AUREN HAD NEVER KNOWN A MORE GLORIOUS DAY than this. In the two hours since they sailed away from the Cove, a warm comradery had sprung up between them—a companionship that was made up of spontaneous comments and shared laughter, punctuated with long relaxed silences.

The brilliant blue sky was decorated with puffy white clouds, and the wind caught the sail, sending the boat shooting soundlessly through the water. She watched a sea gull screeching overhead, then glanced at Nick, who was seated at the tiller, facing her. He smiled and Lauren smiled back, then she lifted her face to the sky again, basking in the sun's golden warmth and in the knowledge that Nick's lazy, admiring gaze was on her.

"We could drop anchor here and do some sunbathing and some fishing. Would you like that?" Nick said.

"I'd love it." Lauren watched him roll to his feet and begin taking in the sail.

"We should get some bass and blue gill for our dinner," he said a few minutes later as he rigged two fishing poles. "There's great salmon fishing here, but we'd need downriggers, and we'd have to troll."

Lauren had fished with her father many times from the banks of Missouri's verdant creeks and rivers, but she'd never fished from a boat. She didn't have the faintest idea what a downrigger was or what trolling was either, but intended to find out. If the man she loved liked to fish from boats, she would learn to like it too.

"I've got one," Nick called a half hour later as his line played out with a whir.

Lauren dropped her rod and went racing toward his end of the boat, unthinkingly shouting directions: "Set the hook! Keep your rod tip up. Don't let the line go slack. He's running—loosen the drag."

"Lord, are you bossy!" Nick grinned, and she realized with a rueful smile that he was handling the fish with expertise. A few minutes later he leaned over the side of the boat and scooped the big perch into a long-handled net. Like a proud little boy who was showing off his trophy to someone special, Nick held up his flapping fish for Lauren to properly admire. "Well, what do you think?"

One look at that boyish expression on his ruggedly chiseled features, and the love that had budded inside Lauren burst into full bloom. You're wonderful, she thought. "He's wonderful," she said.

And in that outwardly casual moment, Lauren made the most momentous decision of her life. Nick already owned her heart; tonight it was right that he have her body too.

The sun was setting in a blaze of crimson when Nick let out the sail and they started back to the Cove. Lauren again felt his gaze on her as he sat at the tiller, facing her in the waning light. It was getting chilly, and she drew her legs up against her chest, wrapping her arms around them. The question of how they were going to spend the night had been completely resolved in her mind, but it bothered her that she was about to take such an irrevocable step with a man whom she adored, but about whom she knew so very little.

"What are you thinking about?" Nick asked quietly.

"I was thinking that I know very little about you."

"What would you like to know?"

It was the opening Lauren desperately wanted. "Well, for a start, how do you happen to know Tracy Middleton and the crowd at her party?"

As if he was delaying his answer, Nick took a cigarette from the package in his pocket and put it between his lips. He lit a match and cupped his hands over the flame, lighting it. "Tracy and I grew up next door to each other," he said, extinguishing the match with a deft shake of his wrist. "Near where Tony's restaurant is now."

Lauren was astounded. Tony's restaurant was in what was today a fashionably renovated downtown neighborhood. But fifteen or twenty years ago, when Nick and Tracy were growing up there, it couldn't have been very nice at all.

Nick watched the play of emotions across her features and apparently guessed the direction of her thoughts. "Tracy married George, who is nearly twice her age, in order to escape from the old neighborhood."

Cautiously, Lauren approached the topic that Nick had avoided earlier and that interested her the most. "Nick, you said your father died when you were four, and that your grandparents raised you. But what happened to your mother?"

"Nothing happened to her. She went back to live with her parents the day after my father's funeral."

Oddly, it was his complete indifference that alerted Lauren and made her study him sharply. His handsome face was composed, a neutral mask. Too composed, too unemotional, she thought. She didn't want to pry, but she was falling in love with this compelling, enigmatic, passionate man, and she desperately needed to understand him. Hesitantly she said, "Your mother didn't take you with her?"

