WHEN COLE WALKED INTO THE FORMAL DINING ROOM beside Diana, he assumed from what he saw that her family had decided to try to pretend Diana's sudden marriage was a reason for celebration instead of homicide.

A large bowl of yellow roses in the center of the dining room table was flanked by candelabra aglow with tapers; the table was laid with formal china and gleaming silver flatware. A large china platter contained succulent slices of roasted duck breast, a large plate was piled high with fluffy buttermilk biscuits, and two serving bowls held new potatoes roasted with olive oil and rosemary, and steamed young asparagus.

The ladies made gallant attempts to smile at him, and even Grandpa managed a polite nod as he took his place at the head of the table and indicated Cole should take the seat at his right. Diana's grandmother sat on her husband's left, directly across from Cole, but when Diana started around the table to sit beside Cole, Gram said, "Corey, dear, why don't you sit next to Mr. Harrison and let Spence sit next to me so we can all have a chance to get to know each other."

Mrs. Foster took her place at the foot of the table and Diana sat between her mother and Spence. Cole saw Mrs. Foster register confusion at the peculiar emphasis on an even more peculiar seating arrangement, but one glance at the lineup Gram had neatly arranged showed him that Gram had managed to put him squarely in the "hot seat." Grandpa was on his left, Gram and Addison were directly across from him, Corey was on his right, and Diana—his only ally—was well removed.

Nothing could have made Cole feel like a bigger hypocrite than thanking an imaginary God he didn't believe in for things He hadn't accomplished in the first place, and then compounding the idiocy by asking for favors He had neither the power—or perhaps the inclination—to grant. Hypocrisy was not one of Cole's many faults, and so he bent his head less than an inch and studied the hand-embroidered yellow rose on his napkin while he waited for the official inquisition to begin.

Henry Britton was not a man given to procrastination. He finished the prayer and said, "Amen. Cole, what are your plans?"

Before Cole could phrase an answer, Diana looked squarely at Corey and said, "Corey's dying to hear about the wedding, and I made her wait until now, when I could tell all of you at once."

Corey unhesitatingly picked up her cue. "Let's hear about the wedding first, Grandpa. After we catch up on the present, Cole and Diana can tell us all about the future." To Cole she added, "Will that be all right?"

In those few moments, Cole arrived at several meaningful conclusions: Gram was not, as he had earlier supposed, merely elderly, outspoken, and endearingly eccentric, she was elderly, outspoken, possibly eccentric, and probably wily as hell.

Corey was an unswerving ally of Diana's, and possibly neutral where he was concerned, while Diana—Diana with her lovely features and soft voice—was skilled enough in diplomacy to be a tremendous asset at any table, be it dinner table or boardroom table.

He watched her give an enthusiastic accounting of an abrupt, unromantic wedding she barely remembered and flavor it with the sort of details guaranteed to interest both sexes.

"We left the hotel in Cole's limousine and went to the airport. Cole's plane is a Gulfstream, Grandpa, and much larger than a little Learjet. You could add it to the model airplane mobile you've designed for boys' bedrooms. Anyway, there was a magnum of champagne in a cooler when we got on board, and one of the pilots was already in the cockpit doing—whatever pilots do before the plane takes off," she said, dismissing the preflight ritual with a wave of her graceful fingertips. "A few minutes later, the other pilot, whose name is Jerry Wade, arrived. Oh, and, Gram—" she added, turning to include that lady in the conversation, who had been frowning intently at Cole until then, "in the dark, he's a dead ringer for your favorite movie star! I told him he has to drop by and visit you some evening."

Fascinated by the way that remark pulled Rose Britton's attention away from him, Cole waited to discover who her favorite movie star was. "He does! Really?" Grandma said with a mixture of doubt and delight. "He looks like Clint Eastwood?"

"Clint Eastwood is practically bald," Grandpa put in irritably, "and he whispers when he talks!"

Corey leaned sideways and answered Cole's unspoken question as she handed him the platter of asparagus, "Gram is crazy about Eastwood, and it makes Grandpa jealous. It's so cute."

"Mom, you'd love what Cole has done to the inside of the plane. You feel as if you're walking into a beautiful living room, furnished in platinum leather, with touches of brass and gold. There were two curving sofas that faced each other, with an antique coffee table between them, a matching buffet with brass hinges, and several chairs."

She'd neatly captured her artistic family's attention, and as Cole listened to her colorful descriptions of everything from the Waterford crystal lamps to the oriental carpet in the plane's main cabin, he made two more interesting observations about Diana: first, she had an indisputable talent for using words to create a vivid picture, and second, she was not mentioning the plane's second-most important feature—its bedroom.

