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‘Cute,’ he said, handing the cutting back. ‘So who is this Third?’
‘Bill,’ she said firmly, ‘was a guy I met in my first year at college in Houston. I hadn’t dated much before then…actually I hadn’t dated at all.’ She saw the look on his face and hurried on. ‘I come from a small town—Fidelity Falls, like it says in the article—and I’ve got four big brothers. It kinda made things…tricky.’
Understatement, Rose.
‘All I wanted to do since I was a little girl was get married,’ she told him again, and then broke off, looking a little flustered. ‘I’m not doing this right. I’m explaining it wrong.’
‘Keep going,’ said Plato.
The smile she kept glimpsing was starting to bother her. She knew how it must seem to him—the small town, the pageant picture, the early engagement. Country bumpkin. But she wasn’t going to hide where she came from. Not any more.
‘Even in college my brothers interfered in my romantic life. They chased away any boys my own age who showed an interest. So when Bill came on the scene nobody suspected a thing, because he was so much older, came from an established Houston family. Who’d think he would be dating a college student? Worse, a girl from Fidelity Falls?’
She risked a glance at Plato. He wasn’t smiling any more. He looked stone-cold serious.
‘I was able to sort of sneak around with him, and I guess it made it exciting. I hadn’t had much excitement in my life of the romantic kind.’ She sighed. ‘He wooed me.’
‘What is this woo?’
‘Courtship. You know—he sent me flowers and took me to dinner and on picnics, wrote me poems.’
‘Poems?’
‘Later I found out he’d had a staff member of his father’s write them, but at the time it seemed…romantic.’ Rose shook her head. ‘I was very young, I thought that was how it worked. Men and women. But now I know different. He took my romantic notions and he trashed them.’
Rose risked a look at him. Plato’s smile was long gone.
‘Bill’s daddy was a senator, and all the Hilligers go into politics. Bill had a whole big career lined up—except he didn’t really have the heart for it. I think he would have been happier lecturing in politics for the rest of his life, but his parents insisted he was bound for big things. He wasn’t very confident with people…with women. I guess he chose me because I was so young and naive. He proposed a month into dating me, and I said no, but he kept asking, and by that time his mother had taken me under her wing and my whole social life seemed to be caught up with the Hilligers. Everyone around me seemed to expect it.’
She closed her little bag with a snap.
‘It wouldn’t have been so bad except he tried to make me ashamed of where I came from, of my family, and for a time I was. He tried to change me.’ She gave Plato a big false smile. ‘So you see—blinkers off. I’m a tough cookie these days.’
‘Da,’ he said slowly, ‘you’re a tough little biscuit. This guy—why did you stay with him so long?’
‘One minute I was living in a dorm with other girls. The next I’d moved into his house, was going with him to dinner parties and functions, living a life beyond my years. I guess I didn’t know how to step off the train.’ She broke off, realising she was almost wrenching the strap off her bag. ‘The idea was we would get married when I finished my degree and had a bit more social polish, and Bill would put his name forward for pre-selection. I started volunteering at a women’s shelter as part of my degree. The Hilligers weren’t happy about it, and that was when I first said no to them. Then I just kept on saying no—until one day I told Bill it was over. I was twenty-four and I’d grown up. In the end I worked out that he just wanted a woman on his arm who wouldn’t embarrass him in public. Which is ironic, because that’s exactly what I ended up doing.’
Plato nodded at her handbag. ‘You dumped him. Why was it newsworthy?’
‘Only in Houston. The Hilligers are big news there, and I used to get dragged along to all the functions with Bill. I made the mistake of agreeing to go to a political dinner after we’d broken up, and he used it as the venue to announce our wedding plans. I guess he thought he could strongarm me that way into doing what he wanted. I caused a little…scene. The press were there and it was all over the next day’s papers. It was a Sunday. Slow day.’ She patted her bag. ‘I carry it around with me so that it doesn’t become some sort of deep dark secret. It’s yellowing now. I imagine in a few years the print will be so blurry I’ll have to throw it out. Which is how it should be.’
‘Take what you need and move on,’ he said quietly. ‘Smart. This small town you come from—you didn’t go back?’
‘I became the girl who threw over the Hilligers instead of the Dairy Queen. I couldn’t go back and face that.’ She made sure her tone was light, almost flippant, keeping a tight hold on the emotions memories of that awful time always evoked. ‘I had my degree by then, so I packed up my suitcase, stuck a pin in a map and came to Toronto to start my own life.’
She gave him a wry smile. ‘I guess you want to turn the car around and take me home now,’ she said with a nervous little laugh. ‘Talking about old boyfriends isn’t very sexy.’
‘Detka, everything about you is sexy,’ he assured her, but there was something behind the easy smile he gave her that made Rose wonder if she’d said too much, made herself seem foolish to him.
CHAPTER TEN
SO ROSE had had a little unhappiness in her life? She’d clearly bounced back. She was a smart, capable woman. She didn’t need him riding in like some sort of Prince Charming, slaying her dragons.
Yet as he pulled out onto the highway Plato glanced at her serious, downcast profile and something hot and tight moved through his chest.
‘Where in the hell was your father or those brothers of yours when all this was going on?’ he demanded roughly.
Rose looked up, blinking with surprise. ‘I protected Bill from them, of course,’ she said simply.
