AUGHTER AND RAISED VOICES ECHOED FROM THE DINING room, where Angela’s dinner party was in full swing, but outside the night was soft and hushed as they strolled across the side lawn toward the water. Corey was amazed at how utterly relaxed and at peace she felt, walking at Spence’s side. She could not remember ever being near him when she’d felt anything but an excited, nerve-racking tension, and she vastly preferred this new feeling.

She no longer had anything to hide or regret – her grandmother’s dissertation at dinner had exposed her girlhood infatuation, laid it bare for all to see, and in the process she’d revealed it to Corey for exactly what it was – a very sweet, adolescent infatuation with an unknowing victim, not the painfully embarrassing, neurotic obsession with a selfish monster she’d feared it was. Spence’s tanned face had actually paled while he listened to her grandmother’s eloquent description of what Corey had “suffered” at his hands.

Before she had left for Newport, Corey had forced herself to view the whole awful debacle with philosophical indifference, but she was still hurt by it. Tonight, she had ended up laughing at herself in her grandmother’s dramatic tale, and then laughing at the “villian” and trying to rescue him from any more guilt than he was already being made to feel. Confession, she decided, was definitely good for the soul, even if that confession was forced out of you by your grandmother. She had finally put an end to any all attachment she ever had to Spence; all that was left was nostalgia, and her freedom gave her a sensation of sublime serenity.

He stopped beneath a big tree near the water’s edge, and Corey leaned her shoulders against, looking out at the crescent ot twinkling lights from houses in the distance, waiting for him to say whatever he’d brought her out here to say. When he didn’t seem to know how to begin, she found his uncharacteristic uncertainty a little touching and extremely amusing.

Spence gazed at her pretty profile, trying to gauge her mood. “What are you thinking about?” he asked finally.

“I’m thinking that I’ve never known you to be at a loss for words before.”

“I don’t quite know where to begin.”

She crossed her arms over her chest, lifted her brows, and tipped her head toward the water in a silent, joking suggestion. “Want some help?”

“I don’t think so,” he said warily. She laughed, and the sound of it made him laugh, and suddenly everything was the way it had always been with them, only better, richer for him because he was beginning to understand its value. He was shamefully pleased that she’d had his pictures all over her room and belatedly delighted that she’d evidently wanted him to take her to her Christmas dance from the very beginning.

Rather than start with the dance, he started with the pictures. “Did you really have my pictures all over your room?” he teased, gentling his tone so she wouldn’t think he was gloating.

“Everywhere,” she admitted, smiling at the memory; then she looked up at him and said, “you surely had to have known I had a terrible crush on you when I was tagging after you taking pictures of you.”

“I did. Only I thought it ended when you were seventeen.”

“Really? Why?”

“Why?” he uttered, a little dumbfounded that she didn’t know. “I suppose I regarded it as a clue when you asked me to help you practice kissing techniques so that you could use them on some guy named…” He searched his memory for a name. “Doug!”

Corey nodded. “Doug Johnson.”

“Right. Johnson. In fact, Diana told me Johnson had planned to take you to the Christmas dance and then had to cancel at the last minute, which was why I volunteered. I naturally assumed you had a crush on him after that, not me. How could I have possibly thought you cared about me after all that?” He waited for her to see the logic in his thinking, and when she only regarded him in amused silence, he said, “Well?”

“There was no Doug Johnson.”

“What do you mean ‘there was no Doug Johnson’?”

“I wanted you to kiss me, so I invented Doug Johnson and used him as an excuse. I wanted you to take me to the Christmas formal, so I used Doug’s name again. The only reason I dated boys was so that I’d know to act on a date with you, when you asked me.” She gave him a sideways smile, and Spence had an insane impulse to lean down and kiss it off her lips – an impulse that approached a compulsion when she shook her head at the memory of her infatuation and added softly, “It was you. It was always you. From the night I met you at the luau until a week after the dance, when you didn’t call to apologize or explain, it was only you.”

“Corey, there was another reason I forgot about the dance and went to Aspen. I’d expected my mother to come to Houston for Christmas, and I was looking forward to it more than I let anyone know. I’d been making excuses for her absence and lack of interst my whole life, and although it sounds absurd now, I actually thought that if she got to know me as an adult, then maybe we could have some sort of relationship. When she phoned at the last minute to say she’d decided to go to Paris instead, I ran out of excuses for her. I got drunk with some friends, none of whom had ‘normal families’, and we all decided to go to Aspen, where one of them had a house, and forget Christmas.”

“I understand,” Corey said. “You’d told me you were looking forward to her visit, but I’d already guessed she was more important to you than you wanted anyone to know. You were a hobby of mine, remember. There wasn’t much about you I didn’t know or try to find out.”

Flattered and touched, Spence braced his palm high on the tree trunk, longing to lean down and kiss her, but there was one more thing he needed to say. “I should have called you to explain, or at least apologize, but I let my grandmother convince me that I’d already done enough damage and that I should stay completely out of your life. She told me that you went to the dance with someone else – which she believed – and that I was not a fit companion for an innocent young girl – which she also believed. I already felt like a complete pervert for what I did to you that night by the pool, so her tirade hit me in a very vulnerable place.”