In his mind, he could still see her startling beauty as she lay across the bed's gleaming silver satin comforter, propped up on an elbow, draped in a vivid purple silk gown that provided him with an erotic glimpse of her full breasts above her bodice. Her face had been turned up to his, inviting his kiss, but as he'd bent over the bed, he'd hesitated. Cold reason and hard logic went to battle against his desire, and they won out over everything else, just as they always did with Cole. Regretfully but resolutely, he'd whispered, "No"; then he'd started to draw back.

Her hand lifted, sliding over his shoulder and behind his nape, her fingers gliding into the short hair above his open shirt collar, and he'd looked into eyes as green as wet jade and as vulnerable as a hurt child's. "No," he repeated, but he heard the hesitation and regret in his voice. So had Diana.

Diana switched to a description of the plane's cockpit, and he wondered whether she'd not mentioned the bedroom out of delicacy, embarrassment, or actual lack of memory. It was hard to believe she could remember that the interior of the plane was upholstered in pale gray leather and forget that one-third of the plane's cabin was a bedroom. On the other hand, she hadn't seen the bedroom until after they were married… after the stress of a ceremony in a garish, neon-lit chapel, a stop at a casino, and more champagne provided by him to eliminate the stress. She'd forgotten much about the wedding ceremony and the casino; Cole supposed it was equally possible she'd forgotten about the time they'd spent in the plane's bedroom.

Diana paused in her story to serve herself some of the roasted duck that had just been passed to her, and Diana's grandmother seized the opportunity to proceed where her husband had left off: "Tell us about yourself, Mr. Harrison," she said.

"Please call me Cole, Mrs. Britton," he said politely.

"Tell us about yourself, Cole," she corrected, though he noticed she did not suggest he call her by anything other than Mrs. Britton.

Cole deliberately referred to his present, not his past. "I live in Dallas, but I travel a great deal on business. In fact, I'm gone about two weeks out of every four."

She dismissed that, peered at him intently above the rim of her glasses, and bluntly inquired, "Do you go to church on Sunday?"

"No, I do not," he informed her without hesitation or apology.

A disappointed look creased her brows, but she persevered. "I see. Well, then, what about your family?"

"They don't go to church either," he retorted with cool finality.

She looked completely taken aback. "I was asking about your family, not whether they went to church." She broke off a small piece of buttermilk biscuit and buttered it. "Won't you tell us a little about your background?" she invited quietly. "Tell us about where you're from and about your family."

The suggestion that he do so was so impossible, so abhorrent that Cole stalled for time by taking a bite of his salad while he glanced at the people gathered around the table—nice people who believed there was nothing unusual about sharing Sunday dinner or sitting at a gleaming wood table or having knives and forks that matched or a carpet beneath their feet instead of filth.

He glanced at Diana, who looked as fresh and perfect as an American Beauty Rose, at Addison, who'd never done anything more "demeaning" than lose a tennis game at the country club, and at Mary Foster, who subtly managed to exemplify dignity and grace and unaffected kindness.

On his left, Diana's grandfather smelled of fresh soap and Old Spice, instead of sweat. Across from him, Diana's grandmother gazed at him with alert, hazel eyes, her brows slightly raised in hopeful expectation, her face set off by wavy, white hair cropped jauntily and sensibly short, and gold wire-rimmed glasses that looked very nice on her. She looked proper and decent.

Cole would have found it easier and kinder to describe to her the lurid details of his most erotic sexual encounter than to tell her the truth about his early life and origins. Rather than spoil her illusions about her temporary grandson-in-law, he answered the questions with the same evasions that always served his purpose: "I'm from a small town in west Texas called Kingdom City. I had two older brothers, who are dead now, and a few cousins, who eventually moved away and with whom I've lost touch—except for one of them. My only other living relative is my great-uncle, who I told you about earlier. My father expected me to stay and work the ranch. Cal believed I had the brains to make it through college, and he badgered me until I began to believe it. He'll like Diana very much. I'm eager for him to meet her next week."

"I'm eager to meet him, too," Diana put in, but she had picked up on the sudden chill, the aloof reluctance in Cole's entire demeanor at the questions involving his background, and she remembered that years ago, he'd been exasperatingly vague when she tried to find out more about him.

"My uncle lives west of Kingdom City, which is about one hundred eighty miles from San Larosa. It's not quite the hill country, but it's beautiful and unspoiled." Cole paused and ate a bite of duck.

