Reasons Of the Heart

His shock briefly penetrated her protective haze. Oops, she hadn't meant to tell him that. 'Knew about what?' she asked with what she thought was extreme cunning, unaware that her eyes were grey with guilty knowledge. Ross sighed and reached back for the half-empty brandy glass he had put on the coffee table. He held it to her lips, which she pressed together with a lop-sided frown.

'Are you trying to get me drunk?'

'You're already drunk, Princess. A little more isn't going to make much difference.' But it might loosen her unwary tongue.

It sounded supremely logical. 'I've never had a hangover before,' she confided proudly and wondered why his mouth tugged down at the corners in that funny, kind of sad way as she sipped. Tenderly he fed her the rest of the glass and between sips softly kissed and coaxed her into rambling honesty. He was behaving like an un­principled bastard, but dammit, he needed to know.

When she told him, half-way between a giggle and a sob, that she had overheard the settling-up of his bet about their date that fateful Monday morning in the bike shed, he groaned and closed his eyes, tilting his lovely shaggy head back. 'Oh, God...'

When he looked at her again, nestled against his side, his eyes were deep blue with regret. 'I'm sorry, Fran, but if you heard everything, surely—'

'I didn't stay to hear all the gory details,' she inter­rupted him with a tipsy attempt at haughty dignity. She had rushed away and hidden in the girls' toilet, feeling ugly and soiled and utterly humiliated.

A few more sips and she let it all spill out... how she had been too shy to actively seek him out in the school grounds, but had hovered near the bike sheds where the boys gathered, hoping to 'accidentally' run into him and defy her grandparents' strictures by cementing the friendship that he had proposed on Saturday night.

'Did you get her blouse open? I'm not paying up on this bet until you give us the brand of her bra. I bet it was an armoured one, with a royal crest on it: Princess Pudge.' The snickering adolescent voice had hit Fran­cesca like a blow.

'I guess you really earned your dough, huh, Ross? We should have offered you danger money on top of the bet... you could have been suffocated just trying to find first base, let alone touching it!'

Francesca hadn't waited for the raucous young laughter to die so that she could hear Ross besmirch the lovely memory of their hours together. Princess Pudge! The tender shoots of womanhood had shrivelled before the vision of him parading her loving vulnerability for his friends to paw over and laugh at. Later, when Ross had asked her to sit with him at lunch, she had lashed out at him with all her pain, grinding his pride into the dust as he had hers.

'Ah, Princess, if only I'd known,' Ross sighed, rocking her gently in his arms, finally solving the puzzle of how the shyly passionate girl who had touched his arrogant young heart had turned into the cool, disdainful princess his wounded ego demanded he dislike and avoid. 'No wonder you attacked me with those painful truths...you must have hated me...'

Fran twisted her head to peer up at him, wondering why he was suddenly receding like that, going furry around the edges. And he looked so serious, so regret­ful. She wanted to make him smile, make him feel all warm and deliciously woozy, the way she felt...

'Don' hate you, Ross...' Her tongue got tangled up as she tried to screw her eyes into focus, 'Only you...' Her words sank into a drowsy slur,'... was lies, 'nyway. No boys...' She smiled dreamily. 'Only you...'

'Francesca? What do you mean, lies? Francesca, wake up!' Ross looked in exasperation at the sleeping woman curled so trustingly in his arms. He didn't have the heart to wake her up; their unfinished business would have to be settled in the morning. His mouth curved wryly. In the morning she would be bolting for her high horse again, and he welcomed the notion of being there when she found the stable empty!

CHAPTER SIX

'Francesca, wake up!'

Francesca surfaced reluctantly, a suffering husk of nauseous vibrations. She groaned as sunlight pierced her aching eyeballs. The act of lifting her head prompted an excruciating pain in her skull that screamed for relief. Her mouth tasted so vile that every time she swallowed her stomach tightened ominously. She groaned again, softly, as she became aware of someone perching on the edge of her bed, causing dangerous fluctuations in the mattress.

'Go 'way,' she slurred, wanting to be left alone in her misery.

'I've brought you some coffee, and this...' The monster of callousness waved a plate with a piece of thin, scarcely buttered toast on it, across her bleary vision.

'Oh, God—' She clapped a hand to her mouth.

Ross grinned an offensively healthy grin and put the coffee and plate down on the chair beside her bed. He hauled her protesting body up against her pillow and held her there with one large hand braced on her shoulder.

'Part of the problem is that you haven't eaten any­thing for nearly twenty-four hours—it's nearly eleven am, you know—and you're probably suffering a bit of dehy­dration as well. Come on, it's only weak, but it's liquid.'

He held up the coffee cup to her lips and tilted it so that she had to sip, or have it poured down the neck of her nightdress. It hit her stomach, warm and wet, but before she could moan again a piece of toast was in­serted into her unwary mouth. 'Nibble.'

Fran chewed and swallowed cautiously. This time when Ross put the cup to her lips she removed it from his hand and drank. He watched approvingly, his blue eyes clear and sparkling with life, his skin smooth-shaven and glossy, his chestnut hair combed damply into unaccus­tomed style. Fran closed her eyes to shut out the vision of physical well-being, grateful and annoyed to find his simple remedy working. She felt marginally better.

'You got me drunk,' she accused.

'You got drunk, I only provided the bottle.'

Fran opened her eyes with a suddenness that hurt. 'I

distinctly remember------ ' she began as aggressively as her condition would allow. Then she distinctly remembered...

'What?' Ross looked interested, his mouth a give-away straight line as he watched her face change from a sickly shade of green to a delicate rose.