“Are you sorry I brought you down here with me?” Amanda asked.
“Shoot, no,” Dolly declared, grinning broadly. “I wouldn’t miss this for nothing.”
While Dolly selected clothing from the closet, Amanda slid out of bed. Even though the house was filled to capacity with out of town guests and relatives, Constance had given Amanda a comfortable room on the second floor.
Amanda walked to the window, her bare feet silent on the carpet. Outside stretched the mansion’s rear lawn—thick grass, shrubs, flower gardens, a gazebo and towering palm trees.
“My, it’s pretty here,” Dolly said, joining her at the window. “One of the cooks told me it don’t hardly ever rain down here. Wouldn’t mind living in a place like this.”
Amanda smiled. “What else did the cook tell you?”
“Oh, you know, just talk,” she answered. “Mostly about Mr. Nick.”
“Nick?” Amanda’s breath caught. She forced herself to look unconcerned, hoping Dolly hadn’t noticed. “What about Nick?”
The young woman grinned dreamily. “How handsome he is. Lordy, he’s a looker, according to all the maids. And just as nice as the day is long. Good to his mama, generous with the staff.”
Amanda’s heart lurched. She wasn’t surprised to hear any of those things about him.
“I’m plum crazy about him already, and I haven’t even laid eyes on him yet.” Dolly grinned. “’Course, that’s nothing you don’t already know, I’m sure, seeing as how you’ve been friends with him for so long.”
“Actually, I haven’t seen Nick in years,” Amanda said.
Ten years. Since that night in the snow…
“Oh, really? Well, how come?” the maid asked. “I thought your families had been friends since way back.”
Dolly had come to work for the Van Pattons only a year ago, so she didn’t know all the family history. Surprising, given how the servants liked to talk.
“That’s just the way things worked out,” Amanda said, and turned away.
“Now, if you don’t mind me saying so, Miz Amanda, there’s a story here you’re not telling,” Dolly said.
Amanda smiled. Dolly was so intuitive she seldom got away with anything around her. She could have simply said that she didn’t want to talk about it, and the maid would have respected her privacy—and remembered her place. But since Dolly had come to the Van Patton household, Amanda found she was more comfortable talking to her than her cousins, aunt or friends.
So telling her now what had happened ten years ago might be just what she needed to put it in perspective, Amanda decided. She’d have to face Nick over the next few days. Perhaps this would help her prepare—and keep her from making a fool of herself.
“It was the autumn I turned fourteen,” Amanda said. “Only six months before that I’d been shipped off to the Van Patton home by my mother, who could no longer care for me after my father’s death.”
She didn’t need to tell Dolly that she’d been born into a distant, poorly regarded branch of the Van Patton family, or that Uncle Philip and Aunt Veronica had agreed to take her in. Amanda was quite certain the servants had already told that part of the story.
“It was a difficult adjustment for me,” Amanda said, but that didn’t begin to describe the problems she’d struggled with.
Etiquette, table manners, conducting herself with proper decorum. Living up to her aunt and uncle’s expectations. Living down her past.
Everything had been uncomfortable. The opulence of their home, the servants, the family meals.
“On top of that,” Amanda said, “I’d suffered through a growing spurt and shot up five inches. I changed, matured. I had long, ungainly arms and legs I didn’t know quite what to do with. Nothing I wore seemed to fit right.”
“Lordy-me, Miz Amanda, do I remember those days!” Dolly commiserated, shaking her head. “Bosoms and hipbones suddenly poking out. The monthly misery. Being angry and sad and happy all at the same time. And nobody understanding.”
Amanda laughed softly. “I suffered no more than any other young girl blossoming into a young woman. But it seemed worse back then, on top of everything else.”
“So what happened between you and Mr. Nick?”
“We vacationed near Tahoe with the Hastingses. They were strangers to me. The twins were quite young then, but my cousin Rachel was sixteen, Daphne seventeen, both beautiful young women at ease with everything and everybody around them.”
Dolly raised a brow. “Including Mr. Nick?”
She nodded. “Including Nick.”
He’d been nineteen that autumn. The most handsome young man Amanda had laid eyes on in her life. She’d spent the whole holiday too addle-brained to think of anything to say to him, and too tongue-tied to speak even if she could have thought of something to say.
Until that night…
Amanda still remembered how warm it had been, despite the snow that blanketed the ground. A full moon illuminated the forest around the magnificent mountain home the Van Pattons referred to as a cabin.
“It was late. Daphne and Rachel slipped outside and I went with them. We met Nick and two other young men from the neighborhood. It was all quite innocent. A playful snowball fight broke out.”
Amid squeals and laughter, the six of them had scattered into the woods, scooping up the cold snow, hurling it at each other as they darted among the trees. One of the young men had picked up Daphne and tossed her into a snowbank. Another had chased Rachel, threatening the same.
“Then, somehow, I found myself alone with Nick. I threw a snowball at him. He dodged it easily and charged right at me.”
Quick as a wink, he’d swept her feet from under her and sent her crashing toward the ground. But at the last instant he’d caught her, kept her from falling. He’d pulled her upright and held her by both arms as she gripped his sleeves.
Moonlight had shimmered through the pines, casting beams across his face as they stood staring at each other. Breathless, Amanda had marveled at his strength—the strength of a man. Had marveled at his quickness. His agility. His masculinity.
He’d knocked her to the ground, but he’d saved her from the fall just as effortlessly. In that instant Nick Hastings had taught her how a man should treat a woman. With tempered strength, compassion, gentleness.
At once, her arms and legs had seemed to fit her body, and she knew why she’d been saddled with the womanly curves she’d found so uncomfortable. Suddenly, Amanda had been at home in her body, glad for the first time that she was a young woman. Understanding, too, that Nick was a young man.
“The next thing I knew, I was in his arms,” Amanda said, looking out the window at the yard, but seeing that snowy forest instead.
They’d