"San Larosa," Rose Britton said to her daughter. "Wasn't that one of your stopping places when you and Robert took the girls on their first camping trip to Yellowstone?"

"It's a popular place for campers," Cole said, anxious to change the subject. "Although I understand that much of the area's only suitable for experienced hikers and campers."

For some reason that comment evoked laughter from the entire family.

"We weren't exactly 'experienced,'" Mrs. Foster explained. "Corey and I had camped out a few times, and Robert had been a Boy Scout. His only other 'camping experience' was limited to 'tennis camp' in Scottsdale. But the girls and I thought it would be fun, so off we went on a three-week trip, each of us confident we knew all there was to know about 'roughing it.' "

Cole found it hard to imagine Diana as an avid camper when, even as a fourteen-year-old, she had seemed to be very fastidious about everything from her white tennis shoes to her short, neatly filed fingernails. "Somehow, I never thought of you as someone who would like roughing it, even when you were young."

"We all had a great time. I loved it," Diana lied, straight-faced.

Something about that didn't ring true, and then a hazy memory snapped into focus. "Didn't we once have a conversation at the Haywards' stable about things we disliked the most?"

Because Diana had been so infatuated with him at the time, each of their conversations had seemed like earth-shaking events to her, and she realized almost at once what he was referring to. Surprised that he remembered it, she took advantage of an unexpected opportunity for light-hearted banter. "Did we?" she asked with a look of innocent bewilderment, before taking a bite of roasted potato.

Cole wasn't fooled. "You know we did," he countered with a lazy smile. "Your top two least-favorites were dirt and camping."

"No, they were snakes and camping," Diana corrected him, her eyes sparkling with merriment. "Dirt was third on my list." She looked at Corey and jokingly said, "Even so, we were very well organized and prepared for every eventuality, weren't we?"

Corey realized immediately what Diana wanted her to do, and she complied at once, eager to help Diana lighten the mood at the table. "Our father wanted the trip to be a joint family effort, so before the trip, we all had assignments. Dad was in charge of transportation and finances; Mom was in charge of food and beverages; Diana was in charge of safety manuals and safety items. I was in charge of first aid and photography. And we were both supposed to have whatever items we felt we needed to be comfortable and safe. I figured Band-Aids and some sunblock would cover first aid, so I started reading up on wildlife photography, but Diana had a much different approach to preparedness. Weeks before we left, she began poring over The Camper's Guide to Survival in the Wilderness, and The Camper's Companion."

"And," Diana emphasized laughingly, "the L.L. Bean catalogs, from which I had selected and ordered what I felt were absolute necessities for Corey and me."

Cole's gaze shifted to her the moment she spoke, and Corey saw his smile grow warm before he turned his attention back to Corey, who continued, "The day before we left, Dad went to get the motor home he'd rented, and Diana and I started carrying down the rest of our 'personal provisions' that she'd been storing in the attic as they arrived. Then we started with her 'campers' safety essentials' that the guidebooks had recommended, and then with the first-aid stuff."

Gram joined in the story with a smile. "The girls had to make at least fifteen trips to get it all downstairs," she told Cole.

"And then," Grandpa added, chuckling, "Robert had to hitch a U-Haul trailer onto the camper to get it to Yellowstone. The problem was—" he continued, his shoulders starting to shake with laughter, "Robert had never driven anything longer than his daddy's Cadillac in the fifties. When he pulled out of the driveway, he knocked over his mailbox with the trailer, and he drove off down the street, dragging the pole and box behind him—"

"Henry and I laughed so hard we could hardly chase after the mail."

Cole was so entertained by the story and this additional glimpse into Diana's past that he forgot he was in hostile territory. "What did Diana take along that took up so much room?" he asked, but Corey hesitated.

"Go ahead and tell him," Diana told her with a laughing look. "He's part of the family now, so, technically, he has a right to know."

"It wasn't all Diana's stuff, it was for me, too," Corey loyally pointed out before she went on. "If she hadn't planned for both of us, I'd have left on a two-week trip with a torn sleeping bag, a couple pairs of shorts and T-shirts, my camera equipment, twenty rolls of film, and some Band-Aids. Period. Anyway," she continued, "Diana had an entirely different sense of what we needed in order to camp out in comfort and safety. She'd ordered a white tent for us with a red, white, and blue awning over the flap; then she'd coordinated our sleeping bags, our clothes, and even our lanterns and flashlights with the trim on the tent. Diana's were blue. Mine were red. We even had red, white, and blue plastic bottles filled with lotion and aspirin and everything."

