Cole’s gaze shifted to her the moment she spoke, and Corey saw his smile grow warm before he turned his attention back to Corey, who continued, “The day before we left, Dad went to get the motor home he’d rented, and Diana and I started carrying down the rest of our ‘personal provisions’ that she’d been storing in the attic as they arrived. Then we started with her ‘campers’ safety essentials’ that the guidebooks had recommended, and then with the first-aid stuff.”
Gram joined in the story with a smile. “The girls had to make at least fifteen trips to get it all downstairs,” she told Cole.
“And then,” Grandpa added, chuckling, “Robert had to hitch a U-Haul trailer onto the camper to get it to Yellowstone. The problem was—” he continued, his shoulders starting to shake with laughter, “Robert had never driven anything longer than his daddy’s Cadillac in the fifties. When he pulled out of the driveway, he knocked over his mailbox with the trailer, and he drove off down the street, dragging the pole and box behind him—”
“Henry and I laughed so hard we could hardly chase after the mail.”
Cole was so entertained by the story and this additional glimpse into Diana’s past that he forgot he was in hostile territory. “What did Diana take along that took up so much room?” he asked, but Corey hesitated.
“Go ahead and tell him,” Diana told her with a laughing look. “He’s part of the family now, so, technically, he has a right to know.”
“It wasn’t all Diana’s stuff, it was for me, too,” Corey loyally pointed out before she went on. “If she hadn’t planned for both of us, I’d have left on a two-week trip with a torn sleeping bag, a couple pairs of shorts and T-shirts, my camera equipment, twenty rolls of film, and some Band-Aids. Period. Anyway,” she continued, “Diana had an entirely different sense of what we needed in order to camp out in comfort and safety. She’d ordered a white tent for us with a red, white, and blue awning over the flap; then she’d coordinated our sleeping bags, our clothes, and even our lanterns and flashlights with the trim on the tent. Diana’s were blue. Mine were red. We even had red, white, and blue plastic bottles filled with lotion and aspirin and everything.”
Uneasy about making fun of Diana’s preparations, Corey stopped and poured herself more iced tea.
“You forgot the repellents,” Diana prompted, laughing. “To be on the safe side, I’d brought a dozen cans each of mosquito repellent, wasp repellent, crawling-insect repellent, and flying-insect repellent. I also had several jumbo containers of snake repellent, which I diligently sprinkled around the outside perimeter of our tent every time we put it in a new place.”
“Snake repellent?” Cole said to Diana with a choked laugh. “What did you think of Yellowstone?”
“It depends on who you ask,” Diana said dryly, and the rest of the family burst out laughing. Mrs. Foster wiped her eyes and said, “The first day in Yellowstone, we all went hiking. Corey got pictures of mountain goats, and I got some lovely sketches. Diana got poison ivy and Robert got an allergy attack.”
“The nights were fun though,” Corey argued. “We cooked out and roasted marshmallows and sang songs.”
“And after we went to bed, the raccoons raided our trash containers and the bears waited for a chance to dine on us,” Diana put in as she cut a bite-sized piece of duck. “I don’t think there was a raccoon within ten miles of our camp that went to bed hungry while we were there.”
“Looking back,” Corey said with an impenitent grin, “it was a very one-sided vacation. While I hiked through the woods, oblivious to everything except getting a perfect photograph, Diana trooped behind me lugging a first-aid kit and reading in her manual about the danger of surprising elk in rutting season and what to do if you encountered an unfriendly bear.”
“You were lucky she did,” Mary Foster pointed out, sobering a little.
“That’s true,” Corey told Cole. “You see, on the day we were supposed to leave to come home, I sneaked out of camp with my camera and tripod just before dawn—strictly against Daddy’s orders, which were that no one left camp alone. The thing was, I wanted to enter a photography contest in the Youth/Outdoors category, but I hadn’t gotten anything that I felt was really outstanding. Then, on the last day in Yellowstone, I saw something that I just knew would be a winning shot. We were about a mile and a half from camp, hiking, when I spotted several elk crossing a stream near a waterfall that was streaming out of a steep wooded hill. I knew if I could get that shot, with the sun rising over the hill in the background, I’d have a chance to win that contest. I asked Daddy to go with me, but by then his allergies were so bad that he said my elk would hear him wheezing and coughing and they’d take off before we could get close enough for a photograph. So I decided to go alone.”
