Free A Perfect Stranger by Danielle Steel Page B

than ever. She was different from every woman he had ever known.
    “Then one would have no protection.” She said it with great seriousness.
    “From what?”
    She paused for a long moment and then smiled at him and said gently, “People like you.” He could only smile in answer, and for a long moment they sat together, with their own thoughts and questions each about the other’s life. She turned to him after a little while, and her eyes were curious and happier than they had seemed before. “Why did you tell me that story about Charlotte Brandon?” She couldn’t figure him out, but she liked him; he seemed honest and kind and funny and bright, as best she could judge.
    But he was smiling at her now in answer. “Because it’s true. She is my mother, Raphaella. Tell me, is that really your name?”
    She nodded soberly in answer. “It is.” But she had offered no other, no last name. Just Raphaella. And he liked that name a great deal.
    “In any case she’s really my mother.” He pointed to the picture on the back of the book and then lookedquietly at Raphaella, still holding the book in her hand. “You’d like her a lot. She’s a remarkable woman.”
    “I’m sure she is.” But it was obvious that she still didn’t believe Alex’s tale, and then with an expression of amusement he reached into his jacket and withdrew the narrow black wallet Kay had given him for his birthday the year before. It bore the same interlocking G’s as Raphaella’s black lizard bag. Gucci. He pulled out two dog-eared photographs and silently he handed them to her across the empty seat. She gazed at them for an instant, and then her eyes grew wide. One of the photographs was a miniature of the one on the back of the book, and the other was one of his mother laughing as he held an arm around her, and his sister stood at her other side with George.
    “Family portrait. We took it last year. My sister, my brother-in-law, and my mother. Now what do you think?”
    Raphaella was smiling and looking at Alex with sudden awe. “Oh, you must tell me about her! Is she wonderful?”
    “Very much so. And as a matter of fact, Magic Lady”—he stood up to his full height, slipped the two files into the pocket of the seat in front of them, and sat down again in the empty seat next to hers—“I think you’re pretty wonderful too. Now, before I tell you all about my mother, can I interest you in a drink before lunch?” It was the first time he had used his mother to woo a woman, but he didn’t care. He wanted to know Raphaella as well as he could by the time the plane landed in New York.
    They talked for the next four and a half hours, overtwo glasses of white wine and then over a fairly inedible lunch, which neither of them noticed, as they talked about Paris and Rome and Madrid, and life in San Francisco, and writing and people and children and law. She learned that he had a beautiful little Victorian house that he loved. He knew about her life in Spain at Santa Eugenia and listened with rapt fascination to her tales of a world that dated back centuries and was like nothing he had ever known. She told him of the children she loved so much, of the stories she told them, of her cousins, of ridiculous gossip about that kind of life in Spain. She told him about everything but John Henry and the life she led now. But it was no life, it was a dark, empty void, a nonlife. It wasn’t that she wanted to conceal it from him, it was that she herself didn’t want to think about it now.
    When at last the stewardess asked them to fasten their seat belts, they both looked like two children who had been told that the party was over and it was time to go home.
    “What will you do now?” He already knew that she was meeting her mother, her aunt, and two female cousins, in true Spanish fashion, and that she would be staying at the hotel with them in New York.
    “Now? I will meet my mother at the hotel. They should already be there.”
    “Can I give