“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.”