Carolina Isle (3 page)

As Ariel stood there watching him shake hands with people, now and then glancing at the blonde on his arm, she knew that someday he'd be hers. She came out of her trance to look into the eyes of the woman with him. She was glaring at Ariel in a way meant to tell her to back off, that R.J. belonged to her. Ariel just smiled. She knew from Sara that R.J. changed women more often than she changed shoes. Next week there would be another mindless blonde—or a redhead, whatever—looking up at him with adoring eyes.

For the whole party, Ariel stayed within viewing distance of R.J. Each time he glanced in her direction, she turned away, as though she'd been looking at someone behind him. But he wasn't fooled. After an hour, he walked toward her. And though she pretended she didn't see him, her heart was pounding so hard she was afraid it would leap out of her chest. If she hadn't had so much inside information from Sara, she would have turned and smiled at R.J. But she knew he was used to that. Sara said that she couldn't see R.J.'s attraction to women, but it was there. She'd told many stories about women making fools of themselves over him. Sara said she'd had to usher each of them out, some of them crying, and later, she always sent them flowers and a nice note that essentially said thanks but no thanks.

Ariel knew better than to rush forward and introduce herself. Instead, she ignored him completely. Sort of. If a person can stalk someone through a three-hour party and still ignore him, that's what Ariel did. She chatted happily with a bunch of old, rich men who kept trying to look down the front of her dress, while she kept an eye on R.J. The second he moved away from
whomever he was talking to, she moved away from him. They were playing cat and mouse—and liking it. Toward the end of the party she felt him bearing down on her and she knew she wouldn't be able to escape. She also knew that she'd have only one chance to make a first impression. But she didn't know what he liked. Sweet and simpering? Or cool but smoldering, like Grace Kelly in
To Catch a Thief
? For him, Ariel would be whatever he wanted. But first she had to find out what would make him want her for more than his usual two weeks.

As he bore down on Ariel, she knew she had to stop him. But how? He was known in the business world as a man who got what he wanted. He'd been called ruthless by more than one source.

Frantically, Ariel looked about the party. Should she go to the ladies' room? But she knew he'd be there when she got out, then that first moment would take place whether she was ready or not. When she saw her mother, she smiled. Ruthless was too mild a word to describe her mother. Knowing that R.J. was watching her, Ariel glided across the room in a manner she
hoped was part beauty queen, part seductress, and all cool beauty. When she reached her mother, all she had to do was whisper a few words and she knew that her mother would keep R.J. away from her better than a pack of wolves could.

Ariel was right.

Just as she entered the ladies' room, she glanced back to see her mother confronting Mr. R. J. Brompton. R.J. looked confused, so Ariel knew she'd won. When she left the restroom fifteen minutes later, R.J. had left the party. Had she missed her one and only chance? No, she had more confidence in herself than that. Ariel smiled the rest of the evening because she had found what she wanted to do with her life: She wanted to marry and raise a family with her cousin's boss.

Life changed after that night as Ariel began planning how to go about getting what she wanted most in the world. First, she had to know her subject, so she went to the library and started researching, spending months reading, cutting out articles, memorizing, and writing her cousin hundreds of letters. The more she wrote, the more Sara wrote back, and Ariel encouraged her
cousin to talk about her job and her boss. Ariel would have e-mailed her cousin daily except that her mother didn't believe in the Internet. Ariel thought that her mother feared that her daughter would find out that men and women got naked and had sex and enjoyed it. She was determined to keep Ariel a virgin in both mind and body in anticipation of her wedding night with David—a night Ariel's mother and David's mother had been planning since the babies were born two weeks apart.

As for David, as always, he was Ariel's beast of burden. Since he had contact with the outside world, she had him look up R.J. on the Internet and give her the hundred and fifty pages he printed out. He had daily news flashes about R.J. e-mailed to him, and he gave Ariel copies.

“The media is more interested in his women than they are in what he does for a living,” David said, looking at a photo of R.J. “You wouldn't think that a man that old and ugly would be able to get all those babes.”

