OUTSIDE, THE WORKTABLES AND EQUIPMENT HAD ALL BEEN put away, and without their presence to distract the eye, the back lawn had been restored to its normal state of manicured, semitropical splendor.

Palm trees surrounded by fragrant gardenias leaned gracefully over chaise longues at poolside, their giant fronds rustling softly in the breeze. Stately clumps of crepe myrtle dripping with blossoms added dignified splashes of light pink and white, while the pink and red asters covered themselves in exuberant glory and the hibiscus bushes flaunted exotic flowers the size of salad plates in colors ranging from tangerine to yellow to red.

Since Diana knew that men were usually enthralled by her grandfather's workshop, with its array of tools, equipment, millwork, and fine woods, she took Cole there first. He pretended to be interested in everything she showed him, but she could tell that he wasn't, so she invited him to stroll through the greenhouse and then the cutting gardens tucked into the back corners of the lawn.

When he still seemed distracted, she decided that the scene in the living room had darkened his mood far more than he'd let show. In view of some of the things that had been said, she couldn't blame him. Deciding to bring it out in the open, Diana stopped on the lawn near the pool. Leaning her shoulders against a palm's smooth, thick trunk she said simply, "I'm sorry about what was said inside. Please try to make allowances for my grandfather's age."

"I did," he said dryly.

"But you're still embarrassed," Diana surmised.

He shook his head. "I'm not embarrassed, Diana."

"Are you angry?" she asked, studying his features for a clue.

"No."

"Then what are you?"

"I'm impressed."

"By what?" Diana asked, taken aback.

"By you," he said solemnly.

She rolled her eyes in laughing disbelief. "For a man who's impressed, you've been looking awfully grim."

"Probably because it doesn't happen very often, and I'm not used to the feeling."

He was serious, Diana realized, and she was momentarily speechless with pleasure and surprise.

"By the way," he added, "that isn't my 'grim' look."

"It isn't?" she said, still glowing from the compliment. "What's your 'grim look' like?"

"I don't think you want to know."

"Oh, go ahead. Let me see it—"

Cole was so unaccustomed to being treated with teasing impertinence that it startled a shout of laughter from him, and Diana thought there was a rusty quality to it.

"You haven't asked me what about you impressed me…

She pretended to ponder that. "Well, I know it wasn't Grandpa's workshop. You called a beautiful piece of mahogany 'a board.' And I don't think you know a hybrid rose from a hibiscus either."

"You're right on both counts. But I do know a little bit about business. I realized your magazine was a success, but I had no idea you'd managed to create national personalities out of your stepmother and her parents. At the very least, that's an amazing feat!"

"I didn't create personalities for them," Diana said with a shake of her head and a wry, affectionate smile. "They were unique when I met them, and they haven't changed a bit. They were forerunners of a coming trend."

"What do you mean by that?"

"About a month after my father and stepmother were married, they took Corey and me to Long Valley, and I met my grandparents for the first time. Although I wasn't familiar with the term at the time, they were the consummate 'do-it-yourselfers.' During the day, my grandfather was a surveyor for a town with a population of about seven thousand. But he spent his evenings and weekends in his garden, where he experimented with ways to grow the biggest and best flowers and vegetables in west Texas without resorting to chemical fertilizers or insecticides.

"When he wasn't poring over seed catalogs or searching through books for new or ancient methods of controlling garden insects and diseases, he spent his time in the little workshop behind their house, where he built everything from dollhouses and scaled-down furniture for Corey, to wooden jewelry boxes and rocking chairs for my grandmother. I loved everything about my grandfather's workshop, from the wood shavings on the floor to the smell of the wood stains he used. I remember on that first visit, I stepped on a little piece of wood about an inch square lying beside his workbench. I picked it up and started to toss it into a trash can beside his workbench. He laughed and stopped me and asked me why I wanted to throw away a kiss. I was fourteen at the time and although he was only in his late fifties, he seemed very old to me. So when he described a little chunk of soft wood as a kiss, I was horribly afraid that he was old and—" With her forefinger Diana made a circular motion near her ear, a child's pantomime for crazy.

