She had to admit that in a few quick minutes, Lenny had transformed her from looking like an impoverished student to a woman who could hold her own at any party the Sloans and Winstons decided to throw. On her own, though, she still wouldn’t have picked white lace.
Sofi slipped into the room, breathless, and handed Rebecca a pair of low white sandals with very skinny straps. “This was the best I could do. It’s reasonably warm tonight—”
Lenny grabbed them. “But these are perfection!”
He insisted on slipping them onto Rebecca’s feet himself. Sofi was highly entertained. “My, my, Cinderella in the flesh.”
“Sofi…”
“Hey, just kidding. You look great. I mean it. If this were an Aztec party you were going to, they’d sacrifice you on the altar.”
“You’re a big help.”
There was a knock at the door. Lenny picked up Rebecca’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Have a wonderful time.”
“Thanks.” Rebecca gave him a hug. “I’m not used to fussing over my appearance. I appreciate what you’ve done, and I’ll try not to ruin the dress.”
“I hope your man tears it off you.”
“Lenny,” Alex said, “you’re making her blush.”
“Of course I am. I want her to have fresh color in her cheeks when she walks out the door.”
Thanking them again, Rebecca shot out into the hall before one or another of the three could make one last remark. She quickly shut her door behind her so Jared wouldn’t see her entourage and room filled with cast-off clothes and think she’d put any effort into the evening.
He was breathtaking in a black evening suit. “Sorry I’m late. I forgot your room number.”
“You’ve been here awhile?”
“A few minutes.” He tried to hold back a smile, but failed.
“Um…You met my roommate Sofi?”
“Was she the one running up and down the hall looking for virgin shoes in size eight?”
So much, Rebecca thought, for illusions of sophistication, but by the time she and Jared reached the elevator they were both laughing.
* * *
“I won’t have her here.”
Jared stiffened in anger at his aunt’s words and looked to Quentin for support, but his cousin remained silent. Annette seemed hardly aware of her son’s presence in the small sitting room off the elegant drawing room where dozens of guests had gathered. Jared could see Rebecca smiling as she took a glass of champagne. She was so damned beautiful. His aunt, elegant in diamonds and black silk, had pulled him aside moments after they’d arrived at her Mt. Vernon Street house.
It was her party, she was his aunt, and Jared, despite his irritation, tried to be patient. “Aunt Annette, I don’t see why you’re carrying a grudge against her.”
“I’m not. She’s a Blackburn, Jared, and while that may be no fault of hers, it’s certainly none of mine.” Annette sighed, her expression softening as she touched her nephew’s hand. “I know this must be frustrating and embarrassing for you, but please try and understand. There are reporters here tonight. If they find out that’s Rebecca Blackburn over there, they’ll be all over me—and her. And I’d rather not have the past dredged up right now. I’m sure she wouldn’t, either. If not for my sake, then for hers, take her home.”
“Mother’s right,” Quentin, who’d been standing mutely beside her, added.
Jared shot his cousin an annoyed look. “You don’t believe that rationalization, do you? I doubt a single reporter here would care if Thomas Blackburn himself had come tonight. They just want free drinks and a chance to rub elbows with the Winstons and Sloans, although I don’t think I’ll really ever understand why.”
With a pained look on his handsome face, Quentin started to backtrack, but Annette put up a hand and he broke off. Jared sighed, not surprised. In Quentin’s place, he’d move as far from Boston as he could. Saigon was far, but Quentin was still working for his mother there—and he hadn’t said a word about not coming home. Annette had given him a year, and Jared was sure that’d be all Quentin took. Before her husband’s death, Annette’s parenting had been nonchalant, allowing her son a generous amount of freedom. All that was sharply curtailed when Benjamin Reed didn’t make it home from Vietnam. Jared didn’t think Annette loved her son any more than she had when Benjamin was alive. She was just more determined to control him, although, perversely, whenever she succeeded she was disappointed in him, more convinced he was a weakling. Jared had quit trying to figure the two of them out years ago, but he did feel sorry for his cousin. No matter what he did, Quentin would never please his mother.
