Brad frowned. He had been sure the two were a couple. The guy might have been a dick-head, but he’d certainly seemed affectionate toward Daphne. “He’s not?” he asked, seeking an explanation for why a man who claimed to adore Daphne wasn’t her partner. “Why not? Is he gay or something?”
“No.” Daphne took a frustratingly long time to sip her iced tea. She lowered the glass, propped her feet up on an adjacent chair and folded her arms across her knees. “We tried dating for a while, but it fizzled out,” she informed him. “We really are just good friends, and we’ve never been much more than that.”
“Then why was he saying all those things, about how much he loves you?”
“That’s his sense of humor, augmented by a few drinks,” she explained, then reconsidered and added, “I guess he loves me as a pal. He was only kidding around last night. He couldn’t have known you were the wrong audience to kid around in front of.”
“He doesn’t know about us?”
“Us?” Daphne scoffed. “One night notwithstanding, Brad, I’d hardly consider you and me an ‘us. ’”
“You know what I mean,” Brad countered. It was suddenly vitally important to him to know who, besides himself and Daphne, might be aware of what a bastard he’d been with her back in college.
He was right. She knew what he meant. “I never told anyone,” she said. “Did you?”
“Not a soul.”
“Not even Eric?” At Brad’s solemn shake of the head, she asked, “Why not?”
His laughter this time was derisive. “Do you think I want the word spreading around that I suck in bed? Do you think I’d want anyone—even my best friend—to know I botched it so badly a lady stormed out of my room teetering on the brink of tears? No, Daphne, that’s not the sort of news I’d like publicized, thank you.”
Daphne’s eyes grew round, as if Brad’s description of what had occurred was unfathomable to her. “I’m the one who botched it, Brad. I’m the one who was inadequate in bed.”
“No. It was my fault. And even if I’m about eight years overdue, I want to apologize. It was my fault. I did a terrible thing, taking advantage of you—”
“Taking advantage—!” Far from accepting his apology, she seemed ready to hurl her glass at his head. He’d never seen her so infuriated in his life. She swung her feet down to the floor, shoved herself out of her chair, and marched to the end of the porch and back. When she reached the table, she planted her hands on its surface and bore down on him. “Let me tell you something, Brad: I was the one who engineered that little bit of stupidity. I was the one who went up to your room. You didn’t gag me and tie me up and haul me over your shoulder. I went, voluntarily. I knew what we were going to do upstairs, and I went. So don’t hand me that bullshit about how you took advantage of me!”
Brad was dumbfounded. When he had tried to predict Daphne’s reaction to his apology, he had anticipated that she might deny he was as much of a bastard as he claimed to be: “Oh, don’t feel so bad, Brad, it’s over and done with.” Or she might agree totally with him: “You’re right, what you did was horrible and you should be sorry.” What he hadn’t expected was that she’d fight with him over who deserved the bulk of the credit for the fiasco.
“Daphne,” he said placatingly, wishing she would sit back down so they could talk reasonably. “Daphne, you were drunk at the time.”
“So were you,” she retorted.
“Not as drunk as you were,” he argued.
“Oh, yeah?”
He tried hard to maintain his equanimity under this latest assault of hers. “Daphne, given my body weight...given my higher tolerance for alcohol...” The hell with it. Why quibble? He hadn’t been completely sober that night. If he had been, he would have done a better job of making love to her—or he wouldn’t have made love to her at all.
She folded her arms across her chest, her expression oddly triumphant.
“Sit down,” he ordered her. He couldn’t organize his thoughts when she was so close to him, glowering down at him with those big green eyes of hers. “Sit down and let’s straighten this thing out.”
She glared at him for a moment longer, then begrudgingly resumed her seat across the table from him. He studied her, taking in the tangled blond mop of hair framing her face, the tautness around her lips, the two vertical lines pinched into her forehead above the bridge of her nose. There was something perversely funny about Daphne’s inability to see that night for what it had really been, but he didn’t dare to smile.
