“Make the toast,” she said. “I’m still too shocked to think of one.”
He lifted the glass. “Here’s to the luckiest woman I know.”
Diana’s smile faded and she shuddered. “God forbid!” He obviously didn’t know what had happened to her, and she quickly tried to pass off her reaction with a casual shrug. “What I meant was that I’ve been luckier—”
“What could possibly be luckier than narrowly escaping marriage to a spineless son of a bitch?”
That remark was so outrageous and so unquestioningly loyal that Diana felt twin urges to laugh and cry. “You’re right,” she said instead. To avoid his gaze she took a quick sip of her champagne; then she hastily changed the subject. “When the news got out that you were actually going to appear tonight, people were very excited. Everyone is dying to get a look at you. I have so many questions to ask you—about where you’ve been and what you’ve done—that I hardly know where to start—”
“Let’s start with the most important question,” he interrupted firmly, making Diana feel like a child again, confronting a much older, wiser male. “How are you holding up through all this?”
Diana knew he meant the gossip that was all over the ballroom about her broken engagement. “I’m doing just fine,” she said, frustrated by the slight quaver in her voice. She thought she heard the door open further down the balcony, and she lowered her voice in case someone had come out. “Fine.”
Cole glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the sound. Illuminated by the Exit sign over the door was a man in a red-and-white-checked shirt who jumped back into the shadows when Cole looked in his direction. Cole’s first impulse was to attack the spying reporter; his next impulse was to make use of him. Cole decided on the second alternative for the moment. With his free hand, he reached out and tipped up Diana’s chin. “Listen carefully, and don’t move.”
Her eyes widened in instant alarm.
“There’s a tabloid photographer watching us, waiting to grab a picture of you. I suggest we give him a picture worth splashing across the front page of their next issue.”
“What?” Diana whispered in panic. “Are you crazy?”
“No, I’ve simply had more experience than you with negative press and prying photographers. He’s not going to leave until he gets some sort of picture of you,” Cole continued while, from the corner of his eye, he watched the reporter step out of the shadows and lift his camera again. “You have a choice. You can let the world think of you as a discarded woman, or you can let them see me kissing you, which will make them wonder if you ever cared about Penworth at all and if I’ve been your lover all along.”
Diana’s mind was whirling with alarm and horror and glee, as well as the effects of two drinks in less than an hour on an empty stomach. In the brief moment she hesitated, Cole made the decision for her. “Let’s make it convincing,” he ordered softly as he set down both of their glasses. His free hand then slid around her waist, curving her body into his arms.
It happened too quickly to resist, and then it seemed to happen in slow motion as Diana felt her legs press into his thighs and her breasts against his chest, followed by the sudden shock of his warm lips covering hers.
He lifted his head a fraction, his eyes looking into hers, and she thought he was going to let her go. She had the feeling he intended to let her go. Instead, his hands shifted, one of them drifting upward over her bare back, while the other tightened, and he bent his head again. Diana’s heart began to pound in erratic, confused beats as his mouth settled firmly on hers, slowly tracing each soft curve and contour of her lips. His tongue touched the corner of her mouth, and her body jumped in surprise. One part of her brain ordered her to pull free immediately, but some deeper, more compelling voice rebelled at such an unjust reaction to his gallant efforts.
His tender efforts.
His persuasive efforts.
Besides, she realized, the photographer might have missed his first few shots. Diana acted on the side of justice and prudence and slid her hands up his jacket and tentatively, uncertainly kissed him back. The pressure of his mouth increased invitingly as his hand slid up and curved around her nape, his fingers shoving into her hair.
A loud burst of music and thunder of applause inside the ballroom announced that the formal festivities were already underway in the ballroom and snapped them both back to the present. Diana pulled away with a self-conscious laugh, and he shoved his hands into his trouser pockets, gazing down at her with his dark brows drawn into a slight frown. Cole looked to see if the photographer was still present and was glad to see that he had apparently gotten his shot and left.
