Because they were late, she didn’t have time to do her usual advance survey of the items being offered. She signed up for a number so she could bid, then pulled Tate through the crowd.
“I’m starved,” he murmured in her ear. “Can’t we get something to eat?”
“You can. I’m working.”
Tate’s sharp gaze swept over the scene. “Are all of these people working?”
Victoria regarded him quizzically. “Tate, haven’t you ever been to an auction before?”
“Never.”
She shook head. “That’s what happens when you spend your life playing games with rows of boring numbers. You miss all the fun.”
“I thought you said this was work.”
“It is for me. But a lot of these people just like to come and spend the day visiting with their friends. It’s sort of like an old-fashioned community picnic.”
His eyes lit up. “Picnic?”
Victoria grinned at his hopeful expression. “There are tables of food right over there. Go get something, if you’re hungry.”
He nodded and loped off through the crowd. When he returned a few minutes later he was carrying two plates piled high with hot dogs, homemade potato salad, coleslaw and slices of both cherry and apple pie. Victoria’s eyes widened incredulously.
“I didn’t want anything,” she told him.
“Good,” he said, grinning at her. “This was all for me. We never did have dinner last night, and you made me skip breakfast.”
“We would have had time for breakfast, if you hadn’t…” Her voice trailed off.
“Hadn’t what?” he teased.
“Tate, please. You’re distracting me.”
“Am I?” he asked innocently. “Good.”
“It is not good. I have to pay attention.”
While Tate ate, Victoria studied the crowd, trying to pinpoint who the heavy bidders were and what they were buying. Only a handful seemed to be dealers or serious collectors. The rest were the usual assortment of auction followers, who bid erratically and frequently too high simply because an item appealed to them. Their unpredictability was what gave the auction its challenge. You had to know the value of every piece and set your limits, or you could be lured into a bidding war with someone to whom price was no object.
Tate watched with amazement as the intensity in Victoria’s eyes mounted and her brow puckered into a tiny, fascinating frown. Somehow he’d thought of her business as a game, primarily because of her unique way of conducting it. He saw now that it was anything but a game to her. She took it seriously and, judging from the careful way she was watching the crowd, she knew what she was doing. Apparently she had to be as good a judge of people as she was of antiques.
He had been paying so much attention to Victoria that he’d lost track of what was happening on the makeshift stage set up under a huge oak tree. When she lifted the number she’d been holding in her lap, his gaze flew to the stage to see what she was trying to buy. It looked like a huge stack of unmatched dishes to him, and they were all in these glaringly bright shades of orange and red and blue. He couldn’t imagine eating food off plates those colors.
“You’re kidding!” he muttered aloud. “You want those things?”
“It’s Fiestaware,” Victoria said excitedly, as if that explained everything.
“Oh,” he said and looked again. “It doesn’t match.”
“It doesn’t have to,” she said and flashed her card again. “Many collectors want a mix of colors. Others are looking for a single piece to fill in a set. I like to get as much as I can find.”
The bidding had intensified, with only Victoria and two others remaining. Her card was waving in the air more frequently than a flash card at a high-scoring football game. Tate could barely tell from the auctioneer’s rapid chatter exactly what the current price was, but it sounded outrageous to him. One of the remaining bidders dropped out, leaving only two. It was up to Victoria. She hesitated, then waved her card.
The other bidder promptly raised her offer and Victoria’s face fell in disappointment. When the auctioneer looked back at her, she shook her head.
“You’re going to drop out now?” Tate asked incredulously, as the auctioneer began his chant, “Going! Going!…”
Tate snatched Victoria’s card and held it in the air.
“Tate, what are you doing?”
“You want it, you’re going to have it,” he said adamantly.
Victoria tried to snatch the card back. Tate held her hand up. When his bid was raised, he managed to wrestle the card away from Victoria long enough to wave it in the air. By now people around them were chuckling, but he didn’t care. All he knew was that Victoria was going to have those dishes if it was the last thing he did.
“Tate McAndrews, stop it this minute,” Victoria pleaded. “I can’t afford to go any higher.”
“I’ll pay for the dishes.”
“Tate,” she said, his name coming out as a soft groan. “Please.”
“You want them,” he repeated insistently.
“Not for me.”
His eyes flew open, and the card drifted back to his lap. “Not for you?”
“No. For the shop. I’m going to sell them.”
“Oh. Of course,” he said quietly, as the auctioneer said with a broad grin, “Sold to the gentleman…and lady…in the fifth row.”
“Oh,” Tate repeated, and this time his eyes were wide with shock. Victoria’s lips were suddenly quivering, and then she was laughing, unable to control her mirth.
“Tate, you were wonderful.”
“I feel like a fool.”
“No,” she said, kissing him. “You did something impetuous, totally crazy, absolutely impulsive, just to make me happy. I love you for it.”
“You do?”
“I do,” she said, grinning at him.
He chuckled and winked at her. “Should I do it again?”
“Don’t you dare. We’ll both go broke.”
