***
Lenore had been thrilled to accept Diana’s offer of ten thousand dollars for everything in her grandmother’s house. Diana wrote up an agreement and promised to call as soon as the moving van had been scheduled. Once she and Lenore had shaken hands, she climbed back into the rental car and drove to the inn, humming “Changes.”
Had she changed? What, besides confidence, had James heard in her words, in her voice? Could he tell, just from talking to her, that last night she’d experienced the hottest, wildest, most arousing kiss in her life?
No. That was not the sort of thing a person could detect in a voice. She was pretty sure they couldn’t, anyway.
She warned herself not to think about Nick, his kiss, and the way she’d felt in his arms. She couldn’t think about it while she still had the engagement ring Peter had given her, stashed inside her rolled socks in a dresser drawer at the inn.
Peter. Surely she loved him. She’d agreed to marry him, hadn’t she? Just because Nick Fiore had bewitched her with a kiss didn’t mean she should throw away everything she and Peter had.
As she thought about it, though, she wasn’t quite certain she’d ever really agreed to marry him. That they would get married had always just been a foregone conclusion. Her parents and Peter’s had been close friends for years, and when Peter and Diana had been born, their parents had begun planning. Like royalty, they’d plotted the merging of their two families when Diana and Peter had been toddlers splashing each other in the wading pool in the backyard of Peter’s parents’ grand brick mansion. When Diana and Peter had reached primary school—the stage at which boys and girls generally loathed members of the opposite sex—their parents had blithely ignored their squabbling and bragged about the magnificent grandchildren Diana and Peter would someday produce for them. They’d sent Diana and Peter to the same prep school, where somehow Diana and Peter had drifted from antagonists to cautious friends to a couple. She recalled Peter’s invitation to the prom when they’d been seniors: “I guess we’re going together, right?”
She’d had a crush on Griffin Stanhope that year. She’d dreamed of Griffin asking her to go to the prom with him. But of course he never did. He couldn’t. Everyone knew she belonged to Peter.
Everyone knew it in college, too. It was a given. A law of nature. When Peter had presented her with that gaudy diamond ring, he hadn’t asked her to marry him. He’d handed her the box and said, “Moving right along…”
At the time, she’d laughed. But it hadn’t been funny. It hadn’t been the romantic proposal she’d dreamed of. No rose petals strewn across the floor. No bended knee. Not even an I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Just “Moving right along…”
She’d moved right along. She hadn’t questioned any of it. Like the apprentice she’d been at Shomback-Sawyer, she’d listened and observed and done as she was told. It was what everyone expected. Diana Simms was not the sort of person who got on the phone and persuaded people to do what she wanted.
Until now.
Strange fascination, she thought as the song floated through her head. She was turning, and she was facing change.
Changes Page 10