Uneasy about making fun of Diana's preparations, Corey stopped and poured herself more iced tea.

"You forgot the repellents," Diana prompted, laughing. "To be on the safe side, I'd brought a dozen cans each of mosquito repellent, wasp repellent, crawling-insect repellent, and flying-insect repellent. I also had several jumbo containers of snake repellent, which I diligently sprinkled around the outside perimeter of our tent every time we put it in a new place."

"Snake repellent?" Cole said to Diana with a choked laugh. "What did you think of Yellowstone?"

"It depends on who you ask," Diana said dryly, and the rest of the family burst out laughing. Mrs. Foster wiped her eyes and said, "The first day in Yellowstone, we all went hiking. Corey got pictures of mountain goats, and I got some lovely sketches. Diana got poison ivy and Robert got an allergy attack."

"The nights were fun though," Corey argued. "We cooked out and roasted marshmallows and sang songs."

"And after we went to bed, the raccoons raided our trash containers and the bears waited for a chance to dine on us," Diana put in as she cut a bite-sized piece of duck. "I don't think there was a raccoon within ten miles of our camp that went to bed hungry while we were there."

"Looking back," Corey said with an impenitent grin, "it was a very one-sided vacation. While I hiked through the woods, oblivious to everything except getting a perfect photograph, Diana trooped behind me lugging a first-aid kit and reading in her manual about the danger of surprising elk in rutting season and what to do if you encountered an unfriendly bear."

"You were lucky she did," Mary Foster pointed out, sobering a little.

"That's true," Corey told Cole. "You see, on the day we were supposed to leave to come home, I sneaked out of camp with my camera and tripod just before dawn—strictly against Daddy's orders, which were that no one left camp alone. The thing was, I wanted to enter a photography contest in the Youth/Outdoors category, but I hadn't gotten anything that I felt was really outstanding. Then, on the last day in Yellowstone, I saw something that I just knew would be a winning shot. We were about a mile and a half from camp, hiking, when I spotted several elk crossing a stream near a waterfall that was streaming out of a steep wooded hill. I knew if I could get that shot, with the sun rising over the hill in the background, I'd have a chance to win that contest. I asked Daddy to go with me, but by then his allergies were so bad that he said my elk would hear him wheezing and coughing and they'd take off before we could get close enough for a photograph. So I decided to go alone."

"You didn't ask your mother to go, instead?" Cole asked.

"Mom spent most of the evening cooking dinner and packing up, and she said she was exhausted."

"What about Diana?"

"I didn't have the heart to ask Diana. She was covered with poison ivy, sunburn, and pink calamine lotion. Besides, she'd twisted her ankle the day before. Anyway, she heard me sneaking out of the tent before dawn, and she started itemizing all the dire things that can happen to an inexperienced camper alone in the wilds, but I headed off anyway with only a flashlight and my camera gear.

"A few minutes later, I heard something crashing through the woods behind me, and I smelled the calamine lotion, so I figured it had to be Diana. Sure enough, there she was, limping down the trail with her ankle wrapped in an elastic bandage, carrying her trusty emergency kit in one hand and her blue flashlight in the other. What a morning," Corey finished with a reminiscent laugh. "When we got to the spot I'd picked out, I realized the angle of the light was going to be all wrong on this side of the stream, so we had to find a shallow place to cross the stream, work our way through the woods on the side of the hill above the waterfall, and then back down."

"Did you get your picture of the elk at sunrise?"

"No, I got lost instead. The light wasn't very good yet, and I didn't know we'd ended up on the bank of another stream near a different hill, so I set up my tripod and attached my telephoto lens. The sky was turning bright pink, and there still weren't any elk, so I left Diana with the camera, in case the elk showed up, while I walked a few yards to the edge of the clearing. I crouched down on my hands and knees so I wouldn't be at the elk's eye level, and crawled out of the woods onto the bank, waiting for my eyes to adjust from the gray shadows to the pink light reflecting off the water. With the sun where it was, I couldn't see the waterfall at all yet, so I sat down and dug out of my pocket the bag of leftover marshmallows I'd brought for breakfast. And then I saw it—he was coming out of the water and heading straight at me."

"The elk?" Cole ventured, while passing the plate of biscuits to Diana's grandfather.