“Daphne,” he said in his most ameliorating voice. “What I sense here is that you’re letting some misplaced feminist sentiments cloud your memory.”
“Who said anything about feminist sentiments?” she asked loftily. “You’re the one making ridiculous claims about the ability of men to tolerate alcohol.”
“Forget about the alcohol,” he snapped. “What I’m talking about is taking responsibility for what happened. It was a college party. I brought you to my room. I plied you with wine—”
“I accepted the wine,” she cut him off. “I could have refused it, but I accepted it and I drank it.” She shook her head in amazement. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. I approached you, remember? I invited myself upstairs. It was my doing, my fault, and, yes, I take full responsibility for it. I can’t believe you think you did anything wrong.”
“I can think of at least one thing I did horrendously,” he muttered, cringing at his memory of the cold, bitter look she’d given him as his body had slid away from hers.
“That was my fault, too,” she said softly, her rage spent. “Contrary to popular rumor, I’m not dynamite in bed.”
“That’s beside the point,” he debated, although he was fast losing track of what the point was. “I should have made you feel good, and I failed.”
“I failed, too,” Daphne remarked. “I know, you’re a man, so you must have enjoyed it on a certain level, but—”
“It doesn’t work that way, really,” he said gently. He was overwhelmed by the sudden, desperate need to hold her, to make her see things the way they truly were. This time when he extended his arm across the table he completed the gesture and clasped her hand with his. She didn’t pull back, so he closed his fingers around hers and smiled pensively. “For a man, there’s relief and there’s ecstasy. Maybe what I felt at the time was relief—but that’s not what it’s all about. The ecstasy comes only if your partner is right there with you. If I’d done a better job of it, we both would have been satisfied. As it turned out, neither of us was.”
The corners of Daphne’s lips twitched upward. “So, it was a job, was it?”
If she hadn’t been wearing that mysterious smile, if she hadn’t woven her fingers comfortingly through his, he would have thought she was being sarcastic. She wasn’t, though. She was being ironic, which Brad considered appropriate under the circumstances. “Why did you approach me that night?” he asked, genuinely curious. It was one of the questions that had haunted him long after she’d stalked out of his room. “We hardly knew each other, Daff. Why me?”
“Oh, Brad...” She sighed, but her lips remained curved in that tenuous smile. “It’s a long story.”
“I’m all ears.”
She sighed again. “Well, to start with...I was in a pretty bad mood that day,” she told him. “I had just found out that the person I considered the love of my life was going to marry my sister.”
“Your prom date?” That son of a bitch! One thing about Daphne—she sure knew how to pick losers. Her prom date left her for her own sister, her date at Eric’s party made tasteless jokes about her sexual prowess…and Brad himself was probably the biggest loser of the bunch.
“Dennis was more than just a prom date. We’d known each other for years, and we’d...” She issued a shaky breath and abandoned the thought. “Anyway, when I found out he was going to marry Helen, I—I went a little crazy. That’s not to imply that I didn’t know what I was doing with you,” she added quickly. “I did. I just�
�maybe I just stepped a little bit out of character.”
“And you had too much to drink.”
“I had too much to drink. But—”
“Why me?” he repeated. “The party was loaded with guys. Why did you pick me?”
“Because you were there?” she half-asked, then shook her head. “I knew you, Brad. I knew who you were.” That was hardly a sufficient reason, and as soon as Daphne saw his disgruntled look she shook her head again. “I honestly don’t know. Maybe I sensed on some subconscious level that you were the sort of guy who wouldn’t make my life hell afterward. You wouldn’t be indiscreet. You wouldn’t…you wouldn’t laugh at me.”
He was moved by her statement. He’d been afraid that Daphne would justify her having selected him by saying something like, “You were cute,” or “I thought you’d perform well.” She hadn’t, though. He didn’t believe he was as decent as she seemed to think he was, but he wanted to believe it. Hearing her describe him so kindly filled him with a tender warmth.