"But he wasn't," Cole ventured with a smile, enjoying her tale and the way the sun glistened in her hair and the way her eyes glowed when she spoke of the people she loved. She was part of America's aristocracy, but there was a wholesomeness and gentleness about her that had always appealed to him—now more than ever, because he realized how rare that combination really was.

"No, he wasn't crazy. He picked up a little carving knife and whittled it into a rounded triangle; then he reached on the shelf and tore off a piece of old silver foil. He wrapped it in the foil and dropped it into my palm. And there it was— a Hershey's 'kiss.' One with no calories, he told me, laughing. There was a bowl of them, I later realized, on a coffee table in the living room."

"How did your grandmother and mother fit into the picture?" Cole asked when Diana turned aside to study a large gardenia bush beside them.

She glanced at him, then returned her attention to the fragrant bush. "My mother worked as a secretary for a manufacturing company when my father met her, but she spent her free time as my grandmother did—cooking and canning and baking to her heart's content."

She snapped off a stem from the bush and turned back to him, her hands cupped around a mound of glossy, dark green leaves with one perfect blossom in the center that looked as soft and white as whipped cream.

"Go on," Cole urged, watching her lift the blossom to her nose.

"My grandmother used the fruits and vegetables that my grandfather grew, and she experimented with recipes that had been handed down in her family from mother to daughter for generations. Every recipe had a name that conjured up friendly ancestors and bygone events along with wonderful tastes and delicious smells. There was Grandma Sarah's three-bean salad and Great-grandmother Cornelia's cherry cinnamon pie. There was harvest-moon cake and wheat-threshers ham biscuits."

Ruefully, she admitted, "Until my first trip to Long Valley, I actually thought strawberries grew on trees and that 'canned goods' meant tin cans with labels on them that said Libby and Green Giant, and that the cans belonged out of sight in a pantry. You can imagine, then, how I reacted to the sight of bright yellow peaches in a glass jar with a label on it depicting a peach tree with a baby sitting beneath it on a blanket, framed in a border of peach blossoms and leaves. To me, it was more than wonderful, it was positively exotic."

He eyed her with amused fascination. "Did you really believe strawberries grew on trees?"

"Why wouldn't I?" she replied, batting her lashes in a comic imitation of a dopey femme fatale. "I thought chicken was created in a carton with plastic wrap. Actually," she admitted sheepishly, "I still prefer to think of it that way"; then she finished her tale: "I thought my grandparents' house was magical. When they came to live with us in Houston, our house began to change in the same wonderful ways, from the back lawn, which had only had a swimming pool and some palm trees when they got there, to the rooms in the house."

Finished, she lifted her hands and offered the flower to him, cradling it in her palms as if it were a priceless treasure. "It's exquisite, isn't it?" she said softly.

You're exquisite, Cole thought, and he shoved his hands into his pockets to avoid the temptation to cradle her hands in his and lift the flower to his face, and then see how her fingers would taste against his lips. Lack of control over his sexual urges had never been a problem for him. Neither had sentimentality, lack of concentration, or the urge to protect a member of the opposite sex beneath the age of sixty. Annoyed with himself for his unprecedented failings in all three of those areas in the last twenty-four hours, he said curtly, "And so you managed to create a market for their talent and philosophy. You were very clever."

She looked a little taken aback by his brusque tone, but she shook her head and her voice remained soft yet firm. Like her body, Cole decided, and glowered at the tree trunk in self-disgust for the direction of his thoughts. "I didn't need to create a market; it was already there and growing bigger each year, though no one seemed to recognize it at the time."

"What do you mean the market was there and growing?"

"We live in a time when Americans are feeling more and more rootless and more separated from each other and their natural surroundings. We live in an impersonal world; we come home to huge subdivisions filled with near-identical houses that are filled with mass-produced everything, from furniture to accessories. Nothing seems to give us a sense of timelessness, of stability, of roots, of real self-expression. People feel a desire to personalize their immediate surroundings, even though they can't personalize the world beyond. The Foster Ideal is about rediscovering the pleasure of, and depth of, one's own creativity."

"I thought women were more interested these days in discovering how high they can climb on the corporate ladder."