“I—I can’t believe we did that,” Diana said nervously, trying to smooth her hair as they walked toward the door into the hotel.
He shot her a sideways glance that was filled with a meaning she didn’t understand. “Actually, I wanted to do that years ago,” he said, reaching out and opening the heavy door for her.
“You did not.” Diana rolled her eyes in smiling disbelief.
“The hell I didn’t,” he said with a grin.
Inside, the mezzanine was nearly deserted. Conscious of missing lipstick and mussed hair, Diana stopped when they came to an alcove where the rest rooms were located. “I need to make some repairs,” she explained. “Go ahead without me.”
“I’ll wait,” Cole stated irrefutably, and he stationed himself at a nearby pillar.
Startled by his gallant determination to stay near her side, Diana tossed him a hesitant smile and vanished into the ladies’ room. Several of the stalls were occupied, and as she walked up to the dressing table to smooth her hair, a lively discussion was underway between two of the occupants: “I don’t know why everyone is so surprised,” Joelle Marchison told her companion. “Anne Morgan said Dan told her months ago that he wanted to break his engagement to Diana, but Diana wanted to marry him and she kept begging him to stay with her. Anne said that marrying someone else and letting Diana find out about it in the newspapers was probably the only way that Dan could break free of her once and for all.”
Rooted to the floor, Diana listened to a chorus of fascinated exclamations from the other stalls and felt tears spring to her eyes. She wanted to shout at all of them that Anne Morgan was a jealous, spiteful liar who’d been in love with Dan herself and had lost him to Diana, but even if she had had the nerve, she was afraid she’d lose control and start to cry. The door to Joelle’s stall started to open, and Diana darted into an empty stall and stayed there until everyone left, wounded by the unprovoked malice of women whom she had never harmed in any way; then she walked back to the vanity and tried to dab at her eyes without ruining her makeup.
Outside the ladies’ room, Cole was being treated to a recitation of the same information by two of the women who’d been in the ladies’ room and who were now imparting the news to their friends: “We just heard that Dan Penworth has wanted to get rid of Diana for ages, but she wouldn’t let him go!”
“It serves her right,” one of them announced. “The media has always treated her like a princess. Personally, I am sick to death of hearing about how wonderful that magazine is and how successful she is, and how gracious, and all that bullshit.”
The other woman was kinder. “I don’t care what you say; I pity her, and so do a lot of people.”
Partially concealed by the pillars at the side of the alcove, Cole heard every word, and he marveled at the viciousness of the female sex toward their own, and then he wondered which would hurt Diana more—their spite or their pity. He had a feeling she’d prefer their spite.
Chapter 21
COLE KNEW THE INSTANT HE saw Diana’s pale face that she’d heard something of what her “friends” were saying in the ladies’ room, and because he couldn’t offer any comfort, he offered his arm instead. When they reached the ballroom doors, they were closed and the opening speech was underway.
Frowning, she drew back, loath to draw more notice by entering the ba
llroom noticeably tardy and with Cole. “I suppose your table is in the front?”
As the donor of the most expensive item to be auctioned that night, Cole was to occupy the seat of honor at the head table, just below and in front of the auctioneer’s podium. “Table one,” he confirmed. “Front row center.”
“Our table is in the third row.” She sighed. “Why couldn’t at least one of us have been seated at the back of the room? There’s no way we can slip in there unnoticed.” Anxious to get inside before they were any later, she reached for the big handles on the heavy doors, but he laid his hand on her arm to stop her from pulling them open.
“Why try to be invisible? Why not let them think what everyone who reads the Enquirer is going to think in a day or two—that you don’t give a damn about Penworth and you’re interested in me, not him.”
“No one who knows me is going to believe that!” she cried, almost wringing her hands in despair. His whole face tightened. “You’re right. How stupid of me. I forgot that this is a gathering of the rich and useless, who would never believe you’d switch from one of their own to an ordinary, common man—”
Diana glared at him, confused and frantic and dumbfounded. “What are you talking about! There’s nothing ordinary or common about you.”