* * *
As the spring days lengthened toward a summery brightness, Tate spent more and more time with Victoria. They managed to avoid her inquisitive parents and an enthusiastically watchful Jeannie, though that was getting to be an uphill battle. One night, Victoria fully expected one of them to pop out of her closet just as she and Tate were rediscovering the magic that their bodies made together.
Though Victoria had tried to force Tate to include her in his life in Cincinnati, he’d been more insistent that he wanted to understand hers first. If he had told her once, he had told her a thousand times that he wanted to experience firsthand the lightheartedness that made her lips curve in a perpetual smile and her eyes sparkle like jewels in sunshine. When he said such uncharacteristically romantic things with a serious gleam in his eyes, her heart flipped over. She found herself doing exactly what she’d sworn not to. She fell more and more deeply in love.
Unfortunately, on top of that, none of her attempts to bring a sort of innocent pleasure, a more casual abandon into Tate’s too-structured life went exactly according to plan. It was as though the same fate that had willfully thrown them together to fall in love had now decreed that it couldn’t possibly work.
First, she had arrived at Tate’s office in the middle of the day and dragged him on a picnic. It had gone beautifully once he’d stopped grumbling about the disruption in his busy schedule. She’d prepared a lovely lunch, brought along a book of poetry and found an idyllic setting. After they’d eaten, she’d leaned against a tree with Tate’s head nestled in her lap, and started to read to him, her melodious voice filling the air with softly spoken, romantic words. It had been just about perfect…until a bee had settled on Tate’s lip. She could still hear his startled shout, and she would never forget the frantic trip to the emergency room, once his lip had started swelling to at least three times its normal size.
“I’m sorry,” she had said over and over again.
“No’ yo’ fau’,” Tate mumbled thickly.
“Yes, it was. If I’d had any idea you were allergic to bees, I would have…”
“Wha’?”
“I don’t know. I could have done something.” She’d run her finger lightly across his lip and winced as she saw a flicker of pain in his eyes. “Oh, Tate.”
“Shhh,” he had said soothingly. “Don’ worry abou’ i’.”
But she had worried and a few days later, when Tate had insisted on helping her plant her vegetable garden, she had practically pitched a fit, imagining him attacked by a whole swarm of bees and blowing up to the size of a hot air balloon.
“Victoria,” he’d said patiently. “I’m sure the odds against my being stung again are a million to one.”
“They are if you stay indoors.”
“I’m helping with the garden.” She knew that tone by now. She swallowed her doubts and gave him a shovel.
They had pulled weeds and cleared the patch of ground in the side yard, worked the rich black soil until it was absolutely perfect, added organic fertilizer and then put in rows of tiny tomato, corn and green bean plants.
“Where’s the watermelon?” Tate had asked.
“I hate watermelon.”
“I don’t.”
They had driven back to the garden store, where he had picked out three watermelon plants.
“Tate, one would be enough.”
“What if it died?”
“Okay. Then two should do it.”
“You might decide you like it.”
Victoria had sighed. “Get three if you want them.”
By the time she’d relented, he’d already paid for them. The man was completely stubborn.
It wasn’t until later that night that they discovered the garden had been filled with poison ivy. For some unknown reason only Tate got a reaction to it. His arms were covered with a bright pink rash that he kept scratching until Victoria threatened to bandage his hands with adhesive tape.
“Tate, don’t you think maybe we ought to do something in Cincinnati this weekend?” Victoria had suggested the previous night. “Maybe we could go to a movie.”
“What would you do if you weren’t with me?”
She’d shrugged. “I don’t know. I never know exactly what I’m going to do until I’m practically in the middle of it.”
“Well, if the weather’s nice what would you probably do?”
“Go fishing, I suppose.”
Tate had regarded her with a pained expression. “Fishing?”
“Sure.”
“But what do you do while you’re waiting for the fish to bite?”
“You don’t do anything. It’s so peaceful just to sit on the edge of the river and dangle your feet in the cold water and feel the sun touch your face. The sun feels almost as good as you do,” she’d murmured, curving herself into his eagerly receptive body.
That had brought an abrupt halt to the discussion for the moment, but this morning she’d awakened to the sight of Tate standing by the bed with a sheepish expression on his face, a fishing pole in his hands and a hook caught in the seat of his jeans.
“Don’t say it,” he’d muttered, as she barely stifled a grin. “Just get it out.”
After that she’d finally convinced him that they should drive to Cincinnati for a concert. It had taken them an hour to decide between a world famous violinist and an outrageous punk rock star with spiked pink hair and more mascara on his eyes than Victoria had ever worn in her life.
“But we both love classical music,” Tate had argued. “Why would you even suggest we go to see this other jerk?”
“Have you ever seen a punk rock group?”
“No.”
“Well, neither have I. It’s time we did.”
“Give me one good reason.”
“It’s an experience.”
Tate couldn’t find a single argument that could stand up to that kind of logic. “I’ll call for tickets.”
They never got to the concert, for which Tate would always be eternally grateful. They were on their way, in fact they were only a few miles away, when Victoria spotted a carnival.
“Oh, Tate we have to stop.”
“We do?”