Her eyes met his. “When I went to your room…” She glanced away, as if she couldn’t bear to look directly at him. “When I went to your room, Brad, it was only because I wanted to forget about Dennis. And that’s about as rotten as you can get. I was the one taking advantage of you. So please don’t tell me it was your fault.”
Daphne Stoltz taking advantage of him? No, it hadn’t been like that at all. Brad had never viewed it that way, and he wasn’t about to view it that way now. “Why don’t you drink liquor anymore?” he asked.
“Because I don’t want to do anything that stupid, ever again,” she said simply. “The liquor doesn’t explain what I did, Brad, but I’m not going to run the risk of getting drunk and doing something so stupid again. I just don’t think it’s worth taking that kind of chance.”
Brad tightened his grip on her. He felt the slender bones in her fingers, the tapering of her wrist. “It seems kind of ridiculous that I’ve spent all these years thinking I was to blame for the whole damned thing, and you’ve been busy thinking you were to blame.”
“Maybe we were both to blame,” Daphne said. “I’ll tell you this—if I ever get my hands on a time machine, one thing I’m going to do is turn it back eight years and live that one night over again. I’d live it very differently.”
“Amen,” Brad agreed. Then he loosened his hold on her and grinned. “You’d refuse to go upstairs with me?”
Daphne appeared bemused. “Can you think of another way to make that night right?”
“Assuming you did come upstairs...I’d make love to you, instead of whatever the hell it was we did. I’d romance you, Daff. I’d make it as good as I could for you, so if you did make the mistake of coming to my room, you wouldn’t regret it for eight years afterwards.”
She laughed. “Such altruism,” she teased. “If you made it that good for me, it would be that much better for you.”
“That’s the way these things work,” he confirmed, mirroring her grin. “Of course, I’d expect you to pitch in and do your part, too.”
“Of course.”
His smile faded as he regarded her. “Do you know what else I’d do if we were able to get hold of a time machine?” he continued, no longer joking. “I’d take it back to our senior year of school and spend more time talking to you. You’re wonderful to talk to, Daff.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean it. Last night, when I started ranting about my parents—”
“If that’s your idea of ranting, Brad, you’re too suppressed. I thought we were having a pleasant chat.”
“Okay. I’m a pleasant ranter,” he allowed. “I didn’t even tell Eric about the lunch I’d had with my mother. I wasn’t going to tell anyone. But then you found me, and it seemed so easy to talk to you.... I wasn’t kidding when I told you that was the highlight of the party for me.”
“I think it was the highlight for me, too,” Daphne said. “I like talking to you, too, Brad.”
He lifted his half-consumed glass of iced tea in a toast to Daphne, then drained it. He was feeling a lot better now than he’d felt when he left the city an hour ago. The fact was, he was feeling a lot better now than he’d felt in the past eight years. “When Andrea suggested that I use you as my realtor,” he confessed, “I wanted to run the other way. I thought it was going to be so awkward.”
“It was,” Daphne reminded him.
“At first. But now I’m glad she pushed me into it.” It elated him to realize that Daphne could be his friend—that she already was his friend.
He supposed it was sometimes possible for a lover to evolve into a friend, but such a transition had never happened in his own life. He tended to choose his lovers for romance, not for friendship. He picked women who were beautiful and witty, who supplied one half of an ideal couple for which he was the other half. He selected women who had the potential to be for him what his mother was for his father—at least, what she had been for his father before their marriage began to falter: someone whose talents complemented his, whose background matched his, whose taste paralleled his.
He tended to choose friends, on the other hand, by his ability to talk comfortably with them. By that standard, Daphne Stoltz was without a doubt an excellent friend.
Perhaps it wasn’t so terribly surprising that she would be. He couldn’t really consider her a former lover, at least not by any legitimate definition of the term. What had occurred between them so long ago had nothing to do with love.
