“It was nice of you to come as her delegate.” Let’s make it clear right up front—you’re not here because of me, and I know it.
“Would you like punch and cookies?” Kurt asked.
“No—I’m not staying for the reception.”
“Because you have too much to do?” His tone was light, conversational.
As if he cares. “Yes, I thought I’d take the rest of the day off to do some serious relaxing before I get down to the task of finding a job.”
“Then my timing was perfect.” Suddenly he sounded serious. “Lissa, I want…I need to talk to you.”
“Oh, I think you said everything that was on your mind at Christmas, Kurt. Pardon me if I’d rather not sit through a repetition. So, thanks again for coming. Tell Hannah I’ll talk to her sometime, and…” She pulled the mortarboard off her head and ran her fingers through her hair. And don’t send me a Christmas card; if I want to know what’s going on with you I’ll just read the business magazines.
“Lissa.” His voice was quiet. “I’m going to say what I came here to tell you. You can stand here and listen to me, or you can walk away and I’ll follow you and shout as loud as I have to, to make sure you hear. So it’s up to you, really. Do you want to keep this between us, or not?”
That would make a nice scene for the crowd—on the stage, the university president still reading off the last half of the graduates’ names, while mere feet away Kurt boomed out—what? More accusations?
A crowd had gathered around the refreshment table, and newcomers from the stage sidestepped Kurt and Lissa to head in that direction. Off to one side of the quadrangle lay an almost deserted path, and Lissa moved toward it. “Why right now?” she said wearily. “It’s been months, Kurt. Why did you have to ruin my graduation day?”
“I didn’t intend to ruin it. I came to tell you I’m sorry.”
She turned to face him. “Sorry for what? There are so many possibilities I don’t have any idea where you might begin.”
He winced. “Let’s start with the biggest one, then. I’m sorry that I accused you of having an abortion.”
She thought about it for a moment, not quite sure what he was saying. Was he sorry he’d believed it, or only sorry that he’d voiced the thought?
“I suppose I’d have to call it temporary insanity,” he said. “What happened to me on Christmas, I mean. Everything seemed to fit—what you’d said to Gran, the whole idea about the home, the fact that you’d been very careful what you’d said to me. You never exactly told me that you hadn’t been pregnant, you know.”
“I couldn’t assure you of something I didn’t know myself, Kurt.”
But he didn’t seem to have heard her. “You only said that you hadn’t given up a baby for adoption. Suddenly all of that seemed to fall into place in my head, and the pieces formed a picture—one I didn’t like. One I didn’t want to believe. But when I confronted you, you didn’t deny it. And the look on your face—”
To his already suspicious eyes, she realized, she must have looked and sounded guilty. No surprise there, because she’d felt guilty—even though she had done nothing wrong—simply because she’d kept her own suspicions to herself for six long years.
“Not that it excuses what I said to you. Lissa, I’m sorry the idea ever crossed my mind. It didn’t occur to me then that there was yet another possibility—that you’d miscarried. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”
She hesitated. “I think so.”
Kurt frowned. “What do you mean, you think?”
“It all happened so quickly. As soon as I began to suspect I might be pregnant, I got a test kit. The results said I wasn’t, but the instructions made it clear that if it was too early the test wouldn’t show up as positive. So I was going to take it again in a few days, but before I could I started bleeding, and…well, it was all over. So I’ve never really known…even though in my heart I was pretty sure.”
“You looked so guilty. And—I wasn’t thinking clearly, that’s all.”
“I’d noticed that,” she said dryly.
“But when I finally stopped letting myself be blinded by anger and thought it through, I knew that had to be the answer. If you had been pregnant, you might not have told me—”
“As if you’d have been eager to hear that sort of news.”
“But you wouldn’t have acted in your own selfish interests. Not if it would hurt someone else.”
She supposed she should be pleased that he’d finally worked it out. “I’m glad you at least got that much straight. How long did it take you, did you say?”
“A while. A month or so. I was pretty angry.” He paused. “So were you, or you wouldn’t have told me that raft of lies.”
“Don’t try to shift the blame, Kurt.”
“I’m not. I take full responsibility for that, too. If I hadn’t been such a—”
She could think of several words which fit the situation, but Kurt seemed to conclude that none of them was quite severe enough as a description.
“I attacked you,” he said quietly. “I hurt you in the worst possible way. It just took me a while to realize why you would admit to something like that when it wasn’t true. But of course you fought back—you wanted to hurt me.”
“I’m not proud of what I said,” she admitted. “I didn’t help things, did I? But even if it took you a full month to figure all this out, why wait till now to talk to me?”
He looked down at the toe of his wingtip and drew an invisible line on the sidewalk. “I know it sounds like I was too scared to face you. And perhaps I was, for a while—because I knew what a horrible thing I’d done to you, and I couldn’t imagine you being willing to talk to me no matter what I did. Last time, you wouldn’t listen at all.”
“By last time, you mean when you caught up with me that day after calculus class? The day after we…You didn’t try very hard to talk to me then, Kurt.”
“Maybe we’ve both learned something in the last six years.”