Annette maintained her regal calm. “Be angry if you want,” she told her nephew. “Just get that girl out of my house.”
Which was what he did.
To her credit, Rebecca knew exactly what was going on. “I’m being booted, huh?”
She was trying to sound as if she didn’t give a damn, but Jared could see the flash of anger—and humiliation—in her eyes and red-stained cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said tightly.
She polished off the last of her champagne. “Don’t be.”
But he was. He’d been a fool to think his aunt would have tolerated a Blackburn in her house, and if Rebecca was going to be polite and not tell him so, her grandfather had no such compunction. They took their frustrations down to West Cedar Street, but after Thomas Blackburn politely told Jared it was good to see him, he waved off their complaints without sympathy.
“What on earth did you expect?” he asked them.
Rebecca kicked off her thin-strapped shoes and paced on the worn carpet in her stocking feet. “Am I going to be damned forever for something I didn’t even do?”
It was a rhetorical question not meant to be answered, but Thomas said, “Probably,” and disappeared into the kitchen.
Jared stood awkwardly in the middle of the dimly lit parlor, a fire going to take the chill off the raw spring night. He didn’t know if he ought to leave or stick around. He was half-Winston and had to be an annoying physical reminder of the Blackburns’ loss of prestige. For centuries, their moral and intellectual rectitude had kept them within the circles of power, even to the point of having presidents consult them on any number of topics. They had been the conscience of Beacon Hill, a shining example of “doing the right thing.” They hadn’t needed money to maintain their particular kind of authority. Jared could remember when Thomas Blackburn’s name had evoked respect and his opinions had made people think, listen, change their minds.
An ambush in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta had changed all that, and even if it was something the Blackburns could get used to, it wasn’t anything Annette Winston Reed was likely to let them—or anyone else—forget. She wasn’t a forgiving woman on the best of days, and her husband was dead because of Thomas Blackburn. If she hadn’t stolen their moral authority from them, she was content not to let them earn it back.
But Jared hoped Rebecca would take his friendship with her grandfather as a cue that he didn’t share his aunt’s relentless hatred, nor her vindictiveness. Because Jared didn’t want to leave the shabby West Cedar Street house.
He wanted, he admitted to himself, to get to know Rebecca again. When they were kids, she was the big sister to a passel of brothers and had sought Jared out just because he was five years older. She had never idolized him; that wasn’t R. J. Blackburn’s style. Sometimes she’d fight and kick and yell and act like a little sister asserting her independence, and then sometimes she’d find a common ground with him that was more mature than the bond she’d share with her younger brothers—something Jared could see now. At the time, more often than not, he’d viewed her as bossy as hell and a royal pest.
“I’m choking in this dress,” she said, unclasping the hook-and-eye at the nape of her neck. She fastened her gaze on Jared. “You can go on back to the party, you know. I’ll be fine here.”
“That’d be the height of rudeness, wouldn’t it? Going back to a p
arty my date’s been kicked out of. What do you take me for, R.J.?”
“Those are your people—”
“I won’t damn my aunt for being what she is,” he said carefully, “but I won’t defend her, either. I don’t agree with what she just did to you. If I did, I’d never have taken you there tonight in the first place.”
Turning her back to him, Rebecca fingered a small brass Buddha atop the marble mantel of the cold fireplace. “I believe you.”
Jared said nothing. It hadn’t occurred to him that she wouldn’t believe him.
“Did Quentin want me out, as well?”
“I don’t think so—”
“I know, it’s hard to tell.” She faced him again, hinted a smile. “I hadn’t seen him since we left for Florida. I didn’t have a chance to say hello to him tonight, but that’s probably just as well.” Her almost-smile broadened into a real one that was filled with energy and irreverence. “He’s a handsome devil, isn’t he?”
Jared laughed. “Yeah, you want his phone number? Maybe he could take you out and give his mother heart failure.”