She meant it, Cole realized with a surprise that was outweighed by self-disgust at his ridiculous outburst. “Thank you,” he said with an assessing smile as he studied her flushed, upturned face. “At least anger put the sparkle back in your eyes. Too bad my kiss couldn’t have accomplished that.”
Diana made the mistake of looking at his mouth, then had to look away before she could concentrate on the issue. “I’m not accustomed to kissing men I hardly know, particularly when someone else is watching me.”
“You’ve gotten awfully finicky,” he joked. “You used to kiss stray kittens and mongrel pups all the time.”
The analogy was so absurd that Diana laughed. “Yes, but only when I thought you weren’t watching me.”
In the ballroom, polite applause heralded the end of the opening speech. Cole pulled open the heavy doors, put his hand beneath her elbow, and escorted her forward. Murmurs erupted throughout the ballroom as one thousand startled people observed the unexpected arrival of their guest of honor—a notoriously illusive billionaire recently listed by Cosmopolitan magazine as one of the World’s Fifty Most Eligible Bachelors—who strolled nonchalantly into their midst with his hand possessively cupping the elbow of Diana Foster—Daniel Penworth’s recently discarded fiancée.
Cole escorted Diana to her table in the third row and seated her there in the vacant chair between Spence and Diana’s grandfather. He nodded politely to everyone, but he winked at Corey, smiled warmly at Diana and briefly touched her shoulder, then strode off to his own table in the front row.
Diana watched him for a moment, impressed and amused by his supreme indifference to the excited curiosity his appearance was generating. Keeping her expression pleasant and neutral, she looked at Doug and his date, Amy Leeland, who were seated across from her to the left; then she glanced to the right at her mother and grandparents. Corey was one seat away, between Spence and Doug, and her eyes were filled with questions, but her expression was perfectly composed.
They were all dying of curiosity, Diana realized, but they all knew the first rule of social survival—always present a calm, united front. In keeping with that rule, Spence, Corey, and Doug smiled at her as if there were nothing in the least extraordinary about Diana arriving conspicuously late on the arm of a man whom they hadn’t seen in over a decade and who treated her with possessive familiarity.
Diana’s mother and grandfather had no idea at all who he was, but they followed suit.
Diana’s grandmother, who had begun ignoring social rules at approximately the same time she attained the age of seventy, decided to ignore this one, too. She stared at Cole Harrison’s back with a perplexed frown, then leaned forward in her chair and demanded of Diana in a loud stage whisper that got the attention of three people seated at the table behind her, “Who was that man, Diana?”
Anxious to avoid a discussion that would be heard by others, Diana said hastily, “That’s Cole Harrison, Gram. You know—he’s the man who donated the Klineman sculpture that you were admiring earlier.”
Rose Britton was aghast at that notion, and in her advancing years, she’d also developed a disconcerting desire to state the entire truth, regardless of the consequences. “I did not admire it,” she protested in an indignant whisper that was overheard by two more people at the table behind her. “I said,” she clarified, “that it was hideous.”
She glanced at the others in an innocent invitation to argue the merits or lack thereof of the sculpture, but everyone launched into diversionary small talk to avoid doing exactly that. “Well, it is,” she told Diana as soon as she looked her way. “It looks like a huge pipecleaner doll!”
Diana was anxious to explain to her that Cole Harrison was the same Cole who’d worked at the Haywards’ when Diana was a teenager, but she was afraid to do it now, for fear that the elderly lady might then begin reminiscing about the food they’d sent over to him and be overheard. Cole had gallantly come to her rescue tonight, and Diana was determined to protect his pride and his privacy in return.
Chapter 22
TO DIANA’S INTENSE RELIEF, THE minor flurry created by their late and conspicuous arrival soon died down. Waiters began serving the first course of the dinner that was included in the $1,000 cost of a ticket to the ball, and the events of the last half hour finally began to sink in.