“You didn’t ask your mother to go, instead?” Cole asked.
“Mom spent most of the evening cooking dinner and packing up, and she said she was exhausted.”
“What about Diana?”
“I didn’t have the heart to ask Diana. She was covered with poison ivy, sunburn, and pink calamine lotion. Besides, she’d twisted her ankle the day before. Anyway, she heard me sneaking out of the tent before dawn, and she started itemizing all the dire things that can happen to an inexperienced camper alone in the wilds, but I headed off anyway with only a flashlight and my camera gear.
“A few minutes later, I heard something crashing through the woods behind me, and I smelled the calamine lotion, so I figured it had to be Diana. Sure enough, there she was, limping down the trail with her ankle wrapped in an elastic bandage, carrying her trusty emergency kit in one hand and her blue flashlight in the other. What a morning,” Corey finished with a reminiscent laugh. “When we got to the spot I’d picked out, I realized the angle of the light was going to be all wrong on this side of the stream, so we had to find a shallow place to cross the stream, work our way through the woods on the side of the hill above the waterfall, and then back down.”
“Did you get your picture of the elk at sunrise?”
“No, I got lost instead. The light wasn’t very good yet, and I didn’t know we’d ended up on the bank of another stream near a different hill, so I set up my tripod and attached my telephoto lens. The sky was turning bright pink, and there still weren’t any elk, so I left Diana with the camera, in case the elk showed up, while I walked a few yards to the edge of the clearing. I crouched down on my hands and knees so I wouldn’t be at the elk’s eye level, and crawled out of the woods onto the bank, waiting for my eyes to adjust from the gray shadows to the pink light reflecting off the water. With the sun where it was, I couldn’t see the waterfall at all yet, so I sat down and dug out of my pocket the bag of leftover marshmallows I’d brought for breakfast. And then I saw it—he was coming out of the water and heading straight at me.”
“The elk?” Cole ventured, while passing the plate of biscuits to Diana’s grandfather.
“No, the bear. He was quite young, several inches shorter than I, which I didn’t realize because he was running on all fours. I thought he was charging me, and I jumped to my hands and knees, but before I could stand up, he was there. I screamed, he stopped, and we stared at each other, eyeball to eyeball, both of us startled and frightened. He came up on his hind legs and I sprang to my feet and threw my marshmallows at him; then I ran as fast as I could in one direction, while he fled in the other.
“To top everything off,” she said, laughing, “when we started back, we realized we were lost, and the further we walked, the more lost we became. Diana kept insisting that her books on camping safety said we should stay put, but I wouldn’t listen, until she finally pretended she couldn’t walk any further on her ankle. At nightfall, she used the matches in her emergency kit to build a little fire to help the searchers find us.
“I’d forgotten to change the battery in my flashlight, and it gave out before I heard what I thought were wolves howling. Diana wouldn’t let me use her flashlight, even though it had a fresh battery. She said we n
eeded it to signal search planes if any flew close, and I knew she was right. Instead, I built a bigger fire for more light, but every time I heard that howling sound, I got closer to hysteria,” Corey admitted and took a sip of iced tea. “I was shivering so hard I could hardly talk, and I had to keep my face turned away so Diana wouldn’t see the tears running down my face. I felt like such a fool, particularly because I’d teased Diana about being afraid of snakes and picking a bouquet of poison ivy and lugging that emergency kit with us everywhere—and there I was, crying like a baby while she calmly took care of all the practical matters of survival. I’d ignored all the camping manuals, but Diana had read them from cover to cover, which was why she was able to make me laugh about the threat of wolves. Finally we went to sleep by the fire. Even after we were rescued the next morning, she never teased me about being so stupid. In fact, we never discussed those imaginary wolves again, until now.”