“That’d do it, wouldn’t it?” Rebecca laughed, as well.
Thomas returned with a big bowl of crisp tortilla chips and a batch of his homemade salsa, hot enough to make Jared’s and Rebecca’s eyes tear. The old man seemed unaffected. He told them he didn’t want to hear another word about the goings-on at the Winston house on Mt. Vernon and suggested they play “that game of yours, Rebecca.”
She grinned, totally recovered from her humiliation at the hands of Annette Winston Reed. “That’s because he always wins. My grandfather,” she told Jared, “has the most incredible junk mind.”
So, as it turned out, did Jared.
A handful of Thomas’s foreign students joined them, and they played until midnight, when he finally threw them out. Jared drove Rebecca back to campus in his rented car and dropped her off at her dormitory, offering to walk her to the door.
“I’ll be fine. It’s pretty late. Sofi, Alex, Lenny and half the floor’re probably waiting up for me.”
“Tell them,” Jared said, leaning toward her and kissing her lightly, “your virgin shoes worked.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
By finals in mid-May Rebecca had turned nineteen and was head over heels in love with Jared Sloan. He made her laugh and wasn’t afraid to tease her about being so compulsive about school and work. And he was self-confident enough that he wasn’t threatened by her ambitions. She could be herself with him. Not just a Blackburn, not just a scholarship student, not just an egghead, not just a young, attractive, blue-eyed woman. It was liberating.
He stayed in Boston for several days after the groundbreaking for the new Winston & Sloan Building. They went everywhere together. They traipsed through Boston Common and the Public Garden, went window-shopping on Newbury Street, wandered through the Museum of Fine Arts, checked out their old haunts on Charles Street. Rebecca managed to find time for them to be together without sacrificing her work, classes or studying. Jared showed up at the library one afternoon and patiently read while she reshelved books.
When he headed back to California, he sent her postcards of the Golden Gate Bridge and jotted on the back that San Francisco was a lovers’ paradise.
“Whoa,” Sofi kept saying, “that man’s smitten.”
So was Rebecca.
Even if she knew whatever they’d started was going to come to an abrupt halt on June first when Jared headed for Saigon.
“Don’t you think it’s nuts for him to want to spend a year in Vietnam?” she would ask her grandfather.
“Yes,” Thomas Blackburn would say, “especially now. I fear South Vietnam’s a dying country.”
He would then proceed to expound on the most recent trials to besiege the country where he’d spent so many years, and had lost so much. He lectured Rebecca on the devastating effects of the 1973 American military withdrawal and the Arab oil embargo on the country’s economy, the suicidal intransigence and shortsightedness of the Thieu regime, the rampant corruption, the lack of interest in Vietnam of an American people preoccupied with the Watergate scandal and the future of their own president. Rebecca knew better than to interrupt when he was on one of his tirades. She had learned that, despite her grandfather’s public silence, in private he spared no one his opinions. At least not her.
“But,” he would eventually conclude, “I can understand Jared’s compulsion to go there. I felt it myself more than fifty years ago.” And he would penetrate her with his icy clear eyes. “Do you, Rebecca?”
“Not right now,” she would always say. “I have to think about school and work. I don’t have the time or the money to go gallivanting all over the world.”
Of course, Jared Sloan did.
He came back to Boston on a warm, sunny May afternoon and found her studying for her microeconomics final on a grassy embankment overlooking Storrow Drive and the Charles River, dotted with hundreds of small white sails.
“Hey, there,” he said, startling her.
She squinted up at him in the sun, and her heartbeat steadied at the sight of him, with his crooked grin and dark, sun-washed hair. Smiling, she laid down her textbook and threw herself on him, and together they fell back onto the grass.
Jared laughed. “Not a bad public display of affection for a repressed Yankee.”
“Don’t forget I’m half-Southerner. Where’d you come from?”
“San Francisco.”
“To visit your mother?”
“To visit you.”