“Carnivals are such fun.”
“No, they’re not. They’re grubby and cheap and disgusting.”
“Tate, please.”
“Oh, to hell with it.” He couldn’t resist it when she turned those blue eyes of hers on him with such a wide-eyed look of innocent entreaty. He vaguely understood now how men had been moved to conquer entire civilizations by the mere lift of some beguiling woman’s brow. He was as helpless to refuse Victoria’s wishes as a moth was to elude a flame. She was beaming at him now with that dazzling smile that warmed his heart and turned his determinedly rational head to absolute mush.
He parked the car, and they strolled hand in hand through the dusty lot onto the fairway. Raucous, tinny music filled the air with a cheerful noise. A Ferris wheel, decorated with bright lights, spun through the early evening sky, its stark reds and greens and blues streaking through the muted mauves of twilight. The distinctive scents of sticky, sweet cotton candy, fresh popcorn, garlicky sausage, hot dogs and pizza blended together to create a mouth watering effect. Barkers were trying to lure the crowd to try its luck pitching pennies, throwing hoops around milk bottles or shooting a moving target of tiny wooden ducks. Tate thought the whole thing had an air of awful unreality about it, but Victoria’s expression was alive and excited, her eyes sparkling.
She drew him first to the cotton candy booth.
“You’re not really planning to eat that stuff?” Tate asked, horrified by the puff of blue that was twirling around a paper cone.
“We’re going to eat it,” Victoria replied firmly, as he reluctantly paid for the candy. She pulled off a chunk and tried to feed it to him.
“That’s nothing—” his protest began, as she poked some of the sticky blue mess in.
“—but sugar,” he concluded, deciding it wasn’t too awful. But it certainly had no nutritional content. “What a waste of calories.”
“We didn’t come here to diet. We came here to have a good time.”
“And eating blue stuff is a good time?”
“Yes.”
“If you say so,” he said doubtfully. “What are we doing next for fun?”
“The Ferris wheel.”
Tate’s eyes surveyed the spinning wheel skeptically. “I don’t think so. Those things aren’t safe.”
“Of course they are. How often have you read about one breaking?”
“Once would be enough, if you happened to be on it.”
“Tate, it won’t collapse.”
“Do you have an in with the mechanic?”
“Buy the tickets.”
“You want me to contribute to my own death? That’s suicide.”
“It’s going to be murder, if you don’t try to get into the spirit of this.”
They were only stuck on top for forty-five minutes. Tate swore he would get even with Victoria, if it took him a lifetime.
“That’s promising,” she said, giving him a broad grin.
“It is? I didn’t mean it to be.”
“You’re planning to spend a lifetime with me. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes, but yours may end the minute we get back on the ground.”
“Oh,” she said softly, studying him quizzically. “Aren’t you having a good time really?”
Actually, Tate supposed it wasn’t the worst time he’d ever had in his life. Having the mumps at twenty-five had been pretty terrible, and having some idiot driver smash into the back of his new car twenty minutes after he drove it off the lot hadn’t been too terrific. But this was definitely right up there among the top ten. He wasn’t sure he ought to say that to Victoria, though. She was already upset enough about the bee and the poison ivy and the fish hook.
“I’m sure I’ll have a great time once we’re back down on the ground,” he said with forced cheer.
“Right. We’ll try the baseball toss, and you can win one of those huge teddy bears for me. I’ve always wanted someone to do that,” she said wistfully.
At that moment Tate would have been willing to spend his next six lifetimes throwing baseballs until her entire house overflowed with those awful, ugly bears, if that was what she wanted.
His first three tosses were right on the mark, and Victoria’s face was alight with laughter when the fat panda with the bright green bow around its neck was handed to her.
“Does he need a friend?” Tate asked.
“Of course,” Victoria said solemnly. “Everyone needs a friend.”
This time on the third toss, Tate wrenched his back and grimaced with pain.
“Tate, what is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Tate, it is too something. You’re holding your breath.”
“Only so I won’t scream.”
“You hurt your back,” Victoria guessed.
“It’s nothing,” he insisted. “I’m sorry about the bear.”
“Don’t worry about it. This one will be just fine. Lancelot will keep him company.”
Tate suspected Lancelot would tear him to shreds, but he didn’t want to put a damper on Victoria’s enthusiasm.
“Is there anything else you wanted to do?”
“Let’s see the fortune-teller.”
“You’re kidding!” Tate was incredulous. “You don’t actually believe in that stuff?”
“Of course not, but it’s fun.”
“Just like the Ferris wheel.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“Sorry.”
They sat down in front of a woman with a yellow bandanna on her dark curls, golden hoops in her ears and red lipstick in a shade just this side of scandalous. She had dark, Gypsy eyes that told seductive tales and a contradictory, impish smile that teased like a child with a feather. Even Tate wanted to trust her. She spread the cards on the table, studied them intently, then hastily gathered them up. Her fingers moved so quickly that Tate wasn’t even aware that her actions were peculiar until he heard Victoria’s sharp intake of breath.
“What’s wrong?” she asked hesitantly.
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