When Corey showed no indication of explaining her last sentence, Cole said, “Imaginary wolves? I don’t understand.”
“Obviously,” Corey informed him, “you haven’t read the Yellowstone Camping Manual either.” She smiled infectiously. “You see, there weren’t any wolves in that part of Yellowstone back then. The park service had corralled them in a distant part of the park, far from the campers. Those were the ones we were hearing.”
Cole thought that seemed virtually impossible, as well as counter to the wildlife philosophy of the national parks. “Do you mean that the park authorities rounded up all the wolves in that gigantic parkland and then put them behind fences?” He looked at Diana for an answer, but she seemed to be engrossed with tracing the pattern on the handle of her knife with her forefinger.
“No, of course not!” Corey explained. “The wildlife commission realized that the wolf population was out of control in Yellowstone because the wolfs natural predator, the Rocky Mountain black ocelot, was almost extinct there, so they imported them from California. The ocelots hunted the wolves and ran them deep into the mountains.”
Diana could feel Cole’s gaze leveled on her, and when she couldn’t avoid it any longer, she finally lifted her eyes from her silverware and saw the knowing amusement in his expression. “Very tidy explanation,” he said dryly.
“I thought so,” Diana said, swallowing a giggle.
Corey looked from one to the other of them, her own thoughts on the long-ago explanation she’d accepted without question at the time. Now that she’d repeated it aloud, it sounded very odd. “Diana—” she said suspiciously. “It was a total lie, wasn’t it?”
“It was a whopper!” Henry Britton hooted. “Surprised you bought it, Corey girl.”
Privately, Cole thought Diana’s solution had been ingenious, but as a new and temporary family member, he didn’t feel entitled to voice a dissenting opinion. Instead, he concluded, “So you spent a terrifying night alone and never got to enter the photography contest, after all?”
“On the contrary, I won second place in the Candid Series division,” Corey informed him with a grin.
“Congratulations,” Cole said.
“Don’t congratulate me,” she countered wryly. “I didn’t take them, I was in them.”
“Who took them?”
“Diana did. When I saw the bear and tried to scramble up on my hands and knees, she thought I’d seen the elk and was trying to stay out of the frame, so she pressed the shutter release as I’d told her to do, and the automatic camera started shooting in rapid sequence. After we got back, I tossed the roll of film out, but Diana retrieved it for laughs. When it was developed, she selected three shots—as required by the contest—and sent them in.”
“Yes,” Mary Foster said with a reminiscent smile, “and National Photographic magazine even used the captions Diana had sent in when they featured the pictures.”
“What were your captions?” Cole asked.
“The first picture was when the bear and I first met, nose to nose. Both of us were crouched on all fours, staring at each other, startled and scared.” Corey laughed. “Under that one, Diana had written ‘On your mark—’ The second picture was of the bear and me rearing up on our feet, ready to run. Beneath that, Diana had written ‘Get set—’ The last picture was the funniest of all, because we were both fleeing for our lives in opposite directions. Diana called that one ‘Go!’ ”
Chapter 37
DIANA AND COREY HAD SET the tone with their camping story, and by the time dessert was over, each person at the table had become the subject of an amusing and sometimes revealing anecdote, including Spencer Addison. And somewhere, midway through the meal, Cole began to be treated as a welcome audience, rather than a mistrusted intruder.
The last tale concerned Rose Britton’s irate response to a fan on Oprah Winfrey’s show who gushed about how much she’d like to be married to Henry. At the end of the good-natured laughter that followed the recounting, Mary Foster looked at Cole with a smile. “I’m afraid you’re discovering all our dark family secrets,” she told him.
“They’re safe with me,” Cole assured her with an answering smile, but privately he found a certain grim amusement in the comparison of this family’s “dark secrets” to those of his own. Nevertheless, he was grateful and surprised that the meal had gone off so smoothly, that no more prying questions were directed at him, and that everyone seemed to have accepted him for the time being as a new family friend.
Everyone except Addison.
