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Having had his say, he gave Corey’s grandmother a conciliatory smile and say, “My memory isn’t greatest either, but I have a very clear recollection of all that because I felt very badly when I realized I’d forgotten about the dance. I was very relieved when I was told that Corey went with someone else.”
“You would have had a clearer recollection,” Gram informed him smugly, “if you had been there, as I was, when she went upstairs in that beautiful blue gown – the gown she bought had to be royal blue because that was your favorite color – and took it off. I don’t know what gave you the idea you weren’t her first choice, but I do know that if you had heard her crying herself to sleep, as I did that night, you would never forget the sound of it either. She was beyond heartbroken. It was pitiful!”
although some of what he’d heard didn’t make sense, as Spence stared at the elderly woman, he knew instinctively she was telling the truth. His niece knew it, too. Filled with shame, he looked at their accusing faces while his mind tormented him with images of his golden girl coming down the stairs in her royal blue gown and waiting for him at the windows. He thought of Corey crying herself to sleep in a bedroom filled with his pictures, and he felt physically ill. He didn’t know why she’d invented a story about needing a substitute date for the dance, but when he looked at Mrs. Foster, who was avoiding his gaze, one thing was obvious: everybody had known how Corey felt about him back then, but him.
He looked at Corey, but she had leaned her elbows on the table and covered her face with her hands, and he couldn’t see her face. His jaw tight with self-disgust, he glared at his water glass, thinking of the barb he’d thrown earlier about honoring commitments. No wonder she couldn’t stand the sight of him!
Across the table, Corey looked between her fingers at the stricken expression of Spence’s face and then the satisfied smile on her grandmother’s, and the whole scenario was so beyond her worst imaginings that she had an uncontrollable impulse to… giggle.
“Corey,” Spence said, lifting his eyes to her covered face, prepared to take whatever verbal flogging she wanted to give him. “I didn’t know. I didn’t realize-“ he began awkwardly, and to his horror, her shoulders started to shake. She was crying!
“Corey, please don’t-!” he said desperately, afraid to reach for her and make things worse.
Her shoulders shook harder.
“I’m sorry,” he said in an aching voice. “I don’t know what else to say-“
Her hands fell away, and Spence stared in disbelief at a pair of laughing blue eyes that were regarding him with amused sympathy, not animosity. “If I were you,” she advised in a laughter-choked voice, “I’d leave it right there and say good night. If Gram isn’t convinced you feel guilty enough, this could actually get worse.” Her transformation from cool stranger to his enchanting ally was so sudden, so undeserved, and so poignantly familiar that Spence felt a surge of pure tenderness pour through him.
He slid out of the booth, gave Corey’s grandmother a wink, and held his hand out to Corey. “In that case, I’d rather do my groveling outside, and deprive her of the opportunity to witness it.”
“I really ought to let you do it,” Corey said with that infectious smile he’d always loved, “but you’re already too late. I’d already forgiven and forgotten the whole thing. In fact, I shipped those old photograph albums here with some of my equipment and supplies. I intended to give them to you. So, as you can see, there’s no need to go outside or grovel.”
Spence put his hand firmly beneath her elbow. “I insist,” he said with quiet implacability.
Joy slid out of the booth behind Corey. “I guess I’d better spend some time with Mom and Peter and their guests.”
Mrs. Foster waited until the three were well out of earshot. “Mother,” she said with a sigh, “I cannot believe you did that.”
“I only said what was true, dear.”
“Sometimes the truth hurts people.”
“Truth is truth,” the elderly lady said smugly as she eased her way out of the booth. “And the truth is that Spencer deserved a thrashing for what he did that night, and Corey deserved an apology. I accomplished both tonight, and they’re both better off for it.”
“If you’re hoping that they’ll fall in love now that you’ve cleared the way, you’re very wrong. Corey is the living example of ‘once burned, twice shy’. You’ve said that a hundred times about her.”
“Well, that’s the truth, too.”
“Do you think,” Mrs. Foster said, her mind shifting away from Corey and Spence and back to the basic problem, “you could just think about the truth, and not say it quite so often?”
“I don’t think so.”
Mrs. Foster stepped aside so that her mother could precede her down the hall. “Why not?”
“I’m seventy-one years old. I don’t think I should waste any more of my time on words that don’t mean anything. Besides, at my age, I’m allowed to be eccentric.”
Ten
LAUGHTER AND RAISED VOICES ECHOED FROM THE DINING room, where Angela’s dinner party was in full swing, but outside the night was soft and hushed as they strolled across the side lawn toward the water. Corey was amazed at how utterly relaxed and at peace she felt, walking at Spence’s side. She could not remember ever being near him when she’d felt anything but an excited, nerve-racking tension, and she vastly preferred this new feeling.
She no longer had anything to hide or regret – her grandmother’s dissertation at dinner had exposed her girlhood infatuation, laid it bare for all to see, and in the process she’d revealed it to Corey for exactly what it was – a very sweet, adolescent infatuation with an unknowing victim, not the painfully embarrassing, neurotic obsession with a selfish monster she’d feared it was. Spence’s tanned face had actually paled while he listened to her grandmother’s eloquent description of what Corey had “suffered” at his hands.
Before she had left for Newport, Corey had forced herself to view the whole awful debacle with philosophical indifference, but she was still hurt by it. Tonight, she had ended up laughing at herself in her grandmother’s dramatic tale, and then laughing at the “villian” and trying to rescue him from any more guilt than he was already being made to feel. Confession, she decided, was definitely good for the soul, even if that confession was forced out of you by your grandmother. She had finally put an end to any all attachment she ever had to Spence; all that was left was nostalgia, and her freedom gave her a sensation of sublime serenity.
He stopped beneath a big tree near the water’s edge, and Corey leaned her should
ers against, looking out at the crescent ot twinkling lights from houses in the distance, waiting for him to say whatever he’d brought her out here to say. When he didn’t seem to know how to begin, she found his uncharacteristic uncertainty a little touching and extremely amusing.
Spence gazed at her pretty profile, trying to gauge her mood. “What are you thinking about?” he asked finally.
“I’m thinking that I’ve never known you to be at a loss for words before.”
“I don’t quite know where to begin.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, lifted her brows, and tipped her head toward the water in a silent, joking suggestion. “Want some help?”
“I don’t think so,” he said warily. She laughed, and the sound of it made him laugh, and suddenly everything was the way it had always been with them, only better, richer for him because he was beginning to understand its value. He was shamefully pleased that she’d had his pictures all over her room and belatedly delighted that she’d evidently wanted him to take her to her Christmas dance from the very beginning.
Rather than start with the dance, he started with the pictures. “Did you really have my pictures all over your room?” he teased, gentling his tone so she wouldn’t think he was gloating.
“Everywhere,” she admitted, smiling at the memory; then she looked up at him and said, “you surely had to have known I had a terrible crush on you when I was tagging after you taking pictures of you.”
“I did. Only I thought it ended when you were seventeen.”
“Really? Why?”
“Why?” he uttered, a little dumbfounded that she didn’t know. “I suppose I regarded it as a clue when you asked me to help you practice kissing techniques so that you could use them on some guy named…” He searched his memory for a name. “Doug!”
Corey nodded. “Doug Johnson.”
“Right. Johnson. In fact, Diana told me Johnson had planned to take you to the Christmas dance and then had to cancel at the last minute, which was why I volunteered. I naturally assumed you had a crush on him after that, not me. How could I have possibly thought you cared about me after all that?” He waited for her to see the logic in his thinking, and when she only regarded him in amused silence, he said, “Well?”