"We are, but unlike men, we're learning early that we can't define ourselves by our success or lack of it at work. We want more from life than that, and we have more to give than that."

Cole frowned in confusion. "Are you implying that career-oriented women make up a significant part of your magazine's readership?"

She nodded, clearly enjoying his misguided notions. "The demographics are going to surprise you. Based on our market surveys, sixty-five percent of our readers are college-educated women who have, or have had, successful careers. There's been a growing trend among American career women to postpone having children until they're in their thirties, then to take a hiatus and stay home during their children's formative years. Once they stay home, they throw themselves into raising children with the same dedication and zeal they brought to their former careers. They're high achievers, used to taking charge and making a difference. Some of them worked in creative areas, others in business and finance. They bring all that creative and organizational ability with them to their new roles, except they don't have any outlet for it—other than their homes. They start looking at ways to improve on their homes, to personalize them, and make them more functional or more beautiful. Their need for self-expression combines with a natural desire to conserve money, and presto—they discover Foster's Beautiful Living. And through us, they discover themselves."

"That's a pretty tall order for one magazine," Cole said, annoyed with himself for noticing how beautifully she spoke. And moved. And looked.

"Foster Enterprises does much more than publish a monthly magazine. We also publish coffee-table books and market a line of environment-friendly, all-natural cleaning products. We also market do-it-yourself 'kits'—those usually are created either by my grandfather or under his supervision. We started out doing seasonal television specials around the holidays on CBS, and the ratings were so high that CBS wanted to sign us to an exclusive contract for six specials a year. I turned it down because I think we're better off financially, and from an exposure standpoint, doing a weekly program and syndicating it. Our production costs are relatively low, so CBS's offer to underwrite them in return for an exclusive contract didn't appeal as much to me as it would to someone with a more costly show, such as a sitcom or even a talk show."

"It sounds like you've got it made."

"That's how it sounds, but that's not how it is. The truth is, we're under tremendous pressure all the time, not only because competitors have been springing up everywhere, trying to carve out a piece of our reputation and our profits for themselves, but because the public seems to hold us to higher standards than our competition, and we have to live up to that. The pressure is intense to constantly come up with newer and better ideas for every issue, every book, every television program than we've done before. We have to look better, be fresher, and offer more than everyone else. That was a lot easier to do before, when we were virtually the only game in town, than it is now. We've actually fired two 'spies' who were planted by competitors."

Cole stared at her in shock. "Somehow, I always associate corporate spying with the areas of electronics or defense."

"I know, so did I—until that happened. The other problem is our public image," Diana said, bringing up Dan without actually referring to him, "and keeping that intact can be a public relations nightmare, not just for me, but for all of us. We have to be careful about everything we say and do, no matter where we are or who we're with."

"All of you?" Cole repeated. "I thought you had the biggest problem in that area because you're primarily identified with the magazine."

"I gave you that impression in the living room, but it wasn't completely accurate. We're all identified with it. The thing that made Foster's Beautiful Living unique from the very beginning is that it was, and is, a family endeavor, and the public has always been attracted by that. So, unfortunately, has the press, which means we can't even disagree on some minor point when we're filming a program without later reading in some gossip column that There's trouble in the Foster paradise' or some other idiotic catchphrase.

"My mother writes a column for the magazine that's one of its most popular features. In it, she reminisces about her girlhood recollections of holidays at her grandparents' homes, the things her mother taught her, and jokes about some of her fears when she gave early parties. She tells stories about Grandma and Grandpa and Corey and me when we were young. All of us have appeared in the photo layouts from time to time, and our readership has come to feel that they know us. The public who buys our magazine, regards all of us as friends. When Corey married Spence, handmade congratulatory cards arrived by the truckload. When the twins were born, readers sent thousands of baby gifts, all handmade. We ended up featuring some of them in a baby issue. When Grandpa broke his leg, more gifts and get-well cards arrived. To the public, we have to remain one big, happy family, living the good life that we expound upon in our issues."

While he listened, Cole was reassessing the extent of her achievements. It truly bothered him that someone who'd accomplished what she had, with very little help, and not much money behind her, thought so little of her accomplishments.

