Page 20 of The Playboy and the Widow
“If you honestly felt that way, you wouldn’t be so eager to be rid of me.”
“Don’t, Cliff,” she pleaded. She wasn’t going to be able to explain a thing with his interrupting every five seconds.
“What I can’t understand,” he said, shaking his head, “is why you’re making it out to be some great tragedy that I find you attractive.”
“But I’m not your... type,” she declared for lack of a better description. “And if we continue to see each other, it will only lead to problems for us both.”
“It seems to me that you’re jumping to conclusions.”
“I’m not,” she stated calmly.
Cliff was losing his temper now. “And as for your not being my type, don’t you think I should be the one to decide that?”
“No,” she argued. Diana could hardly believe she was telling the most devastating man she’d ever known that it would be better for them not to see each other again.
“Why not?” he shot back.
“Because.”
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Diana clamped her mouth closed. It wasn’t going to do any good to try to reason with him. He probably was so accustomed to women falling into his arms that he wasn’t sure how to react when one resisted. A few years earlier she would have been like all the others, she noted mentally.
“Diana,” he said after a calming minute. “I don’t know what’s going on in that twisted mind of yours, but I do think you’re being completely unreasonable. I like you, you like me...”
“The girls...”
“Are terrific.”
“But, Cliff, you drive a Lamborghini.”
The car bothered her! “What’s that got to do with anything?”
Diana wasn’t sure she could explain. “It makes a statement.”
“So does your Ford SUV.”
“Exactly! What I can’t understand is why a man who drives an expensive sports car is interested in seeing a thirty-year-old widow who plows through traffic in a ten-year-old bomber.”
“Bomber?”
Diana’s grin was fleeting. “That’s what the girls call the Ford.”
Cliff’s gaze drifted to the two youngsters running along the rolling surf. Their bare feet popped foam bubbles with such mindless glee that he found himself smiling at their antics.
Diana’s gaze followed his and her thoughts sobered.
“This doesn’t really have anything to do with what cars we drive, does it?”
“No,” Diana admitted softly. “Shirley warned me about you.”
“I’m not going to lie,” Cliff murmured. “Everything she said is probably true. But of all the women I’ve met, I would have thought you were one to form your own opinions.”
“If it were just me, I’d be accepting your offer so fast it would make your head spin,” she answered honestly. “But the girls think you’re the neatest thing since microwave popcorn and they’re at a vulnerable age.”
“Somehow I get the feeling that what’s bothering you isn’t any of these things. Not the car, not the girls, not the other women I date.”
He read her thoughts so well it frightened her. She clenched her hands together and nodded. “I can’t be the woman you want.”