Maybe, she thought doubtfully. Though if he’d called her up anytime this spring she might have slammed the phone down. She’d been plenty angry, too. Even this afternoon she hadn’t wanted to hear him out.
“But I couldn’t just let it ride,” Kurt went on. “Whether you listened to me or not, I had to at least tell you I was sorry—for everything. At the same time, I knew everything you’d been through the last few years in trying to finish school, and I didn’t want to risk that. As long as you were doing all right, I didn’t want to upset you all over again. So I waited till the semester was done—till today. And I thought if I approached you in public…”
Shanghaiing her was more like it. “I see.”
“If I’ve done the wrong thing by coming to talk to you, I’m sorry—but at least by waiting I didn’t throw you off course again and keep you from graduating.”
“Very thoughtful of you. You said you knew I was doing all right? How? Oh, from Hannah, I suppose.”
“No. Gran wouldn’t so much as breathe your name. I called up the dean of the business school.”
The dean—the man who had just shaken her hand up on stage and murmured, You have a bright future. Much he knew about it, Lissa thought. “I suppose he read you my report card in return for a nice contribution?”
“Not exactly. But he did agree to keep an eye on you—and he seemed to be impressed by what he saw.”
Lissa said dryly, “He was probably only impressed because you were the one who was asking about me. He loves to use Maximum Sports as a good example—of everything.”
“What are you going to do next, Lissa?”
He was finished, she realized. The apology was over, the discussion complete, and now he was moving on to civil chit-chat for a few moments before saying goodbye. “Look for a job. So far I haven’t had anything but nibbles.”
“If you’re interested, there’s a position with Maximum Sports.”
“That wasn’t a hint for you to hire me, Kurt. Besides, I’m
terrible at sales, and I’d scare people away from the climbing wall—so, thanks, but no.”
“It’s corporate,” he said. “I’d like you to set up that new simplified tracking system you told me you could create.”
It would be her dream job, and for a moment Lissa let herself wallow in the thought of how perfect it all could be.
“I feel bad about the internship,” Kurt went on. “You kept your part of the bargain—Gran’s finally moved out of the house, and everything’s settled—but I didn’t keep mine. I wanted to, but I thought if I offered you a job—or suggested I pay your rent—you’d throw it in my face after what I’d said to you.”
“I might have,” she admitted. “And I didn’t exactly accomplish what you wanted, anyway. It took Hannah all spring to get the house mostly cleared out, and even though they’re remodeling now, she’s still got the china stacked in an upstairs closet because she swears you’re going to want it someday—so I didn’t figure you owed me anything.”
“Well, that’s past. Now that we’ve got things straightened out….”
Oh, yes. Everything’s just peachy, now.
“What about the job, Lissa? A real job, I mean—not an internship.”
She eyed him narrowly. “I thought you said the dean didn’t read you my report card.”
His eyebrows furrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“Never mind. It’s nothing. Thanks for the offer—but I don’t think so, Kurt.”
It was the only thing she could say. Working near him, working for him, but not being with him, would be more than she could bear.
He nodded, obviously not surprised that she’d turned him down. She wondered if there was a flicker of relief deep inside him. If so, at least he’d had the decency and self-control not to show it.
They’d reached the far edge of the quadrangle, where the shade of a row of pine trees kept the sidewalk even cooler than the grassy expanse they’d crossed. The campus boundary was just ahead, and beyond that was only a neighborhood of student housing. There was no further excuse to linger, so she tipped her head back and looked directly up at him. “Anything else you want to get off your chest before I go, Kurt?”
He took his time answering. “I’ve really ruined things, haven’t I?”
She wanted to say, Yes. You ruined everything. But she had ached so long and so deeply that she was too guarded to admit that there had been anything between them at all, anything which could be ruined. So she only shrugged and turned away, hoping that she could get out of sight before she broke down and cried.
“At least let me walk you home, Lissa.”
She clenched her fists on the hard leather binder that held her diploma until her knuckles ached. But there really was no reason she could give for not allowing him to share a public sidewalk with her on a beautiful spring day, so she shrugged and started off, setting a brisk pace.
“You haven’t asked why it was so easy for me to convince myself that there had been a baby,” he mused.
“Oh? Your being a bit paranoid wasn’t enough of a reason?”
“I don’t think so. And neither was remembering that you’d supposedly been sick that spring. You see…what I finally realized was that part of me wanted there to have been a baby.”
The admission was so startling that she tripped over thin air. Kurt grabbed her arm to steady her and didn’t let go. “My parents….” he said slowly. “They didn’t fight all the time because they both wanted me, they fought because they didn’t.”
There was no pain in his voice, only acknowledgment of the truth. But she felt his hurt nevertheless. “I’m sorry, Kurt.”
He shrugged. “They only got married because I was on the way. I’ve always thought it would have been better if they hadn’t bothered.”
She listened to the rhythm of their footsteps, almost in tune against the concrete. “I don’t understand. If it was so bad for you, why would you want another child to feel like a burden?”
“Because it would have been different. I’m not my parents.”