She could hardly believe the forceful, sophisticated male in the elegant black tuxedo who’d materialized out of the shadows on the balcony was actually the same jean-clad youth who’d talked with her while he curried the Haywards’ horses . . . and teased her while they played cards . . . and greedily dug into whatever food she brought along.
She reached mechanically for a crusty roll and broke it open, her hands then going still. . . . The Cole she’d known before had always been hungry, Diana remembered fondly. A smile touched her lips—judging from the adult Cole’s tall, muscular physique, he’d undoubtedly been hungry because he’d still had some growing and “filling out” to do.
A politely insistent voice near her ear intruded on her reverie as two bottles of excellent wine appeared in her peripheral vision. “Would you prefer red wine or white wine, miss?”
“Yes,” she murmured absently.
The confused waiter hesitated, looked helplessly at her and then at Spence, who was on her left and who came to the waiter’s aid. “Perhaps both,” Spence suggested blandly.
Another waiter followed in his wake and slid a bowl of shrimp bisque in front of her; animated conversations and bursts of laughter swirled around her, blending with the soft clink of flatware against china, but Diana noticed none of that. Cole had changed a great deal, she decided as she absently spread a rosette of butter onto the roll, then laid it on the plate without touching it and reached for a glass of wine instead. She picked up the one closest to her hand, a chardonnay, smooth and mellow.
The years had not mellowed Cole, she thought a little sadly, just the opposite. As a youth, he’d had an aura of hard-bitten strength, but he’d seemed approachable and kind, even gentle at times. Now there was a cynical edge to his voice and a coldness in his eyes—she’d witnessed both when she objected to entering the ballroom with him. He was battle-hardened, toughened. But he was still kind, she reminded herself. When the photographer had appeared on the balcony, he was kind enough to rush to her rescue. He was also quick enough and smart enough to instantly devise a plan that turned a negative situation into one that would work in her favor. To accomplish that, he had kissed her. . . .
Diana’s hand shook as she reached for her wineglass again and took another hasty swallow. She should never have let that happen! What a foolish, uncharacteristically impulsive thing for her to do. And what a kiss! Soft at first . . . awkward fo
r her as she came into unexpected closeness with the legs and chest and mouth of a stranger—an old friend, whose mouth had covered hers with casual expertise and then with teasing insistence . . . and then with increasing demand. He’d lifted his head, ended the kiss, stared into her eyes . . . and then he’d kissed her again . . . almost reluctantly, and then almost . . . hungrily.
Diana’s cheeks reddened with embarrassed heat, and she drained the rest of the chardonnay, trying to steady her nerves. She shouldn’t have let that second kiss happen. Other women got jilted, and they didn’t throw themselves into the arms of the first available man who offered sympathy.
Or did they?
Now that she thought about it, maybe they did!
In fact, now that she thought about it, she realized she was overreacting to everything and making far too much out of a simple, meaningless kiss enacted purely for the benefit of a spying reporter. While she was obsessing on a kiss, Cole had probably forgotten the entire trivial incident. For all she knew, he had escorted a woman to the ball who was with him now. Either way, he was undoubtedly being showered with attention at the head table and having a perfectly pleasant time.
She tried to resist the impulse to find out for herself and failed. Cole’s table was two rows in front of Diana’s and a little to the left, directly in front of the auctioneer’s podium, which was on a raised platform. By looking slightly to the left or the right, she could see between the shoulders of the group at the next table and see most of the people at Cole’s. Casually, she lifted her glass to her lips and looked to the right. The head table was larger and seated more people, two of whom made Diana’s heart sink the instant she saw them.
Franklin Mitchell was the chairman of this year’s ball, and he and his wife were naturally seated at the head table—but so was their son, Peter, and his wife, Haley, formerly Haley Vincennes. The other couple were friends of Peter and Haley’s. The elderly woman with blue-tinted white hair, with her back to Diana, was undoubtedly Mrs. Canfield, whose ancestors had founded the White Orchid Ball. The balding man beside her had to be her son Delbert, a middle-aged bachelor.