Corey saw his gaze drop to her lips and a little of her newfound serenity deserted her even before he said in a husky voice, “Now that we’ve finished the explanations, there’s only one thing left to do.”

“What’s that?” Corey asked warily.

“We have to kiss and make up. It’s traditional.”

Corey pressed further back against the tree trunk. “Why don’t we just shake hands, instead.”

He smiled solemnly and shook his head. “Don’t you know it’s bad luck not to honor the traditions of your host?”

The forgotten sweetness of the memory was nothing compared to what she felt as he laid his palm against her cheek and whispered, “A golden girl told me that one Christmas, a long time ago.” He bent his head and brushed a kiss slowly over her lips, and Corey managed to savor the moment without participating, but Spence wasn’t finished. “If you don’t kiss me back,” he coaxed, sliding his mouth over her cheek, “the tradition isn’t fulfilled. And that means very bad luck.” His tongue lazily traced the curve of her ear, spending shivers down her spine to her toes, and Corey smiled helplessly, tipping her head back a little as he traced a warm path down her neck. “Extremely bad luck,” he warned, retracing his path, and then the teasing was over. He cradled her face in his palms, his thumbs slowly caressing her cheeks, and Corey was mesmerized by the intensity in his eyes. “Have you any idea,” he said gruffly, “how much I hated Doug Johnson after that night?”

Corey tried to smile and felt the sudden, inexplicable sting of tears instead.

“Have you any idea,” he whispered as his mouth descended purposefully toward hers, “how long I’ve wanted to do this…”

Corey felt her defenses crumbling and tried to forestall him with humor. “I’m not completely sure I’m old enough.”

A sensual smile curved his lips, and she watched them form a single word: “Though,” he said, and curved her into his arms, capturing her lips in a kiss that was as rough and tender as his answer had been.

Corey told herself there was no danger in a kiss, no defeat in cooperating just a little, as she slid her hands up his hard chest and yielded to the coaxing insistence of his tongue. She was wrong. The instant she did, his arms tightened and his mouth opened over hers in a fierce, demanding kiss that assaulted her newfound serenity and made her clutch his broad shoulders for balance in a world that was beginning to spin. His tongue drove into her mouth, and with a silent cry of despair, Corey wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back.

She leaned into him and forced him to gentle the kiss by softly stroking his tongue with hers and felt the gasp of his breath as he drew her tighter to him, his arm angling over her hips to hold her pressed to his rigid thighs. She kissed him slowly, sliding her fingers over his jaw and around his nape, and he let her set the pace, his hand drifting in a slow caress over her spine and bottom, his mouth moving endlessly on hers, following her lead. And just when Corey was beginning to feel in complete control, he took it away. His fingers shoved into the hair at her nape, and he ground his lips into hers, pressing her back against the tree with his body, freeing his hands sto rush over her breasts, then slowly covering and caressing them until Corey thought she would die of the sweet torment and the longing for more.

Time ceased to exist, measured only in a series of endless, shattering kisses and arousing caresses that began slowly and built toward a crescendo; then they pulled apart. So they could begin all over again.

Corey heard herself moan when he tore his mouth from hers for the very last time. He buried his face in her neck, then he drew a long, labored breath and tightened his arms around her, holding her face against his heart.

She stayed there, her eyes closed tightly against the moment when her mind would take over and rage against the stupidity, the insanity of what she’d just done to herself, but it was already too late. Reality was setting in. She was clearly mentally ill! She had some sort of sick obsession with Spencer Addison. She had tossed away her adolescence on him, and now, all he had to do was say something sweet – and she fell into his arms like a lovesick idiot. She had never in her life felt as she had tonight except once… long ago on a summer night by the swimming pool. A tear dropped from her eye and raced down her cheek. She did not mean anything to him, and she never had…

“Corey,” he said in a roughened voice as he touched his lips to her hair. “Would you care ti explain to me why I seem to lose my mind the moment I touch you?”

Her heart did a somersault, her mind went into silent shock. For the second time tonight, she had an absurd impulse to laugh and cry at the same time. “We are both clearly insane,” she said, but overall, she felt much better than she had the moment before. She moved away from him, and he put his arm around her shoulders, walking with her back to the house.

Lost in her own thoughts, Corey scarcely noticed that he was walking her to her room until the’d turned down the hall and she saw the double doors of the Duchess Suite in front of her. She turned in front of them and looked up at him. This last half hour was the closest thing to a date they’d ever had, and she had an irreverent impulse to smile at him and say, “Thank you for a lovely evening.” Instead, she said, “Since we’ve already kissed good night, I guess there’s nothing else to do or say.”

He grinned at hre and braced his hand against the doorframe, relaxed and confident. A little too confident, she thought. “We could always do it again,” he suggested.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she lied.

“In that case, you could invite me in for a nightcap.”

“I think that’s an even worse idea,” she primly informed him.

“Liar,” he said with a grin, then he bent and gave her a hard swift kiss and opened the door. Corey walked serenely into her room, closed the door, and collapsed against it, dazed by the last half hour she’d spent in his arms. Her gaze landed on the clock on the little secretary. It was almost midnight. They’d been outside for well over an hour.