She nodded. “But…”
“I would have wanted my baby. And when for that instant of time I thought that there had been a child and I’d lost him—or her—”
It wasn’t a baby, she’d said to him. It was a nuisance. It had been a blow struck in anger, a lie told in a moment when she’d have done anything in her power to wound him. Now she wondered how many times he’d heard himself called a nuisance by the people who should have loved him most.
No wonder he’d turned to stone when she’d said it. She couldn’t have found a way to hurt him more.
He looked down at her, almost as if he were seeing her for the first time. “I went crazy—I’m not making an excuse, because there isn’t any. If I’d only stopped to consider I’d have known you couldn’t do that—but I didn’t take the time to think it through. Lissa, I’d give my right arm if I could go back and relive that fifteen minutes.”
Something deep inside her relaxed—something which had been so tense since Christmas that she had grown used to it, even begun to think it was normal. “Oh, not the right arm, Kurt,” she murmured. “It would make climbing that wall much too difficult.”
He frowned at her as if he didn’t appreciate the feeble effort at humor. “It’s taken me six years to figure out what’s wrong with me. Six long years to figure out that what happened between us that night was no accident.”
She wanted to snort. “Of course it wasn’t an accident. You planned it.”
He shook his head.
“Come on. You can’t deny there was a bet.”
“It wasn’t what you thought. I didn’t set out to go to bed with you. I told one of the guys that you were going to tutor me, and he started making jokes about how I must want something more than a calculus lesson, and I said, yeah, sure, I had all kinds of plans. It was the sort of thing all stupid young guys say when they’re trying to sound macho in front of their buddies. Before I saw what was happening everybody knew about it. I tried to squelch the talk, but then after that incredible night….”
He had thought it was incredible, too?
Calling it incredible doesn’t necessarily mean he thought it was wonderful, Lissa reminded herself.
“At first I was too stunned to think. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. But you were like a startled rabbit—jumpy and anxious, in such a hurry to get out of my room that of course I said all the wrong things. Did all the wrong things.” He sighed. “And by the next day, we both must have been giving off vibes—because it was obvious to everyone what had happened. Then there was no stopping the gossip.”
And as soon as she’d heard about the bet she’d refused to speak to him at all….
Kurt had been a fool, there was no argument about that. But so had she. They had let their passion carry them away, long before their tentative friendship had been strong enough to stand the pressure. Then, in their proud refusal to be the first one to confess—in their fear of being embarrassed if feelings turned out not to be mutual—they’d squashed any possibility of finding out if their attraction could turn into something more lasting.
At least now there’s no more need to wonder what happened. We did it to ourselves, in equal measures.
“Then you wouldn’t even give me the time of day,” Kurt went on. “So I assumed that it hadn’t been so wonderful for you after all, and I stopped trying. But even while I was telling myself that women couldn’t be trusted, that you’d slept with me and then turned your back—”
“Wait a minute. I turned my back?”
“I didn’t say I was right, Lissa, just that it’s what I thought back then. It hurt me, that you had walked away without seeming to care. And I was still hurting when I saw you again at the cloakroom that night, when you told me to get lost. By then, I’d buried it so deeply that I didn’t recognize what was happening—but that’s why I was so nasty and suspicious at first. And when I began to suspect that you’d been pregnant—and
hadn’t even told me….”
She sighed. “I would have told you, Kurt—if I’d been sure. But there was never anything definite to tell you. I certainly wasn’t going to walk up to you and say, I just wanted you to know I thought I might be pregnant but I’m not.”
He smiled a little. “Yeah, I can see that. Lissa, I know it must have been a relief to you when it was all over…but I almost wish it had been different.”
She stopped at the foot of the steps outside her boarding house. “It wasn’t a relief,” she said, almost under her breath. “Well, this is the end of the road.”
He didn’t look at her but at the façade of the house, and for an instant she saw it through his eyes. The porch was even more rickety than it had been at Christmas. The stairs sagged. The paint was peeling off the front door, and a panel of glass that had been loose then was gone now, replaced by a board.
Kurt’s jaw tightened. “I wanted so much to take you out of here. But I messed that up, too.”
She was so glad that he hadn’t picked up on her admission—or at least she told herself she was glad—that she was almost giddy. “Oh, really? Then why did you raise such a fuss when Hannah tried to give me her house?”
“Because I didn’t want you to have it,” he admitted.
“Seems a little contradictory, Kurt.”
“I didn’t want the house to get in the way. I didn’t want it to be a possession to come between us, something to fight over the way my parents fought over everything.” He turned her to face him, his hands tight on the shoulders of her black gown. “I didn’t want you to get attached to the house—because I wanted to take you with me.”
Her heart was suddenly beating in a staccato rhythm she’d never felt before. “And I suppose that’s why you offered to rent an apartment for me here, right? You aren’t making sense, Kurt.”
“I know I’m not. Give me a chance, Lissa. This is hard for me.”
She looked up at him for a long moment. There was something about his expression, a turbulence in his eyes… “I’m going inside.”
The Tycoon's Proposal Page 17