"No, the bear. He was quite young, several inches shorter than I, which I didn't realize because he was running on all fours. I thought he was charging me, and I jumped to my hands and knees, but before I could stand up, he was there. I screamed, he stopped, and we stared at each other, eyeball to eyeball, both of us startled and frightened. He came up on his hind legs and I sprang to my feet and threw my marshmallows at him; then I ran as fast as I could in one direction, while he fled in the other.

"To top everything off," she said, laughing, "when we started back, we realized we were lost, and the further we walked, the more lost we became. Diana kept insisting that her books on camping safety said we should stay put, but I wouldn't listen, until she finally pretended she couldn't walk any further on her ankle. At nightfall, she used the matches in her emergency kit to build a little fire to help the searchers find us.

"I'd forgotten to change the battery in my flashlight, and it gave out before I heard what I thought were wolves howling. Diana wouldn't let me use her flashlight, even though it had a fresh battery. She said we needed it to signal search planes if any flew close, and I knew she was right. Instead, I built a bigger fire for more light, but every time I heard that howling sound, I got closer to hysteria," Corey admitted and took a sip of iced tea. "I was shivering so hard I could hardly talk, and I had to keep my face turned away so Diana wouldn't see the tears running down my face. I felt like such a fool, particularly because I'd teased Diana about being afraid of snakes and picking a bouquet of poison ivy and lugging that emergency kit with us everywhere—and there I was, crying like a baby while she calmly took care of all the practical matters of survival. I'd ignored all the camping manuals, but Diana had read them from cover to cover, which was why she was able to make me laugh about the threat of wolves. Finally we went to sleep by the fire. Even after we were rescued the next morning, she never teased me about being so stupid. In fact, we never discussed those imaginary wolves again, until now."

When Corey showed no indication of explaining her last sentence, Cole said, "Imaginary wolves? I don't understand."

"Obviously," Corey informed him, "you haven't read the Yellowstone Camping Manual either." She smiled infectiously. "You see, there weren't any wolves in that part of Yellowstone back then. The park service had corralled them in a distant part of the park, far from the campers. Those were the ones we were hearing."

Cole thought that seemed virtually impossible, as well as counter to the wildlife philosophy of the national parks. "Do you mean that the park authorities rounded up all the wolves in that gigantic parkland and then put them behind fences?" He looked at Diana for an answer, but she seemed to be engrossed with tracing the pattern on the handle of her knife with her forefinger.

"No, of course not!" Corey explained. "The wildlife commission realized that the wolf population was out of control in Yellowstone because the wolf's natural predator, the Rocky Mountain black ocelot, was almost extinct there, so they imported them from California. The ocelots hunted the wolves and ran them deep into the mountains."

Diana could feel Cole's gaze leveled on her, and when she couldn't avoid it any longer, she finally lifted her eyes from her silverware and saw the knowing amusement in his expression. "Very tidy explanation," he said dryly.

"I thought so," Diana said, swallowing a giggle.

Corey looked from one to the other of them, her own thoughts on the long-ago explanation she'd accepted without question at the time. Now that she'd repeated it aloud, it sounded very odd. "Diana—" she said suspiciously. "It was a total lie, wasn't it?"

"It was a whopper!" Henry Britton hooted. "Surprised you bought it, Corey girl."

Privately, Cole thought Diana's solution had been ingenious, but as a new and temporary family member, he didn't feel entitled to voice a dissenting opinion. Instead, he concluded, "So you spent a terrifying night alone and never got to enter the photography contest, after all?"

"On the contrary, I won second place in the Candid Series division," Corey informed him with a grin.

"Congratulations," Cole said.

"Don't congratulate me," she countered wryly. "I didn't take them, I was in them."

"Who took them?"

"Diana did. When I saw the bear and tried to scramble up on my hands and knees, she thought I'd seen the elk and was trying to stay out of the frame, so she pressed the shutter release as I'd told her to do, and the automatic camera started shooting in rapid sequence. After we got back, I tossed the roll of film out, but Diana retrieved it for laughs. When it was developed, she selected three shots—as required by the contest—and sent them in."

"Yes," Mary Foster said with a reminiscent smile, "and National Photographic magazine even used the captions Diana had sent in when they featured the pictures."

"What were your captions?" Cole asked.

"The first picture was when the bear and I first met, nose to nose. Both of us were crouched on all fours, staring at each other, startled and scared." Corey laughed. "Under that one, Diana had written 'On your mark—' The second picture was of the bear and me rearing up on our feet, ready to run. Beneath that, Diana had written 'Get set—' The last picture was the funniest of all, because we were both fleeing for our lives in opposite directions. Diana called that one 'Go!'"