sudden I needed to see you. It came from nowhere, but maybe it didn’t. I think I’m—” An icy pain bound his chest and trapped the words in his throat. She took advantage of his hesitation to keep them there.
“You’re what, thirty-odd?” she asked, sounding almost prosecutorial.
“Thirty-four. Five in a few more months.”
“My daughter, had she lived, would have been just a year younger.”
Stunned by this revelation, he blinked, swallowed, stirred his coffee cup with his spoon. The cup was empty, and the metal made a nerve-wracking sound against the china.
“Daughter,” he muttered after a long silence.
“Born dead.”
“I’m sorry. So you’re—”
“Yes.”
“You don’t wear a ring.”
“No.”
This was brutal. As her answer, delivered in a downward pitch, cut off further inquiry, he did not make any. He swept up the check before she could.
“I have an account here,” Diana said. “That’s completely unnecessary.”
“I asked you to dinner. You could at least leave me that.”
“Very well. But I insist on saving you the taxi fare and driving you back into town.”
He was going to make one final attempt. “Diana.”
Thinking that he was about to protest her offer, she turned partway around, patted the purse hanging from her chair, and said, “No rubbish about me driving myself back home alone. I have a friend who lives here, chap named Walther. I’ve been trained to use him, I practice with him about twice a month, and I wouldn’t think twice about pulling the trigger on some thug.”
Now he gave up and said, “I believe you wouldn’t. I didn’t realize I was in dangerous company.”
“Hardly.” She tossed her head in the self-deprecatory way that had so charmed him that afternoon in her foyer. “I’ve got to stop off at the loo. Meet you outside.”
He interrogated himself as he stood by the door, looking at the parking lot and the long drive sloping down in the darkness toward the road. Why had she accepted his invitation, and why had she touched his hand with such tender pressure, and why had she made that remark about the pleasure of her company? Why had she dressed and made herself up so gorgeously if not to look pleasing to him? Was he being presumptuous? Women had always come so easily to him, he must have thought she would too, despite the manifest obstacles, the pressures of convention. He must have misread her entirely. But if he hadn’t? Then she and her husband must be living under some sort of arrangement—You’re free to fuck whomever you want so long as I am, too. Yes, that could be it. Long ago these white uplanders had established a reputation for adulterous hijinks, and he doubted they’d changed. It would be just the thing for a married middle-aged woman high up on the social ladder to have an adventure with a younger brown-skinned lover. Get some real gossip going, just for the thrill of it. A flash of pure rage brought sweat to his forehead. He shook out a cigarette, then tossed it unlit into the shrubbery. A new thought sprang up, calming him somewhat. She’d said she was going to drive herself back home, which didn’t suggest that she intended to make him a toy in some game of infidelity. Or was she playing it coy? He’d never been so confused. Well, he could thank her for preventing him from declaring his love and making a complete idiot of himself.
“Shall we then?”
She’d freshened up, and her beauty instantly dissolved his turmoil. Love—that was the only word in his mind, the only thing he could feel.
She started across the lot with her sergeant major’s stride, her heels clicking martially on the pavement. They came to her car, the same sedan he’d seen her drive more than a year ago.
“My daughter was not by my husband, nor by any previous husband,” she announced without preamble. “My husband came later.”
He decided to be chivalrous and held the door for her, even as he thought, I don’t need or want to hear any of this. But as she climbed in, his eyes shot to her skirt, riding up to reveal her equestrienne’s thighs. She tugged it down, and the rustle of cloth against nylon brought on a convulsion of raw lust. He circled to his side and got in and slammed the door. She didn’t switch on the ignition. She looked at him with a peculiar intensity.
“David lives in the U.K. We’ve been separated for a very long time. For reasons that are—excuse me—none of your business,