Addison wasn’t neutral. Every instinct Cole possessed warned him that Addison was solidly opposed to Diana’s marriage. Not that he made it obvious. Addison was much too well-bred to disturb his wife’s family with any sort of unpleasant coldness at their table. In Cole’s experience, men like Addison invariably sided with their own kind, no matter how stupid or shortsighted or evil their socially prominent friends might be. By virtue of birth and upbringing, Addison was already a natural foe of Cole’s in any situation that pitted Cole against another member of “the privileged class,” and Cole knew it. He understood it. In business, Cole always made it a practice to force adversaries like Addison out into the open, where they couldn’t hide their feelings and intentions beneath the nearly impenetrable layers of social custom and ritual. Cole did that because it made them feel awkward, exposed, and uncomfortable, which made any contest of wits more equal.
In this case, Cole saw no reason to force Addison from his position of passive opposition into one of open enmity. Diana had already married him, and for some reason, Cole knew she would not back out of the agreement she’d made with him.
He trusted her, Cole realized, as he watched her talking to Corey.
He trusted her, and this realization was profoundly disturbing. And then he pictured her trooping through the woods after Corey with an emergency kit and a bandaged ankle, and his alarm turned to mirth.
* * *
Despite the harmony and gaiety during dinner, the farewells in the foyer were understandably awkward.
Normally newlyweds left the bride’s home under a shower of rice, with family and friends shouting good wishes. Since that was inappropriate, Diana’s family tried to improvise, and to Cole, the results were as endearing as the family itself.
Diana’s mother held out her hand to her new son-in-law, hesitated, and then blurted uneasily, “It was very nice to meet you after all these years, Cole. Will we see you again?”
“I’m sure you will.”
Grandpa shook his hand. “Welcome to the—You’re welcome here anytime.”
“Thank you.”
Spencer Addison did not pretend this was a meaningful occasion, but he seemed more amused than hostile. “I never knew Diana hated dirt and snakes. What did you do about the big blacksnake that lived in the Haywards’ stable?”
Anxious for the opportunity to show Spence how kind Cole had been, even then, Diana answered before Cole could. “Cole trained him to stay away when I was there so I wouldn’t be afraid.”
“Really?” Spence said to C
ole, his brows raised in amused challenge as he reached out to shake Cole’s hand. “How did you manage that?”
“I brought in a Rocky Mountain black ocelot to drive him up into the rafters,” Cole replied drolly.
“You lied to me?” Diana demanded, laughing.
Corey gave Cole a hug.
Grandma gave him a dozen cookies and a loaf of freshly baked bread.
Chapter 38
THE AWKWARDNESS IN THE FOYER grew stronger in the car as Diana wondered how she and Cole could part on some sort of appropriate and, preferably, uplifting note. Cole had checked out of the Balmoral when they left, his luggage was in her trunk, and his pilots were waiting for Cole to call them with a departure time.
If the local television stations hadn’t already run the news clips of Cole giving her the necklace, the story and pictures would surely hit the Monday morning paper and the announcement of their marriage would have to follow immediately. In Diana’s exhausted state, the immediate future seemed perilous and overwhelming.
The clock on her dashboard showed 7:15, and the prospect of being alone in her apartment with nothing to do but anticipate tomorrow’s siege of phone calls, comments, and stares from friends, associates, employees, and newspeople was depressing and overwhelming.
She turned onto San Felipe and decided to ask Cole up to her apartment for a drink. There were probably many details they needed to go over.
Beside her, Cole watched her expression go from thoughtful to somber to unhappy, and he guessed the reason. “Why don’t you invite me up for a drink?” he suggested.
That startled a laugh from her. “I was just going to do that.”
* * *
Diana’s high-rise apartment had glass exterior walls that provided a beautiful view, and the spacious interior was clearly the work of a good designer. Filmy white draperies with graceful swags and valances complemented the thick white carpeting and inviting groupings of white sofas and chairs. Silk flower centerpieces and throw pillows provided splashes of mauve, light green, and white. Earlier, Cole had thought her apartment luxurious and well done, but now he noticed it lacked the profusion of homey touches that had been so much in evidence at the River Oaks house, and that surprised him.