Judith McNaught - Remember When

Shock momentarily overcame her manners. "You'd what? Who are you?"

The glass lowered, revealing a very familiar face. "I am the shark who married the guppy last night," he said drolly.

Cindy sank down on the arm of the sofa. "Hanging is too good for me," she murmured in a small, meek voice.

She recovered and stood up as he came to stand beside Diana and slid his arm around her waist. "I'm Cindy Bertrillo," she said gravely, offering her hand across the table. "I used to be public relations director for Foster Enterprises."

Cole had expected Diana to voice some sort of sharp reprimand, which was what he would have done in similar circumstances, but as he silently shook the publicist's hand, he wasn't completely indifferent to her misery or her humor.

Diana and Cole spent a few minutes bringing Cindy up to date with the fact of their marriage, after which the publicist turned her considerable talents toward dealing with a public announcement. It soon became apparent that the best method for all concerned was to give a short press conference midmorning the following day. Although the publicist never said it, Cole sensed that, from a public relations standpoint, she was delighted to have Diana free of the stigma of Penworth's desertion, and she positively lit up when she realized that Diana and Cole had known each other for years.

When the meeting was concluded, Diana showed her out. Then Diana walked into the kitchen, where Cole was filling a water glass from the faucet. "Where would you like to sleep tonight?" she asked.

His gaze swerved to her. "What are my choices?"

"Here," Diana said innocently, "or the Balmoral."

"Here."

She nodded. "Why don't you call your pilots and tell them of the change of plans and then bring your suitcase up, and I'll get the guest bedroom ready."

For some reason, memories of last night's dream began to play through Diana's mind as soon as she went to work putting fresh sheets on the bed in the guest bedroom. It had seemed so real, and yet... not. That strange, floating bed, the demon lover who made her behave in ways she never normally would. Insistent mouth—gentle hands... tender... rough.

She shook her head and reached for a pillowcase, embarrassed by the direction of her thoughts, but as she shoved a pillow into the case, the memories came back again, hovering at the edges of her mind. Blue lights. Small room, low ceiling, filled with steam or smoke or something that made everything look gray. Gray.

Behind her, Cole strode silently into the room, carrying a black garment bag in his right hand and a briefcase in his left. "Could I—"

With a stifled cry, Diana whirled around, her hand clutching a fistful of silk shirt over her heart, then she laughed. "Oh, it's you."

He eyed her worriedly as he put his briefcase down at the foot of the bed. "Who were you expecting—Jack the Ripper?"

"Something like that," she said dryly, pulling the spread up and then folding a corner back.

"Am I making you nervous?" he asked.

She turned and watched him slowly strip off his jacket, hypnotized by the unexpected intimacy of the ordinary act. "No, of course not," she untruthfully assured him. His eyes held hers as he dropped the jacket over a chair, loosened his tie, and pulled it free of his shirt collar. For one anxiety-filled moment, Diana thought he was going to undress right in front of her.

A knowing smile tugged at the corners of his mouth as he loosened the top button of his white shirt. "I am making you nervous."

She thought quickly for something to blame her reaction on, and came up with a partial truth. "It has nothing to do with you, really. While you were getting your luggage out of the car, I started thinking of a dream I had last night. It was—well—a very um ... graphic. dream in some ways. It seemed so real."

He unbuttoned the second button on his shirt, an odd gleam lighting his eyes. "What sort of a dream was it?"

"Do you remember an early thriller movie called Rosemary's Baby?"

Cole thought back and remembered something about demonic possession, and then he nodded. "The woman in it was drugged and then forced to have sex with the devil."

Diana nodded and turned away, snapping on the lamp beside the bed. "Well," she explained as she turned and headed toward the door, "last night, I was that woman."

Cole's fingers froze on the third button of his shirt.

Blithely unaware of the verbal blow she had just delivered, she sailed out of the room, turning in the doorway with her hand on the light switch. "Your bathroom is right through there. Can I get you anything before I go to bed?"

"A large bandage might be nice," he said sardonically.

Diana's eyes widened, sweeping quickly down the length of him, from his broad shoulders and white shirt to his black trousers and black loafers. "For what?"

"For my ego, Diana."

Diana's brain simply shut down. It blocked the pathways between hearing and logic. She nodded and backed out of the room. "Well. Good night."

Safe behind the door of her own bedroom, Diana, like an automated machine, went about the routine of getting ready for bed. In the shower, she mentally recited the names of all the articles in the last three issues of Beautiful Living. As she blew her hair dry, she felt a compulsion to remember all the names of the students in her seventh-grade class. As she put on her pajamas, she began preparing her Christmas list.

As she walked over to her dresser to change the wake-up time on her clock radio, she burst into tears.

Snatching a handful of tissues from a box beside her bed, she marched over to the chaise longue at the far end of the room, flopped onto it, and gave free rein to the tears that had been building up inside her for days. For the first time since she'd picked up the Enquirer and read about Dan's marriage, she gave in to self-pity. She wallowed in it. With her hands over her face and the tissues pressed to her eyes, she drew her knees up against her chest and rocked back and forth, sobbing.

She thought about the way Dan had complimented her mind and her looks and used silence to criticize her body and her performance in bed. "Bastard," she whispered, crying harder.

She thought of the years she'd wasted, trying to juggle her schedule to suit his, only to have him marry a child bride. "Monster!" she wept, rocking back and forth.

She thought of her insane marriage to Cole Harrison, and she cried harder. "Lunatic."

She thought of herself during her own wedding, swaying drunkenly on her feet and leaning back trying to mentally redecorate an arched trellis, and she moaned. "Idiot!"

She thought of Cole this morning, gallantly nursing her through a hangover and grinning good-naturedly as he recounted her drunken antics of the night before.

She thought of the dream that wasn't a dream, of a bedroom in shades of misty gray aboard a private jet as it hurtled through the sky and finally slammed onto a runway, racing past blue lights.

She thought of a man who tried to refuse her idiotic attempt at seduction. And didn't. He'd made it very clear, and she'd agreed, that sexual and emotional intimacy were not to be part of their agreement. Then at the first possible moment, she'd thrown herself at him, and because Cole had always been kind, he'd overridden his personal aversion to the idea and made love to her.

In return for his kindness, his thoughtfulness, his self-sacrifice, she had just delivered the ultimate insult by likening his lovemaking to a terrifying scene out of Rosemary's Baby. He had so much pride and he was so sensitive to the disparity between their backgrounds that he must have been twice as much hurt by her remark as he'd been by her having forgotten the incident.