His mouth found hers, and they rolled over on the ground, Jared ending up on top, bits of grass sticking in his hair. She relished the feel of his weight on her. His tongue flicked hot and wet against hers, and he murmured, “I could make love to you right here.”
“We’d be arrested.”
“All for a good cause.”
She laughed, seeing the piratical gleam in his eyes. “I’ve missed you.”
To her surprise, he rolled off her and sat up, exhaling in relief.
“Did you have any doubts?” she asked, shocked.
“Yeah,” he admitted, “I did. You Blackburns are a self-sufficient lot, you know. And you, R.J.—Ms. Four-oh Average, Ms. Future Diplomat, Ms. Full Scholarship—you’re about as intense as they come. They didn’t break the mold when your grandfather was born.”
Rebecca wasn’t sure that was a compliment, however accurate he might be. She abandoned microeconomics for a walk along the river holding hands with Jared. Afterward they grabbed a couple of hot dogs from a vendor on Commonwealth Avenue and headed back to her dorm, talking all the way. When they reached her room, Jared’s gaze rested on Sofi’s stripped bed, closet, desk and bureau.
“Oh,” Rebecca said, “she finished her last final yesterday and headed home to Westchester.”
“Did she, now?”
He gave her a wildly exaggerated lecherous look and pounced, hooking one arm around her waist and tossing her playfully down on her skinny bed. Rebecca laughed—until she saw his eyes. Then she knew he wasn’t just horsing around.
Her breath caught. “Jared…”
His body was strong and hard on top of hers. Rebecca could feel him breathing, feel him wanting her. A sharp stab of longing went through her—and a little fear. “Do not go Blackburn on him and tell the man you’re a virgin,” Sofi had warned her before leaving. “You’ll scare him.” Rebecca had countered that she wasn’t even sure she’d see Jared Sloan again. Sofi had groaned and said her roommate was so naive.
He smiled tenderly and brushed the hair back from her forehead. “I thought I’d never do this in a dorm bunk again.”
“Bully for you,” Rebecca blurted. “I’ve never done it at all!” Too late, she caught herself. “I mean—”
“R.J., it’ll be all right.” Lowering his mouth to hers, he kissed her softly, slowly. “I promise.”
She nodded that she believed him, but her practical nature asserted itself. “You’re prepared?�
�
He laughed. “You’re the one who calls me a pirate—”
“I don’t mean ready, I mean prepared.”
“I was just teasing. I know what you mean. Yes, Ms. Four-oh Blackburn, I’m prepared.”
He plucked a package of condoms from his jeans pocket and set it on the edge of the bed. Rebecca didn’t know whether to be pleased or appalled. “You planned this?”
“Let’s just say I’m ever-hopeful. R.J.” He had the grace to be embarrassed. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re direct?”
She gave him a mock look of innocence. “A Blackburn direct? Imagine.”
As outspoken as she was, she didn’t find undressing in front of Jared easy. She felt shy and inexperienced, but the prospect of leaving the job to him unnerved her, at least for the first time. It would just be too awkward.
And in spite of her five brothers and their notorious absence of modesty, she wasn’t sure about having Jared undress in front of her, either. He was tanned and muscled, but she didn’t know if she should stare, look away, make a comment, or, just for a change, keep her mouth shut.
Finally he came to her on the ridiculous bed and smoothed his palms over her bare shoulders, just looking at her. “If you want me to stop…if I hurt you…”
She shook her head. “You won’t.”
But she wished she felt as confident as she sounded and resisted the impulse to crack a joke to relieve the strange tension that was making her mouth tingle and her skin feel almost alive. A breeze from the opened window made her shiver. Then Jared stroked her upper arms and she was hot again. She lay back on the bed, bringing him with her, reveling in the erotic sensation of her bare skin against his. They would have to take their time, she thought. She wanted to take note of everything.
But Jared had other ideas, and he communicated his urgency—made her feel it, as well—when they kissed. He explored her mouth with his tongue, matched its probing rhythm with his hips, and all her self-consciousness and nervousness vanished. Yes, she thought, I want this….
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