The curtness of Nick's tone warned her that he was not pleased with the direction of the conversation, but he answered, "My mother was a wealthy, pampered Grosse Pointe debutante who met my father when he went to her family's house to repair some electrical wiring. Six weeks later she jilted her bland but wealthy fiancé, and she married my proud but penniless father instead. Apparently she regretted it almost immediately. My father insisted that she live on what he could make, and she hated him for that. Even after his business was doing better, she despised her life, and she despised him."

"Then why didn't she leave him?"

"According to my grandfather," Nick responded dryly, "there was one area where she found my father irresistible."

"Do you resemble your father?" Lauren asked impulsively.

"Almost exactly, I'm told. Why?"

"No reason," Lauren said. But she had a rueful feeling that she understood exactly how irresistible Nick's father must have been to his mother. "Go on with the story, please."

"There isn't much else to tell. The day after my father's funeral, she announced that she wanted to forget the squalid life she'd led, and she moved back to her parents' house in Grosse Pointe. Apparently I was part of what she wanted to forget, because she left me behind with my grandparents. Three months later she married her former fiancé and within a year she had another son—my half brother."

"But she did come to visit you, didn't she?"

"No."

Lauren was horrified at the idea of a mother abandoning her child and then living in luxury only a few miles away from him. Grosse Pointe was where the Whitworths lived, too, and it wasn't far from the neighborhood where Nick had grown up. "You mean you never saw her again after that?"

"I saw her occasionally, but only accidentally. One night she pulled into the gas station where I was working."

"What did she say?" Lauren breathed.

"She told me to check the oil," Nick replied imperturbably.

Despite his outward attitude of total indifference, Lauren couldn't believe that as a younger man he'd been so invulnerable. Surely having his own mother treat him as if he didn't exist must have hurt him terribly. "Is that all she said?" she asked tightly.

Unaware that Lauren was not sharing his ironic humor in the story, he said, "No—I think she asked me to check the air in her tires too."

Lauren had kept her voice neutral, but inwardly she felt ill. Tears stung her eyes, and she turned her face up to the purpling sky to hide them, pretending to watch the lacy clouds drifting over the moon.

"Lauren?" His voice sounded curt.

"Hmmmm?" she asked, staring steadfastly at the moon.

Leaning forward, he caught her chin and turned her face toward his. He looked at her brimming eyes in stunned disbelief. "You're crying!" he said incredulously.

Lauren waved a dismissing hand at him. "Don't pay any attention to that—I cry at movies too."

Nick burst out laughing and pulled her onto his lap. Lauren felt strangely maternal as she put her arm around him and soothingly stroked his thick dark hair. "I suppose," she said in a shaky voice, "that when you were growing up, your brother got all sorts of things that you could only dream of having. New cars and everything."

Tipping her chin up, he smiled into her somber blue eyes. "I had wonderful grandparents, and I promise you that I don't have any emotional scars from what happened with my mother."

"Of course you do—anyone would! She walked out on you, then practically before your eyes lavished her attention on her next son…"

"Stop it," he teased, "or you'll have me in tears."

With quiet gravity Lauren said, "I was crying for the boy you were then, not for the man you are now. Despite everything that happened—no, because of it—you became a strong, independent man. Actually, the one to pity is your half brother."

Nick chuckled. "You're right—he's an ass."

Lauren ignored his humor. "What I meant was that you've succeeded on your own, without wealthy parents to help you. That makes you a bigger man than your half brother."

"Is that why I'm bigger?" he joked. "I always thought it was in my genes. You see, my father and grandfather were both tall…"

"Nick, I'm trying to be serious!"

"Sorry."

"When you were young, you must have dreamed of becoming as rich and successful as your mother's husband and her son."

"Richer," Nick confirmed. "And more successful."

"So you went to college and got your engineering degree," Lauren concluded. "Then what did you do?"

"I wanted to start my own business, but I didn't have enough money."

"That's a shame," Lauren said sympathetically.

"That's also enough of my life history for now," he finished evasively. "We're almost home."