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The bar was noisy and full of executive types. It really wasn’t Rose’s sort of thing at all, but her girlfriends seemed to enjoy it. Her deep, dark little secret was that she liked honky-tonks and places where they knew your name and your daddy, and if a guy hit on you he kept it polite because he knew there’d be consequences.
Maybe this was why she was still single almost two years after she’d arrived in Toronto. She dated, but nothing with a view to the future. Not that she was in any hurry. Getting yourself disastrously engaged to a man twelve years your senior barely a year into college, having your life taken over by his ambitious family and your sexual self-confidence rubbed into the ground under his fake cowboy boot heel could leave a girl gun-shy.
But it did have a certain irony, given she had spent her whole life matchmaking. An accident on the ranch had left her motherless at six years old, and she had spent her eighth summer plotting to bring her father and her new teacher together. Through fate, her brother Cal falling off the roof and an overnight stay at her teacher Melody’s house, all of Rose’s work had come to fruition. Dad had been married in the fall and from that moment on Rose had been hooked.
Tomorrow morning Date with Destiny would be flashed around Toronto in a high-profile way. Her website would have more hits. Phoebe and Caroline, her girlfriends who worked on the site, would be hooking up new clients, she would continue to consult in private practice and life would go on.
And suddenly it all seemed rather…empty. Because she would still be alone.
She knew she had to take her own advice to others: be brave, take chances, allow her heart freedom. But it was hard. Bill Hilliger had taught her to doubt herself. Whilst her brothers had been overbearing at times, they had never made her feel inferior or unable to make her own decisions.
Looking back, she could see how very young she’d been—a girl with no experience of the world, of men and relationships. She had been not much more than a child with a head full of romantic notions. She gave herself credit that her belief in love and the importance of romance hadn’t died with those lessons Bill had taught her. She knew better. She knew she was worth more than that.
A man across the bar was trying to get her attention and Rose swivelled on her seat, smiling blankly at whatever Caroline was saying.
‘Another mocktail, Rose?’ Phoebe yelled in her ear.
Rose flinched and nodded, although she hadn’t finished the one she had.
Why had she come tonight? She could be with Plato. And if he wasn’t big on romance he still had a lot to offer a girl… She was a red-blooded woman after all. Why shouldn’t she acknowledge that and act on it?
If only he had taken the trouble to come and get her himself.
And there was the rub. She might be responding to him on a physical level, but she had deeply ingrained notions about romance and being wooed.
Even so, last night Plato had ticked some pretty significant boxes in that department, and it had made her think… Well, she knew it was old-fashioned, but she was an old-fashioned girl—she wanted to feel as if she were special to him in some way, not just a face in his crowd. For a couple of minutes there he’d made her feel pretty special…
Right now she felt as if she had her nose pressed up against the glass. Was she always going to be on the outside, looking in on love and passion? Always the fairy godmother to other people’s love stories? She’d been telling herself for a little too long now that she wasn’t in any shape or condition to risk herself to a serious relationship… When, really, had she ever? It had never been serious with Bill. She’d chosen him because he’d been exactly the sort of person she was never going to lose her head over.
Shoot! Rose’s tummy bottomed out. Was that what she wanted? For Plato Kuragin to get serious about her? He was rich and high-flying and everything a Texan girl like her with down-home values should be running from. From what she could discover he dated very beautiful, flashy girls. Yet despite all their beauty and worldliness it seemed he hadn’t been serious about one of them. Which raised the question: why the heck should he get serious about her?
Rose bit her lip. It shouldn’t encourage her but it did. The story of her parents’ courtship was famous in their parts. Joe Harkness had parked his boots under the bed of just about every available woman in three counties before he’d walked into the Fidelity Falls diner, sat down and ordered from a new waitress by the name of Elizabeth Rose Abbott and his life had changed. It had been love at first sight. Sometimes it could happen like that.
Rose slammed her drink down on the table.
She’d quit without staying around for the fight!
Before anything had even started she’d given
up!
Her brothers would be disgusted with her. Even if you knew you were going to end up tail-first in the dirt, covered in dust, you had to mount up.
She’d just taken a look at the size of that bull and turned tail like a little girl in pigtails.
She jumped to her feet.
‘Where are you going, Rose?’
‘What’s going on with Rose?’
‘Hey, Rose, what about your drink?’
She pushed her way through the 10:00-p.m. crowd. She knew where she was going.
On the pavement outside she hailed a cab, and in the backseat she called Plato’s cell. It went to messages.
‘Plato,’ she whispered, ‘call me.’
