New Way to Fly

He nodded, accepting her words as a dismissal.

“Goodbye, Amanda,” he murmured.

“Goodbye,” Amanda said with a small sardonic lift of her beautiful mouth. “It’s certainly been interesting talking to you.”

Then she was gone, moving gracefully off through the laughing throng, conscious of his dark eyes resting on her as she walked away.

CHAPTER THREE

RAIN POUNDED against the windshield and streamed over the surface of Amanda’s small car, whipping past in gusty sprays to pool on the highway and in the ditches. Amanda gripped the wheel, frowning and squinting into the darkness, struggling to see ahead each time the wipers gave her a brief field of vision.

“Damned lousy rain,” Beverly Townsend muttered, lounging beside Amanda in the passenger seat and glaring out the window. “It’s probably fixing to flood again, like it did in the spring. Everything will be a great big ol’ mess, all over again. I hate it, Mandy. I just hate it.”

Amanda grinned at her friend’s fretful tone, distracted for a moment from the strain of driving in the storm.

“Well, I declare, Beverly Townsend,” she said in a cheerful imitation of Beverly’s warm Texas drawl, “you certainly aren’t your usual chipper self tonight, are you? Now, why on earth could that be, I wonder?”

Beverly had the grace to smile back, her teeth flashing white in the darkness. “Well, what do you expect? Here I am, a poor helpless waif thrown out of my own home, forced to thrust myself on the hospitality of a friend who doesn’t even like me enough to show the least little bit of sympathy.”

Amanda chuckled. She was always charmed by Beverly’s witty good humor, and by the warmth and sweetness that were so startling to all those people who looked on Beverly Townsend as little more than a self-absorbed beauty queen.

“Nobody’s throwing you out of your home,” Amanda pointed out reasonably. “This was entirely your own choice, Bev, coming to Austin to stay with me for a week or so to give Carolyn and Vern some time alone together.”

Beverly shrugged. “Well, sure, but really, what choice did I have, Mandy? It’s their honeymoon, for God’s sake. And since Mama absolutely refuses to go away anywhere while Cynthia’s so close to her due date, I could hardly hang around the house and make it a cozy threesome, could I, now?”

“What about Lori? Isn’t she going to be around? She lives there, too, doesn’t she?”

Beverly glanced over at her friend with the look of weary but resigned tolerance that she reserved for Amanda.

“I told you,” she began, “about twelve hundred times, Mandy, that Lori’s been renovating the old garage next to the tennis court to make a gorgeous little studio apartment for herself. It’s not quite finished but she moved in a couple days ago anyhow, just to give the newlyweds some privacy.”

“Did you tell me that?” Amanda asked blankly.

Beverly laughed, then sobered and gazed moodily out at the rain once more.

Amanda stole a sidelong glance at her friend’s discontented profile. “You know what I think? I think this mood of yours has nothing at all to do with the weather or where you’re going to be living for the next week, Bev.”

Beverly turned to glance at her quickly, then sank low in the seat and braced her blue-jeaned knees against the dashboard, hugging them gloomily.

“I know,” she said at last. “But, Mandy, it’s so strange, somehow. All those years I had so much fun playing the field, picking up guys and dropping them just for the hell of it, never really giving any of them much thought. Now, I hate to admit it, but Jeff goes away for a week on business and I can hardly stand it. A week, it seems like eternity, you know what I mean? I don’t know if I can bear to be away from the man for a whole entire week.”

Amanda gave her friend a disbelieving look. “Not even for the chance to spend a week in the city, attend two fashion shows and a gallery opening, meet some really important people and do a whole lot of early Christmas shopping?”

Beverly shook her head morosely. “Nope. Not even for that.”

“My goodness,” Amanda said seriously, although her mouth was twitching with amusement. “I guess it must be love, all right.”

Beverly glared at the other woman and punched her arm lightly. “If you’d ever been really, really in love,” she complained, “you wouldn’t laugh at my misery. You’d show a little more compassion, you coldhearted witch.”

Amanda’s face tightened briefly and she stared ahead into the driving rain.

Beverly caught the look and laid a gentle hand on Amanda’s suede coat sleeve. “Sorry, kid,” she murmured. “I guess you’ve been through it, too, haven’t you? You spent a lot of years with Edward, after all.”

“Four,” Amanda said, trying to smile. “Four years. And you don’t need to treat me like a poor girl with a broken heart, Bev. It was my idea to leave, after all.”

“I keep wondering about that, but I never wanted to pry. So there was no big fight or dustup, nothing like that? You just decided to move back to Texas and open your own business, and Edward let you go, just like that?”

“Just like that,” Amanda agreed with a sad smile. “All very civilized. He’d just bought his own store in New York, and sunk all the money he inherited into it, and he certainly wasn’t about to toss all that aside and follow me, no matter how much he cared about the relationship.”

She fell silent, gripping the wheel in gloved hands and gazing bleakly at the black flowing rain.

“And you?” Beverly prodded delicately. “Didn’t it hurt to leave him behind after all those years? Did you really want to be on your own enough to give up such a long-term relationship?”

Amanda frowned. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I thought I did, Bev. I was getting so restless, so stale and tired of everything, and I really thought I needed a change of scene, some kind of fresh challenge.”

Beverly nodded. “Absolutely. That’s the way I felt before I got really involved with my hospital work. And Jeff, of course,” she added with a faraway smile.

“Of course,” Amanda agreed dryly.

“So how do you feel about it all now? Do you wish you were back in New York, working for Edward again and socializing with all your friends?”

“Sometimes…well, I guess I do,” Amanda said, surprising herself with her response. “Sometimes I feel so lonely and out of place, and so terribly scared that my business will fail and I’ll be…”

She was silent again, regretting the sudden intimacy of the conversation. Beverly Townsend was a good friend, probably Amanda’s closest friend at the moment. But there were things about herself, fears and dreams and longings, that Amanda Walker never admitted to another soul.

Beverly didn’t notice the sudden silence. She was still much more interested in the details of her friend’s relationship. “So, do you hear from him at all?” she asked.

Amanda shook her head again. “Not often. He said that if we were going to make a break, it might as well be a clean break, but that any time I wanted to come back, he’d be waiting.”

“Well, that was real sweet,” Beverly ventured cautiously. “Wasn’t it?”

“Oh, sure,” Amanda said. “Edward always does and says exactly the right thing. Then, about a month later, a mutual friend told me he was dating one of the top models from a big-name agency.”

She swerved to avoid the lashing spray of a passing semitrailer, then pulled her little car back into the driving lane.

“It bothered you, right?” Beverly said, glancing at her friend’s still face. “Hearing he was with somebody else, it really got to you, didn’t it?”

“A little,” Amanda said, not willing to discuss the unexpected pain she’d felt when she heard about the glamourous new woman in Edward’s life.

“Maybe you’re still in love with him,” Beverly suggested comfortably. “Maybe you should go back to New York and check it out.”

“And give up everything I’m beginning to achieve here? Just admit that it was all a big mistake and go running home saying, ‘please look after me, I’m so sorry, I’ll never do it again?’”

“Yeah, I see the problem,” Beverly said slowly. “Especially since he’s not likely to move to where you are, right?”

“Not likely,” Amanda agreed bitterly. “He spent years clawing his way up through the retail garment industry in New York to the point where he could manage his own store and draw a handpicked clientele. Believe me, Edward Price is not about to throw all that away for a woman, Bev. Any woman.”

Beverly was silent a moment, her face thoughtful. “What does he look like?” she asked finally. “You know, I never did meet him, Mandy. Every time I came to New York, he was off on a buying trip to Paris or Bangkok or somewhere.”