Ariel snatched the photo out of his hand. “He's only forty-two and he is far from ugly,” she said, glaring at David.

“Forty-two is old enough to be our father, so—”

“For your information, you and I do not have a joint parent. Anyway, he would have had to be a teenager when he conceived two twenty-four-year-olds like us.”

“Conceived,” David said, smiling. “What a nice word.” He was lounging on her bed, twirling her stuffed duck-billed platypus around his finger. She took it away from him. He'd been back in Arundel since graduating from college two years ago, but he didn't seem in any danger of getting a job. Against his mother's protests, he'd studied horticulture. His mother had spent days with Ariel's mother drinking endless cups of tea while she cried that her beloved son was learning to be a farmer. “Why couldn't he be a doctor or a lawyer? Why a farmer?” she whined. Ariel's opinion was that, with David's money, what did it matter what he studied?

“Don't you have something to do?” she asked, but she knew their mothers had set an obligatory time that they had to spend together. If they missed it, their lives would be made miserable. David and she had made a silent agreement to
give them what they wanted, which is why he was now lounging on her bed and nearly tearing the ear off her toy armadillo.

“We could go skinny-dipping in the creek,” he said.

“Didn't I hear that you did that two weeks ago with one of the girls who lives by the mill?” The old cotton processing plant hadn't been used in forty years, but it still marked the different parts of town. The tiny houses that had been built for the millworkers were now protected by historical covenants, but that didn't change the fact of where they were.

“Jealous?”

“Of what?” she said as she read through the latest news on R.J. Ariel looked at David. He was stretched across her bed, all long, lean, masculine energy, and she thought that Sara would probably like him. For all of Sara's sarcasm and acting as though she was a tough girl, Ariel thought she was pretty soft. Yes, she thought, Sara and David might get along splendidly.

“Mom wants me to ask you to the dance next Saturday. Shall we do the usual?”

The “usual” was that he'd ask some other girl
and Ariel would be his cover. Actually, for the past six months David had been dating just one girl and Ariel was beginning to think he was serious about her. Her name was Britney and she was from the worst side of town that anyone could be from. Her father drove a truck around the U.S. and her mother cleaned people's houses. If David's mother found out about her, she'd probably put herself in the hospital with a panic attack—and stay there until David agreed to give up the girl. He hadn't said so, but Ariel was beginning to think that the real reason David was still in town and hadn't taken a job in another state was because of Britney.

He rolled onto his stomach and looked at her. “So what is it with you and this guy Brompton?”

“I'm going to marry him.” David and she had few secrets from each other. They were in prison together, so why shouldn't they be friends?

“Great!” he said. “Told your mother yet?”

“No. I'm going to let you tell your mother, then she can tell mine.”

David rolled onto his back and tossed her kangaroo in the air. “How about if you and I get married, move to another state, then get a divorce? If, after living with me, you want a divorce, that is.”

Picking up her scrapbook, Ariel sat on the bed beside him. “I know you think I'm joking, but I like this man. Yes, he's older, but he's not too old. The best thing is that he's powerful and rich, so maybe he'll please my mother. If not, he can support me when she disowns me.”

“You could get a job, you know.”

“What can I do? Clean houses like Britney's mother?”

David gave her a look that let her know she'd crossed the boundary.

“Okay, I apologize. I'm sure Britney is a very nice person, and that you like her for something other than her impressive bra size.”

“You can be a nasty little bitch, you know that?”

“Tell your mother that you can't marry someone like me.”

Sighing, David turned onto his side and took the scrapbook from her hands to look at pictures of R.J. “You'll have ugly kids—if a man that old can still do it, that is.”

“He seems to make women happy.”

“He buys them diamonds and they fake orgasms. Not that you would know anything about orgasms. Or do you?”

When she didn't make her usual comeback, he reached out and patted her on the shoulder. “Come on, Ariel, it's not that bad.
I'm
not that bad. People in other countries often have arranged marriages. It won't be so bad, I promise.”

