Free A ruling passion : a novel by Judith Michael Page A

worried," she echoed. 'Tou're so sure."
    "I'll make sure. I'll do what I have to and I'll make sure."
    He sounds like me, Sybille thought. Why is he with Valerie when it's me he's like? Then, as if she remembered that she had not won her argument, she returned to it. "You'll make sure because you'll have your credentials. And because you've met people here who might help you. Though mostly you have to help yourself, because you can't count on other people being interested in you. Valerie, I'm right, aren't I? You want to go into the theater and this is a way for you to get started."
    "Not really," Valerie said. She toyed with her chopsticks, looking bored, Nick thought. "I don't think about the stage as a career; it's too confining. I might do amateur productions now and then, but thafs probably about all."
    Sybille was staring at her. "Then why did you come to college?"
    It was Valerie's turn to look at Sybille as if she were slow. "Why not? It's something new, like going to Africa or India, but I'd already done that. Besides, everybody goes to college; it's the next step after high school."
    Nick chuckled and raised his glass of Chinese beer in a toast to each of them. "To the academic life."
    "You can have your little jokes," Valerie said serenely. "I like to learn as much as anybody does, I just do it instead of talking about it. And I'm having a good time."

    'Well, of course I like it, too," said Sybille. "It's just not—" She stopped. She couldn't convince them; they were too set in their ideas.
    Valerie touched her glass to Nick's. "To a good time, and lots of ways to have it."
    "Together," he said, his eyes holding hers.
    "Maybe." She looked across the table, at Sybille. "How about this? Ten years from now, the three of us will be raising our glasses to drink to Sybille Morgen, nationally famous star of her own television show."
    "I'll drink to that," Sybille said, and the three of them drank, each to a different toast.
    Valerie sat beside the window, daydreaming, while the professor flourished his chalk at the blackboard and worked out the intricacies of a chemical formula. She could tolerate science better now than before she met Nick—in fact, sometimes she was surprised to find herself enjoying it—and she kept herself awake through the dull parts by pretending it was Nick's voice she was hearing, which wasn't so hard since he sounded faintly lecturing when he helped her with her homework.
    She was thinking about him a lot these days, more than she had thought about any other man. She wondered why. He wasn't the sexiest man she knew, nor the most handsome or daring; he hadn't traveled and didn't seem in a hurry to catch up with her; he didn't have the money to join her in the jaunts she took with friends, sailing, water skiing, going to parties and nightclubs, driving around the peninsula looking for things to do; he hadn't been able to get away from work to go with her the two weekends she'd flown to New York and had wanted him to come to meet her parents; and he was so damned serious about everything!
    That was the worst of all, she thought. Her hand was moving smoothly over her notebook, copying the formula and its solution, but her thoughts were with Nick. The truth was, he may not have been the sexiest or the most handsome or anything else, but he was the most consuming man she had ever known: when they were together she was entirely with him, never drifiiing off into daydreams or fantasies the way she did with other people, and when they were apart the memory of him filled her thoughts and wrapped around her just the way he did when they lay in his bed.
    But then there was his intensity, his drive to do everything he set out to do, even if it was just an afternoon ride through the fields or a part-time job on campus, or the work he was planning for the future.

    Always, deeply a part of him, there was that seriousness and control, that concentration that even she couldn't count on breaking.
    She couldn't