“I should give you more time. God, you’re still in high school.”

“Only for a few more months.” Her heart beat wildly with anticipation as she lifted her head. “I’m not a child, Peter.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I know what I want. I’ve always known.”

He believed her. And he, also, knew what he wanted. Had always known. That, too, he mused, they had in common.

“Still, I told myself I would wait.” He brought her hands to his lips, watched her eyes. “Another year, at least.”

She knew this was what she had dreamed of, had waited for. “I don’t want you to wait,” she whispered. “I love you, Peter.”

“I love you, Laura. Too much to wait even another hour, much less another year.”

He eased her down onto the padded bench. Her hands trembled. With all her heart she absorbed every aspect of the moment. The sound of music in the distance that carried over the clear night air in quiet notes. The scent of night-blooming jasmine and hints of the sea. The way the shadows and lights played through the sheltering lattice.

He got down on one knee, as she’d known he would. His face was so beautiful in the delicate, dreamy light, it broke her heart. Her eyes were swimming with tears when he took a small black-velvet box from his pocket, opened it. The tears made the light that glinted off the diamond refract into rainbows.

“Will you marry me, Laura?”

She knew what every woman felt at this one shining moment of her life. And held out her hand. “Yes.”

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Twelve years later

When a woman turned thirty, Laura supposed, it was a time for reflection, for taking stock, for not only shuddering because middle age was certainly creeping closer and closer around that blind corner, but for looking back over her accomplishments.

She was trying to.

But the fact was, when she awoke that morning in January on her thirtieth birthday to gray skies and unrelenting rain, the weather perfectly mirrored her mood.

She was thirty years old and divorced. She had lost the lion’s share of her personal wealth through her own naïveté and was struggling mightily to fulfill her responsibilities to her family home, raise two daughters alone, hold down two part-time jobs—neither of which she had prepared herself for—and still be a Templeton.

Crowding the minus side was the failure to hold her marriage together, the personal and somewhat embarrassing fact that she had slept with only one man in her life, worry that her children were being penalized by her lack, and fear that the house of cards she was rebuilding so carefully would tumble at the first brisk wind.

Her life—the unrelenting reality of it—bore little resemblance to the one she had dreamed of. Was it any wonder she wanted to huddle in bed and pull the covers over her head?