Cole moved forward and braced his hand on the tree trunk above her head. "Tell me something," he said sternly. "Why do you think your mistakes are so enormous that they override your incredible success? In the living room, you downplayed all your own talent and achievements and made your successes seem like nothing more than dumb luck."

She flinched and looked away. "You don't realize how damaging my mistakes have been, or how many I've made."

"Tell me what they were and let me be the judge of that. I promise to be impartial."

Diana was glad of the opportunity to spend time with him, getting reacquainted, but she wished he weren't so insistent about this topic. With a reluctant sigh, she leaned her shoulders against the trunk and gave in. "You got the gist of it in there. I passed up some wonderful opportunities over the years because I didn't want to take a chance—I was afraid of growing too fast."

Cole gazed down at her upturned face, marveling that Diana seemed as genuine and unaffected now as she had been when she was sixteen, and almost wishing that she wasn't. This marriage of theirs was not foolproof, and he didn't want to succeed in what Penworth had failed to do— turn her into a cold cynic.

"I think," she joked, "I'm seeing your grim look right now."

"No," he replied with a half-smile. "That was my impressed look again." Before she could question him about its cause, he replied to her earlier comment. "Businesses fail all the time because someone lets their dreams outpace their financial resources. It's much wiser to err on the side of conservatism."

"I erred on the side of foolishness. The largest of my mistakes was waiting until two years ago to market our own line of gardening and crafts products. When we finally did that, they sold like we were giving them away."

"You must have had reasons for waiting, reasons that seemed sound at the time," Cole pointed out.

"I did. Basically, I was concerned about quality control and start-up and warehousing costs. When we finally launched the product line, it was a huge success, which means we lost a lot of revenue while I was dragging my feet."

"That's hindsight," Cole scoffed.

Diana refused to be patronized. Crossing her arms over her chest, she countered tartly, "Would you have waited and deliberated while all the competition was getting a head start?"

At the beginning of the discussion Cole had promised to be truthful. He kept that promise. "No," he admitted.

"There, you see? You have daring and foresight."

"No, I don't 'see.' There's one major difference between my circumstances and yours. When I started Unified Industries, I had sufficient money behind me and more available if I needed it."

She brightened, but just a little. "I did other things I wish to heaven I could undo."

"Like what?" Cole persisted, reacting to some inner need to give her honest consolation even though he knew he was prying.

"As I said in the living room, I practically gave away shares in our new company to raise money to get us started, and later to keep us going."

Cole felt a sudden desire to reach out and touch her cheek, and when he answered her, his voice was unaccustomedly gentle. "I'm amazed that at twenty-two you could talk a bank into investing in your scheme, let alone round up individual investors."

Diana shrugged. "The bank wasn't taking much of a risk, because we put this house up as collateral."

Refusing to let her denigrate her accomplishments, Cole said, "Really? Then how did you get private investors to put up their hard-earned cash on a high-risk, no-potential-profit deal?"

"Oh, that," she said with a rueful laugh. "I packed up my briefcase with official business plans and projections and called on my father's friends. They all thought we were probably going to fail, but they felt sorry for me, so they patted my head and gave me five thousand or ten thousand—figuring all along that they'd at least end up with a tax loss they could use to offset profits on their income taxes. In return for that, I gave them stock certificates in the new company." She sighed and looked away. "In short, I gave away so many pieces of our business that when they were added up, we were down to fifty percent for ourselves."

"Diana, did you have any other choice?"

"If I had dreamed how profitable and successful we'd be now—"

"I'm talking about before, when you were starting up," he said sternly. "Did you have any other way to raise the money you needed?"

She hesitated and then shook her head. "None."

"Then stop blaming yourself for not being psychic and give yourself credit for overcoming hundreds of hurdles all by yourself—hurdles that would eliminate all but the most gifted and flexible entrepreneurs!"

Diana gazed up at his stern, handsome face and realized he was completely serious. "Coming from you, that's high praise indeed."

He grinned then. "Just remember that. I can't have my wife going around belittling her accomplishments. It might reflect badly on my judgment," he joked, "and cause Unified's stock to drop."

"And Wall Street to collapse," Diana put in, her spirits lifting crazily beneath the warmth of his sudden smile.