“Whoa,” Hal said, putting his hands up before his face as though to act as a shield. “I didn’t mean anything bad. I’m male; I watch all the pretty girls, okay?”
Leslie let out her pent-up breath and smiled. “Sorry. It’s just that with being a dancer you get some . . .” She waved her hand to finish the sentence.
“Yes, I would imagine that with a body like yours you get every pervert on campus following you.”
Leslie knew that she should say something modest, but it had been a long time since anyone had paid her such a compliment—a long time since she’d been in good enough shape to deserve such a compliment. Turning away, she blushed all the way to her hair roots.
“Why did you leave the party so early last night?” he asked.
“I . . .” she began.
“Didn’t know anyone, and it was too noisy and too busy?” he suggested.
Laughing, Leslie turned back to look at him. “Exactly. You’re fairly perceptive, aren’t you?”
“Fairly,” he said, and she could tell that he was amused. No doubt he was used to girls who flattered him endlessly.
“So why did you invite me?” she asked again. “And don’t you dare say anything about the shape of me.”
“That will be difficult,” he said.
Heavens! But it had been many years since Leslie had flirted with anyone. In fact, had she ever flirted with a man? Alan wasn’t exactly the flirting type.
“Maybe I should ask you why you accepted,” Hal said. “I hear you’re engaged to be married the second you graduate.”
“His car broke down and I was going to be spending the week alone, and I wanted to see this place. Maybe I’ll tell my children that I visited the Formund estate and met Halliwell J. Formund IV, who is now president of the U.S.”
She had meant to make him laugh, but he didn’t. Instead, he was staring at her as though she were a witch. “How did you know about me and politics?” he asked softly.
“Oh, just something I heard, I guess,” Leslie said, trying to cover herself.
“There was nothing you could have heard,” he said. “My entire family assumes I’m going into the banking business with my father and my uncles. The idea of politics is inside my head only.”
“Maybe you look like a politician,” she said, smiling. “In fact, I can easily envision your face on campaign posters. I can even imagine you in Congress and the press saying that you’re a president-in-the-making.”
He didn’t return her smile but looked away at his mother’s little house. “I think you see me the way I see myself. But my family isn’t going to like it.”
“Not like that their son wants to be president of the United States?” she asked, incredulous.
Turning, he looked at her for a while, as though he were considering something. “Would you like to spend the day with me? I mean, just the two of us? We could take a basket of food and go rowing on the lake.”
It was amazing how much the idea appealed to Leslie. She knew that inside her mind, she was nearly forty, but she was in the body of a twenty-year-old and raging inside her were hormones that she hadn’t felt in many years. The thought of a lazy day on a lake with a handsome young man who thought she was beautiful was vastly appealing.
He misinterpreted her hesitation. “I won’t lay a finger on you,” he said. “I promise.”
“Then I am definitely not going,” she said before she thought. But in the next moment they were both laughing.
“If I must,” Hal said, his eyes sparkling, then he held out his hand to her and in the next moment they were running across the lawn toward the back of the big house, but he stopped outside the door. “If you go in with me and we get the food together, it will be all over the place within seconds,” he said. “Your decision.”
Looking at him, Leslie marveled that he could be so thoughtful. He knew that she was engaged to another man, and now he was giving her a chance to keep what she was doing secret. How many other boys his age would think of such a thing? “You’re going to make a good president,” she said; then she opened the kitchen door and stepped inside. Let Alan find out. Let Alan feel what Leslie had been feeling in the last months over his assistant, Bambi.
With a chef and two helpers in it, the kitchen was a flurry of activity as they prepared breakfast, but from the way Hal slipped in and out of the quickly moving people, he was a familiar presence. He knew where the picnic baskets were kept, and he knew where the best foods were stored. Leslie saw two of the workers drop things into Hal’s basket without his asking them to do so. Fifteen minutes later he opened the door and they left the kitchen together, the big basket over Hal’s arm.
“Do that often?” she asked teasingly.
“Not with a girl,” he said, “if that’s what you’re asking, but, yes, I often take a lunch and stay away for the entire day.”
“I thought that young men like you liked parties and girls and . . . well, parties and girls.”