Carolina Isle (Edenton 2)

ARIEL FELT BAD THAT SHE’D LIED TO her cousin, but she knew it was necessary. If she’d told Sara the truth, she would never have considered exchanging places. And wasn’t it true that all was fair in love and war? Ariel just hoped that her cousin would forgive her when she found out that she had done everything for love.

It had started over a year ago when Ariel was in New York with her mother on one of their twice-yearly clothes-buying trips. Ariel had to attend some boring fund-raiser with her mother and a lot of other old people who wanted to show off how much money they had.

For the first hour Ariel made small talk and listened to people tell her how quaint they found Arundel. Their tone said that they couldn’t imagine living in a place that had no food delivery, but still, it was an adorable little town. “So clean,” they said.

When her mother’s eagle eye was turned away, Ariel tipped a waiter a twenty to replace her mother-approved ginger ale with champagne. It was while she was slowly sipping her champagne (to make it last) that she saw him. Him. For Ariel, it was one of those moments when the earth stood still. Maybe the other party guests kept moving and talking, but for her, the world stopped revolving. When she saw the man walk into the room, she knew she was seeing her future. She was seeing the only man she would ever love.

R. J. Brompton. Of course she knew who he was. Sara had sent photos and newspaper clippings. But photos didn’t show what he was really like. You could feel him. Sense him. He had a presence about him, an aura, a charisma such as Ariel had never experienced. In all her trips with her mother, she had never seen anyone like R. J. Brompton.

Sara had described him in only bad terms. She said he worked her half to death, and that he had no idea that she should have a life of her own. He called her during the night and asked her where the papers on a land sale were. She would tell him she had put them in his briefcase, then he’d ask where his briefcase was. More than once, she’d had to pull on jeans and a T-shirt and go to his apartment in the middle of the night to find something or to write a letter for him. She said that as far as she could tell, he never slept.

As Ariel stood there watching him shake hands with people, now and then glancing at the blonde on his arm, she knew that someday he’d be hers. She came out of her trance to look into the eyes of the woman with him. She was glaring at Ariel in a way meant to tell her to back off, that R.J. belonged to her. Ariel just smiled. She knew from Sara that R.J. changed women more often than she changed shoes. Next week there would be another mindless blonde—or a redhead, whatever—looking up at him with adoring eyes.

For the whole party, Ariel stayed within viewing distance of R.J. Each time he glanced in her direction, she turned away, as though she’d been looking at someone behind him. But he wasn’t fooled. After an hour, he walked toward her. And though she pretended she didn’t see him, her heart was pounding so hard she was afraid it would leap out of her chest. If she hadn’t had so much inside information from Sara, she would have turned and smiled at R.J. But she knew he was used to that. Sara said that she couldn’

t see R.J.’s attraction to women, but it was there. She’d told many stories about women making fools of themselves over him. Sara said she’d had to usher each of them out, some of them crying, and later, she always sent them flowers and a nice note that essentially said thanks but no thanks.

Ariel knew better than to rush forward and introduce herself. Instead, she ignored him completely. Sort of. If a person can stalk someone through a three-hour party and still ignore him, that’s what Ariel did. She chatted happily with a bunch of old, rich men who kept trying to look down the front of her dress, while she kept an eye on R.J. The second he moved away from whomever he was talking to, she moved away from him. They were playing cat and mouse—and liking it. Toward the end of the party she felt him bearing down on her and she knew she wouldn’t be able to escape. She also knew that she’d have only one chance to make a first impression. But she didn’t know what he liked. Sweet and simpering? Or cool but smoldering, like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief? For him, Ariel would be whatever he wanted. But first she had to find out what would make him want her for more than his usual two weeks.

As he bore down on Ariel, she knew she had to stop him. But how? He was known in the business world as a man who got what he wanted. He’d been called ruthless by more than one source.

Frantically, Ariel looked about the party. Should she go to the ladies’ room? But she knew he’d be there when she got out, then that first moment would take place whether she was ready or not. When she saw her mother, she smiled. Ruthless was too mild a word to describe her mother. Knowing that R.J. was watching her, Ariel glided across the room in a manner she hoped was part beauty queen, part seductress, and all cool beauty. When she reached her mother, all she had to do was whisper a few words and she knew that her mother would keep R.J. away from her better than a pack of wolves could.

