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“I know what you’re talking about. You think I’m silly and superficial, like those friends of mine you just met. I’m not!”
She laid her hands on his forearms and appealed to him earnestly. “They irritated me, too. Do you know why? Because I saw myself—the way I used to be. I was judging them just as you did me when we first met.
“But please be tolerant toward them. Toward me. This is Beverly Hills. Nothing is real. There are areas of this city I couldn’t relate to. The Gawrylows’ cabin was beyond my realm of comprehension. But I’m changed. I really am. I’m not like them anymore.”
“You never were, Rusty. I thought so. I know better now.” He framed her face between his hands. “But that’s the life you know. It’s the crowd you run with. I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Wouldn’t even want to try. And you wouldn’t belong in my life.”
Hurt by the painful truth of what he was saying, she reacted with anger and threw off his hands. “Your life! What life? Shut away from the rest of the world? Alone and lonely? Using bitterness like an armor? You call that a life? You’re right, Cooper. I couldn’t live like that. The chip on my shoulder would be too heavy to bear.”
His lower lip narrowed to a thin, harsh line beneath his mustache. She knew she’d hit home, but there was no victory in it.
“So there you have it,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. In bed we’re great, but we’d never make a life together.”
“Because you’re too damned stubborn to try! Have you even considered a compromise?”
“No. I don’t want any part of this scene.” He spread his hands wide to encompass the luxurious room and all that lay beyond the wide window.
Rusty aimed an accusing finger at him. “You’re a snob.”
“A snob?”
“Yes, a snob. You snub society because you feel superior to the masses. Superior and righteous because of the war and your imprisonment. Scornful because you see all that’s wrong with the world. Locked up there on your solitary mountain, you play God by looking down on all of us who have the guts to tolerate each other despite our human failings.”
“It’s not like that,” he ground out.
“Isn’t it? Aren’t you just a trifle self-righteous and judgmental? If there’s so much wrong with our world, if you ridicule it that much, why don’t you do something to change it? What are you accomplishing by withdrawing from it? Society didn’t shun you. You shunned it.”
“I didn’t leave her until she—”
“Her?”
Cooper’s face cleared of all emotion and became as wooden and smooth as a mask. The light in his eyes flickered out. They became hard and implacable.
Shocked, Rusty laid a hand against her pounding heart. A woman was at the source of Cooper’s cynicism. Who? When? A hundred questions raced through her mind. She wanted to ask all of them, but for the time being she was occupied only with enduring his icy, hostile stare. He was furious with himself and with her. She had goaded him into resurrecting something he had wanted to keep dead and buried.
Her overactive heart pumped jealousy through her system as rich and red as her blood. Some woman had wielded enough influence over Cooper to alter the course of his life. He might have been a happy-go-lucky chap before this unnamed she-wolf got her claws into him. For his bitterness to be this lasting, she must have been some woman. He was still feeling her influence. Had he loved her that much? Rusty asked herself dismally.
A man like Cooper Landry wouldn’t go long without having a woman. But Rusty had imagined his affairs to be fleeting, physical gratification and little else. It had never occurred to her that he’d been seriously involved with someone. But he had been, and her departure from his life had been wrenching and painful.
“Who was she?”
“Forget it.”
“Did you meet her before you went to Vietnam?”
“Drop it, Rusty.”
“Did she marry someone else while you were a prisoner?”
“I said to forget it.”
“Did you love her?”
“Look, she was good in the sack, but not as hot as you, okay? Is that what you’re itching to know—how the two of you compare? Well, let’s see. She wasn’t a redhead, so she lacked your fiery spirit. She had a great body, but it didn’t come close to yours.”
“Stop it!”
“Her breasts were fuller, but no
