Free none Page B

know, historical romances. The sort where a beautiful young woman gets carried
off and ravished by a handsome, dashing pirate who turns out to be a
disinherited duke or something."
    "I see." Jed lowered his lashes consideringly. "She has, I take it, an active
imagination."
    "Oh, no. Mona - excuse me - Tanya knows whereof she writes," Lacey retorted,
unable to repress a wave of humor. "She’s always getting herself carried off by
the most fascinating men, oil-rich sheikhs, notorious underworld figures,
obscure Hungarian counts, you name it. Men find her quite fascinating and she
returns the favor. Who knows? Play your cards correctly and she might be
persuaded to let herself be carried off by a rich antiestablishment type."
    "Not a poor, thirty-six-year-old hippie?"
    "I’m afraid not. Tanya has her standards, and she’s enormously practical
beneath that scatterbrained, flighty exterior. Lucky for you you’re rich." Lacey
added minced hot peppers to the grated cheese and a dollop of mayonnaise and
some lemon juice. "I’m surprised she didn’t get around to giving you the
exciting facts of her life. That’s usually first on her conversational agenda."
    "I suppose we never got around to it," Jed told her calmly, his voice heavy
with meaning, "because we spent the time discussing you."
    "Me." Lacey whirled around, the bowl of cheddar filling in hand, and stared
at him. "What do you mean, you discussed me?" She made no attempt to conceal her
outrage. The thought of Jed talking about her with someone like Mona was too
much. "I can’t imagine either of you having any great interest in my
background."
    "Don’t glare at me like that; I’m liable to burn the pita bread." He leaned
over to remove the heated rounds, neglecting to use an implement. An instant
later he flung the too-hot bread onto a nearby plate and waved slightly singed
fingers in the air. "Your friend Tanya or Mona or whatever came over to borrow a
cup of caviar or camembert or something. She is a little flighty, isn’t she?" he
observed as if only now noting the fact.
    Lacey simmered in silence, fully able to imagine her neighbor breezing
through the door, kimono flying, asking for a cup of caviar. Not deigning to
respond to Jed’s observation, she filled the pita bread with the cheese mixture,
and they sat down to eat.
    "At any rate," Jed plowed on between bites, "she started drawing parallels
between the two of you, said you were both self-made women and I asked her what
she meant." The gold and brown eyes met Lacey’s hazel gaze over the edge of the
stuffed pita bread. "Why didn’t you .tell me your father gambled away everything
he owned before he died? That everything you’ve got - your business, your
apartment - you’ve built from scratch?"
    Lacey stilled for a long moment, frozen by the depth of the inquiring demand
in his expression. Then she forced a casual tone. "You never asked. What
difference does it make?"
    "It gives me another tiny piece of the puzzle. What happened, Lacey?"
    She made up her mind not to tell him a thing, and even as she came to that
decision, she heard herself explaining quietly. ‘‘There’s not much to tell, Jed.
My parents were divorced when I was in my teens. I didn’t see much of my father
after that, and my mother certainly didn’t see much in the way of child support
or alimony. Dad was killed in a car accident on the way to Las Vegas. It was
when I was going through his papers after the funeral that I realized he’d
become a heavy gambler. There wasn’t much left."
    "So you’ve been on your own financially for quite a while," he remarked
speculatively. "I can see why you didn’t exactly approve of me. I must seem like
an irresponsible, ungrateful rich man’s brat who never grew up."
    "What you choose to do with your life is your own business," she told him
stiffly, uncomfortable beneath the rueful sympathy in his eyes.
    "But the hardworking, success-oriented side of