Ariel was right.

Just as she entered the ladies’ room, she glanced back to see her mother confronting Mr. R. J. Brompton. R.J. looked confused, so Ariel knew she’d won. When she left the restroom fifteen minutes later, R.J. had left the party. Had she missed her one and only chance? No, she had more confidence in herself than that. Ariel smiled the rest of the evening because she had found what she wanted to do with her life: She wanted to marry and raise a family with her cousin’s boss.

Life changed after that night as Ariel began planning how to go about getting what she wanted most in the world. First, she had to know her subject, so she went to the library and started researching, spending months reading, cutting out articles, memorizing, and writing her cousin hundreds of letters. The more she wrote, the more Sara wrote back, and Ariel encouraged her cousin to talk about her job and her boss. Ariel would have e-mailed her cousin daily except that her mother didn’t believe in the Internet. Ariel thought that her mother feared that her daughter would find out that men and women got naked and had sex and enjoyed it. She was determined to keep Ariel a virgin in both mind and body in anticipation of her wedding night with David—a night Ariel’s mother and David’s mother had been planning since the babies were born two weeks apart.

As for David, as always, he was Ariel’s beast of burden. Since he had contact with the outside world, she had him look up R.J. on the Internet and give her the hundred and fifty pages he printed out. He had daily news flashes about R.J. e-mailed to him, and he gave Ariel copies.

“The media is more interested in his women than they are in what he does for a living,” David said, looking at a photo of R.J. “You wouldn’t think that a man that old and ugly would be able to get all those babes.”

Ariel snatched the photo out of his hand. “He’s only forty-two and he is far from ugly,” she said, glaring at David.

“Forty-two is old enough to be our father, so—”

“For your information, you and I do not have a joint parent. Anyway, he would have had to be a teenager when he conceived two twenty-four-year-olds like us.”

“Conceived,” David said, smiling. “What a nice word.” He was lounging on her bed, twirling her stuffed duck-billed platypus around his finger. She took it away from him. He’d been back in Arundel since graduating from college two years ago, but he didn’t seem in any danger of getting a job. Against his mother’s protests, he’d studied horticulture. His mother had spent days with Ariel’s mother drinking endless cups of tea while she cried that her beloved son was learning to be a farmer. “Why couldn’t he be a doctor or a lawyer? Why a farmer?” she whined. Ariel’s opinion was that, with David’s money, what did it matter what he studied?

“Don’t you have something to do?” she asked, but she knew their mothers had set an obligatory time that they had to spend together. If they missed it, their lives would be made miserable. David and she had made a silent agreement to give them what they wanted, which is why he was now lounging on her bed and nearly tearing the ear off her toy armadillo.

“We could go skinny-dipping in the creek,” he said.

“Didn’t I hear that you did that two weeks ago with one of the girls who lives by the mill?” The old cotton processing plant hadn’t been used in forty years, but it still marked the different parts of town. The tiny houses that had been built for the millworkers were now protected by historical covenants, but that didn’t change the fact of where they were.

“Jealous?”

“Of what?” she said as she read through the latest news on R.J. Ariel looked at David. He was stretched across her bed, all long, lean, masculine energy, and she thought that Sara would probably like him. For all of Sara’s sarcasm and acting as though she was a tough girl, Ariel thought she was pretty soft. Yes, she thought, Sara and David might get along splendidly.

“Mom wants me to ask you to the dance next Saturday. Shall we do the usual?”

The “usual” was that he’d ask some other girl and Ariel would be his cover. Actually, for the past six months David had been dating just one girl and Ariel was beginning to think he was serious about her. Her name was Britney and she was from the worst side of town that anyone could be from. Her father drove a truck around the U.S. and her mother cleaned people’s houses. If David’s mother found out about her, she’d probably put herself in the hospital with a panic attack—and stay there until David agreed to give up the girl. He hadn’t said so, but Ariel was beginning to think that the real reason David was still in town and hadn’t taken a job in another state was because of Britney.

He rolled onto his stomach and looked at her. “So what is it with you and this guy Brompton?”

“I’m going to marry him.” David and she had few secrets from each other. They were in prison together, so why shouldn’t they be friends?