Page 58 of The Playboy and the Widow
“You haven’t even cheatedwithme yet.”
Her soft laugh was like a refreshing sea mist on a hot, humid afternoon. Cliff savored the sweet musical cadence of her voice.
It struck him then, struck him hard.
He was in love with Diana. No wonder he’d reacted like a lunatic when Joan had told him her mother was out with an old high-school flame. He’d been a blind fool not to acknowledge his feelings before now. He’d been attracted to her physically almost from the first, and the pull had been so strong that sharing a bed with her had been the only thing on his mind. Her reaction to that idea had left him reeling for days. She wanted more, demanded more. At the time he hadn’t learned that the physical response she evoked in him only skimmed the surface of his feelings for her.
“I can’t tell you how boring tonight was,” Diana went on. “Dan doesn’t like women who wear Levi’s. Can you believe that, in this day and age? I spent the entire evening listening to his likes and dislikes, and I’m telling you—”
“Diana,” Cliff interrupted her.
“Yes?”
The need to say it burned on his tongue, but he held back. A man didn’t tell a woman he loved her over the phone. “Nothing.”
The line went completely silent for a moment. “I’m not seeing him again. I made that perfectly clear to Dan tonight.” She could deal with her mother’s disappointment more readily than she could handle another date with a fuddy-duddy thirty-year-old.
“Don’t let me stand in your way,” Cliff returned almost flippantly. He was still shaking with the realization that he loved Diana. When a man cared this deeply for a woman, he shouldn’t need those kinds of reassurances.
Suddenly angry, Diana frowned at the receiver. “That’s a rotten thing to say.”
“What is?”
“Oh, don’t play stupid with me, Cliff Howard. I hadn’t planned on seeing Dan again, but since you have no objection, then fine.”
He could feel the heat of her anger a thousand miles away. Her words were hurled at him with the vehemence of a hand grenade. “What’s made you so mad?”
“You. Do I honestly mean so little to you?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“That... that last statement of yours about my dating Dan, as though you couldn’t care less and...”
“I couldn’t care less,” he echoed, and feigned a yawn.
“Fine, then.”
Cliff couldn’t so much as hear her breathe. It was as though they’d been caught up in a vacuum, both struggling to find an escape, but discovering they were trapped.
She’d do it, too. Diana would go out with this clown again just to spite him. Women! He’d made a major concession on her behalf, and she didn’t have the good sense to appreciate it. “Okay, you want me to say don’t go out with Dan... then I’m saying it.”
It was exactly what Diana had needed to hear five minutes before. Unfortunately his admission had come too late. “You’ve got no claim on me. I can see anyone I please, and you...”
“The hell I don’t have a claim on you.”
“The hell you do!”
“I love you,” he shouted. “That must give me some rights.”
“You don’t need to shout it at me!”
“How else am I supposed to get you to listen?”
“I... I don’t know.” If she had felt like crying before, it was nothing compared to what she was experiencing now. “You honestly love me?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“What’s wrong now?” True, he hadn’t planned on telling her like this, but he expected some kind of reaction from her. What he’d honestly hoped she’d do was to burst into tears and tell him she’d been crazy about him from that first night when he’d repaired her sink.
“Why did you tell me something like this when I’m a thousand miles away?”