Ariel glared at him. “Being made to marry someone you don't love is horrible. A lifetime of never hearing bells ring when you kiss! A whole life of never feeling little tingles in your scalp when he looks at you. Years of—”

David yawned. “You've been reading paperbacks again, haven't you? Listen, I'd better go.”

“Britney calling you?” she said nastily. In a way, she was jealous. She was jealous that he had someone in his life, while all she had was a scrapbook.

“Yeah,” he said, grinning in a lecherous way. “Britney.”

Ariel looked away. She wished the man she loved was with her.

David got off the bed and walked toward her. For a moment his arms hung at his side, as though he wasn't quite sure what to do with them. “You hang in there, kid,” he said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away. “Ariel,” he said softly. “I do understand. You may
think I don't, but I do. It's not me who's the problem, it's that you want a choice. You want to choose who you marry.”

“Choice,” she said. “A concept that is foreign to my existence.”

“Maybe you and I could—” He broke off as he stared, wide-eyed, at her scrapbook. Picking it up, he walked to the window and looked closely at the grainy newspaper photo. “You know who this is, don't you?”

“Who is what?” she asked.

He pointed to a woman standing near R.J. She knew the man beside him. He was Charley Dunkirk, an old, rich man who had given R.J. his start in business and was still his best friend. “That's Susie Edwards,” David said.

“And just who is Susie Edwards?”

“I forget that you've lived in a tiny world inside the tiny world of Arundel. Her picture is hanging in one of the corridors at the high school. She won every beauty contest in three counties from the time she was three until she left Arundel when she got out of high school. She went to New York, changed her name to Katlyn, and married one of the richest men in the world.”

Ariel looked at the picture. The woman was pretty, yes, but in that well-preserved way that meant she'd had half a dozen face-lifts and spent her days in salons. “She's from Arundel and she's the wife of R.J.'s best friend? Hmmm.” Ariel's head was whirling with this news. Her intuition told her that this woman was the way she was going to reach R.J. She'd already decided that the less Sara knew about her plans, the better. Unfortunately, this meant she couldn't ask Sara's advice about anything. What Ariel wanted to do was to get R.J. onto
her
territory, into Arundel. If her plan of impersonating her cousin was going to work, Sara needed to be near Ariel while they were pretending to be each other. Ariel knew she'd need help working for R.J., so she wanted Sara close. But how to get R.J.—and Sara went where he did—to tiny Arundel?

Ariel put her hand on David's arm, looked up at him, and gave him her best pleading sigh.

“Oh, no you don't,” he said. “I'm not going to help you in this. When you elope with that man, I plan to be the innocent, jilted, almost-bridegroom. I want our mothers to think that I
did no wrong. I certainly don't want either of them to think that I helped you.”

“David, dear,” she said sweetly, “wouldn't you love some tea? We could drink it while we have a nice, long talk.”

“I'm going to regret this,” he said as he sat down on a chintz-covered chair.

Smiling, Ariel started talking. David was so glad to see her happy again that he stayed the entire afternoon.

In the end, David did help her. Through his girlfriend, Britney, and her connections in “that side of town,” he found a man who was sending Susie Edwards—a.k.a. Katlyn Dunkirk—information about Arundel.

David got Mrs. Dunkirk's address and Ariel wrote her a letter asking if they could meet if she ever happened to be in the area. As Ariel hoped, a letter came back soon, giving a time and place in Raleigh.

On the appointed day, with David's help, Ariel managed to escape her mother long enough to meet Mrs. Dunkirk for lunch in Raleigh.

Ariel knew all about the woman the moment she saw her. For all her jewelry (a diamond necklace
at lunch?), her careful accent (a sort of French-English concoction), and her five-thousand-dollar suit (in Raleigh?!), Ariel would have known her anywhere. There was an air of the cotton mills around her that no time or money could wipe away. The woman was very nervous and kept smoking cigarettes and talking too much.