Regretfully Trent consented. Later he even found her aversion to having the light on amusing. “I didn’t realize you were so bashful.”
Rana knew he wouldn’t think so if he’d ever been behind the scenes at a fashion show. The haughty models strutted down the runways looking cool, confident, and unruffled, while backstage, pandemonium reigned. She had often been stripped even as she switched hats and earrings.
Other hands had dressed and undressed her as many times as she had herself. One couldn’t be self-conscious about nakedness and work with designers, seamstresses, and photographers. Their touches were so impersonal, soon she had ceased to be aware of them. Her mother had never been one to show any affection.
Perhaps that was why Rana had responded so urgently and rapidly to Trent ’s touch, she thought. Oh, yes, she must be starved for the loving touch of another human being. If he wanted to think her bashful, she would let him.
“Does it surprise you that I’m so shy?”
“Frankly, yes. Especially since you’ve been married.” He strummed her back for a few moments, then asked, “Can you tell me about that or is it too painful a subject?”
“It was, but it ended so long ago that sometimes I think it happened to someone else. I was fresh out of high school.”
“He was your high-school sweetheart?”
“Something like that.”
Actually, they had dated only several months before they got married. Patrick, like most young men, had been dazzled by her. But she had managed to break through the barrier of his awe, and she and Patrick had fallen into an idealistic, immature kind of Love.
Susan was already talking about a move to New York and planning how to coordinate Rana’s career with a few years of college. Rana resisted. She wanted a career, because she loved beautiful clothes and couldn’t imagine anything better than getting paid for modeling them. But she didn’t want a career orchestrated by her mother, a career that would exclude everything else, especially Patrick.
So she had talked him into a whirlwind marriage. It was a desperate attempt on Rana’s part to escape her mother’s clutches. When Susan heard their plans, she had been furious. But she was a relentless, cunning fighter. Instead of refusing to let them marry, she permitted it.
From the outset, she smothered the young couple, advising on this, arranging that, until Patrick felt useless and emasculated. The final blow to his ego came when Susan intervened with the personnel manager at a company where he had applied for employment.
Rana, admitting to herself that she had used him abominably, and knowing how unhappy their marriage was making him, had offered him a way out. He readily took it.
Six months after the wedding, the marriage ended in divorce. Rana and her mother moved to New York as soon as arrangements could be made. In the long run Susan got exactly what she wanted.
“He was very sweet,” Rana told Trent now. “Good and kind to me. But it was doomed from the beginning.”
“Why?”
“My mother was constantly butting in, and my husband wanted to live his own life.”
“Your mother? You’ve never mentioned any living relatives.”
“We’re not very close. Not any longer.”
“Are you close to anyone, Ana?” he asked, his tone of voice soft.
The conversation was getting too personal, and she didn’t want that. She looked up at him with a mischievous smile and tiptoed her fingers down his front. “Right now, I’m very close to you.”
He grunted with pleasure and lowered his mouth to hers.
Later, as she dozed, he went downstairs and made scrambled eggs and bacon. He carried the meal up on a tray. If the rattling dishes hadn’t awakened her, the tantalizing aromas would have. She sat up, blinking sleep from her eyes.
“Hungry?” he asked with a grin when he saw that she was awake.
“Starving, though I didn’t realize it until now.”
He set the tray on the bed and tossed her one of his shirts. “May I turn the light on now?” he asked after she slipped the shirt on and modestly closed a few of the buttons.
She reached for her purse, which he had had the foresight to bring up along with her panties, and took out the tinted glasses. “Yes,” she answered, putting them on.
“Do you have to?” he asked, nodding toward the glasses.
“Do you want me to dribble orange juice all over your bed?”
He winked. “That might be kinda kinky.”
She let his remark pass as a joke and was glad that he didn’t pursue the topic of the glasses. Eagerly they attacked the food.
“You know, don’t you, that you had me ranting and raving?” he said, biting into a last piece of toast.
She set her coffee cup back in its saucer and moved the tray aside. She had cleaned her plate and was now reclining against the pillows he had piled behind her.
“Over what?”
“Over your sudden disappearance. I nearly went crazy worrying about you.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t say good-bye. There wasn’t time.”
“Was that the only reason you didn’t see me before you left?”
“What other reason could there be?”
“Things were getting pretty hot in the greenhouse. And I don’t mean that in meteorological terms.” He took her hand and rubbed his thumb over the ridge of her knuckles. “If Ruby hadn’t called you to the phone, I think I would have taken you right there in the dirt. Love among the blooms. Hothouse romance.” He was teasing, but he grew serious when he asked, “Were you running from something you couldn’t handle, Ana? From me?”
“Possibly. I don’t know. In any event, you caught me, didn’t you?”
“You needed to be caught, Miss Ramsey.”
“Needed to be?” She cocked her head to one side.
“Uh-huh,” he said, leaning back and propping himself up on his elbows, not realizing how complacent he looked. He had pulled on a pair of shorts when he went downstairs, but they only emphasized his sex. Right then he epitomized male smugness. “I think you’ve needed a man for a long time, someone to scratch that itch you had, someone to satisfy your dark, secret desires.”
“And you filled the bill?” she asked carefully.
By way of an answer, he shrugged. That self-satisfied expression on his face said it all.
Rana sprang off the bed so quickly that he didn’t have time to react until she was out the door and halfway across the hall. “What’s the matter? Where are you going?”
She spun around and confronted him, enraged. “I don’t need anybody, Mr. Gamblin. Especially a man who makes love to me out of a sense of pity!”
“Pity! What the hell are you talking about?”
“Figure it out.” She stamped into her room and slammed the door, locking it quickly. The thought that his lovemaking had been a charitable act wasn’t to be borne. She had come home feeling lonely and desperate. He had lent her comfort and she had grasped at it. Had his loving been no more than a means of rejuvenating poor Miss Ramsey, lifting her out of the depths of despair?
He rattled the door angrily and banged against it with his fists. “Open this door.”
“Go away.”
“I’m warning you.”
“I said to go away!”
“If you don’t open this door, I’ll tear it down, and you’ll have to tell Ruby how it happened.”
“Your threats of brute force don’t frighten me.”
Perhaps they should have. The next sound she heard was the crashing of the door against the wall as he shoved it open. Instinctively she cowered, crossing her arms over her chest. He grabbed her by the shoulders, jerked her up so that her toes were barely touching the floor, and shook her.
“You’re the most stubborn woman I’ve ever known. Pity!” he scoffed. “Darling, no one carries pity that far. Don’t you know love when you see it?”
She had been holding herself rigid. Now she went limp in his arms. “Love?” she repeated weakly.