Since he had been promoted in the Templeton organization and transferred to the California branch, he had courted her in a fashion designed to win her romantic heart.

There had been roses delivered in glossy white boxes, quiet dinners at restaurants with flickering candlelight. Endless conversations about art and literature—and silent looks that said so much more than words.

They had taken walks in the garden in the moonlight, long drives along the coast.

Her fall into love had not taken long, yet it had been a gentle tumble with no scrapes or bruises. Very much, she thought, like sliding slowly down a silk-lined tunnel into waiting arms.

Perhaps, at twenty-seven, he was a bit older than her parents might have liked, and she a bit younger. But he was so flawless, so perfect, Laura couldn’t see how the years could matter. No boy of her own age had Peter Ridgeway’s polish, his knowledge, or his quiet patience.

And she was so much in love.

He had hinted at marriage, gently. She understood that this was to give her time to consider. If only she knew how to let him know she had already considered, already decided he was the man she would spend her life with.

But a man like Peter, Laura thought, needed to be the one to make the moves, the decisions.

There was time, she assured herself. All the time in the world. And tonight, at the party to celebrate her eighteenth birthday, he would be there. She would dance with him. And in the pale blue dress she’d chosen because it matched his eyes, she would feel like a princess. More, she would feel like a woman.

She dressed slowly, wanting to savor every moment of preparation. It was all going to be different now, she thought. Her room had been the same when she’d opened her eyes that morning. The walls were still papered with those tiny pink rosebuds that had grown there for so many years. The winter sunlight still tilted through her windows, filtering through lacy curtains as it had done on so many other January mornings.

But everything was different. Because she was different.

She studied her room with a woman’s eyes now. She appreciated the elegant lines of the mahogany bureau, the glossy Chippendale that had been her grandmother’s. She touched the pretty silver grooming set, a birthday gift from Margo, studied the colorful, frivolous perfume bottles she’d begun to collect in adolescence.

There was the bed she had slept in, dreamed in, since childhood—the high four-poster, again Chippendale, with its fanciful canopy of Breton lace. The terrace doors that led to her balcony were open, to invite the sounds and scents of evening inside. The window seat where she could curl up and dream about the cliffs was cozy with pillows.