What was occurring between them right now had everything to do with friendship. And Brad would gladly drink many, many iced- tea toasts to that.
***
I BET he thinks of me as a sister, Daphne contemplated as she pulled on an attractive short-sleeve sweater. When her head popped through the neck-hole her curls burst out around her head like little yellow springs. She shook them loose, then tucked the hem of the sweater into the waistband of her slacks and fastened the fly. Fully clothed at last, she peeked out of her bedroom window, which overlooked the back yard.
Brad was standing next to the apple tree, shielding his eyes from the sun as he gazed up at the pinkish-white blossoms dotting the branches. If Daphne were more diligent about spraying insecticide on her trees, she’d probably be able to harvest a bumper crop of fruit in late September. While she wasn’t a devoted fan of insects, she had enough concern about the environment to avoid chemical warfare and instead share her tree’s fruit with some of Mother Nature’s lesser creatures.
She didn’t want to think about insects, though. She wanted to think about the tall, dark man with the spring-sky blue eyes who had felt compelled to drive all the way to Verona to tell her he understood why she’d taken a powder last night. She wanted to think about how honest he’d been, how noble in claiming responsibility for something that wasn’t his fault, how attuned he’d been to her feelings then and how sensitive he still was now.
She wanted to think about how much she enjoyed his company. Obviously, he enjoyed her company, too. He wouldn’t have insisted that she change her clothes and spend the rest of the afternoon with him if he didn’t want to be with her. He could have slapped himself on the back for having done his good deed, and then returned to the haven of Andrea’s and Eric’s apartment until his next house-hunting trip, which was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.
But he’d been firm about her abandoning her garden for the day: “Your flowers looks great, Daff, so don’t waste the rest of the afternoon on them. Go put on some clean clothes, and we’ll check out that park downtown.”
It wasn’t a date. Brad had absolutely no interest in Daphne as anything other than a pal. One more luscious, sexy man treating her like a sister, she thought with a sigh.
In truth, she wasn’t bothered by the thought of having a brother/sister relationship with Brad, because she’d never been in love with him. She had loved Dennis, and she had come dangerously close to falling in love with Paul Costello, but she’d never even considered Brad as someone she cou
ld love. He was too desirable: too good looking, too wealthy, too polished. Too decent. Who else but an immeasurably decent man would have done what Brad had done today?
Turning from the window, she ran her brush through her hair a few times, grabbed her purse, and left the bedroom. Brad was waiting for her by the back door. She locked up, then spun her key ring in search of her car key.
“I’ll drive,” he said.
“You don’t know your way around here,” she argued. “You’ll get lost.”
“You can keep me on course,” he suggested. “If I’m going to be moving here, I wouldn’t mind getting a feel for the community.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, accompanying him around the house to the rented car parked at the curb.
Once they were both settled in the car, she gave him perfunctory directions to the park. He pulled away from the curb, shifted gears and tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. “Whose shirt were you wearing?” he asked.
Startled, Daphne glanced down at her sweater. “I’m pretty sure it’s mine,” she said, bewildered.
He glanced toward the becoming peach-colored sweater, then grinned and returned his gaze to the road. “I mean before, when you were gardening. That man’s shirt.”
He seemed to be fishing for personal information. Given the personal nature of their conversation on her back porch, and the fact that he wouldn’t learn anything particularly scintillating from the line of questioning he’d taken, she didn’t object. “It was my father’s,” she answered. “He passes his shirts along to me once they start fraying at the cuffs. I spend a lot of time doing house repairs and gardening, and the shirts come in handy.”
Brad digested her answer, deep in thought. She hoped he wasn’t viewing her as her father did whenever he presented her with his old shirts: as a pitiful single lady who didn’t have a husband do grout the bathtub for her, or prune the shrubs, or change the screens in the storm doors.
“Is it strange, living in a big house all by yourself?” Brad asked, hinting that perhaps he had been viewing her as a pitiful single lady.
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