Any Man Of Mine. Diana Palmer

running. She was as out of place in the small town as a sparrow would have been in a den of hawks. Alan Whitman had moved here from Miami, settling in this pleasant section of south Georgia with a mind toward starting his own business. But illness had slowed him down, diminished his resources, and he’d had a daughter to support. So he’d taken a job at the local textile mill, just until he could get on his financial feet again. But he’d been trapped by house payments and car payments and doctor bills into keeping the hated job, and he’d found all too soon that there was no way out. He was stuck.

      His spirit was all but broken by the long hours, and there was no laughter in the big house he’d spent his life savings on. He had dozens of get-rich-quick schemes that fell through quickly. He spent his life looking for the rainbow, but all he found was the pants line of the manufacturing company.

      Keena sighed bitterly at the irony of life. Her father had gotten poor making clothes, while she’d gotten rich. Even now she looked the part of the wealthy career woman in her chic designer jeans and wide-sleeved silk blouse. The emeralds on her ears and her wrist were real, not the paste ones she’d loved to wear as a poor teenager.

      How long ago it all seemed now, those brief, secret meetings with him in the woods, the first few kisses that led a naive Keena to an apartment owned by one of James’s friends. Tall, dark-headed, with vivid blue eyes under thick black lashes, James Harris had been the darling of the social set, a young attorney with promise. Keena had known that it was disastrous to care about him, but her heart had ignored her mind and gone end over end every time it saw him. She couldn’t begin to look at another boy, or even Larry Harris, who worshipped her.

      If only she’d realized that he had never had any intention of marrying her. She’d been too blinded by her own feelings to realize that James was keeping his relationship with her a secret from everyone. He’d never even stopped by the house to see her, or pick her up there for one of their few dates, and he was careful to stay away from public places. They spent long hours in his car at the local lover’s lane, necking, until one night when the kisses grew suddenly longer and slower and deeper, and he suggested that they go to his friend’s apartment to have a snack before he took her home. They both knew why they were going, and it had nothing to do with food. Keena, young and naive and with her first passion for a man in full bloom, went trustingly.

      She was expecting all the fiery passion and tenderness of every romantic novel she had read. But James, for a supposedly practiced lover, was carelessly intent on his own satisfaction. He hadn’t even bothered with taking time to study the softly curving young body he’d taken so quickly and roughly.

      “Get your clothes on fast,” he’d said the minute he was through, leaving Keena confused, frustrated and ashamed of her easy capitulation. He didn’t even look at her as he dressed. “Hurry!” he’d called over his shoulder. “Jack could come in any minute. He told me I could only have the apartment for an hour.”

      She’d dressed hurriedly, tears streaming from her eyes, her body feeling bruised, violated. She’d expected a loving word or two, but there had been none of that.

      She’d followed him to the door, and he’d taken her back to the end of her driveway, careful to stop the car in the privacy of the alley so that no one would recognize it.

      “Sorry I had to be so quick,” he’d said with a half smile. “Next time it will be better. I’ll find another place.”

      There wasn’t going to be a next time, and she’d told him so, her voice shaking with disappointment.

      “Well, what did you expect, rose petals and fireworks?” he’d burst out. “I thought you cared about me.”

      “I did,” she’d wept.

      “I don’t want any part of your fears, Keena. There are too many willing girls.” And he’d driven away.

      Keena had sweated out the next few weeks, and she hadn’t relaxed until she knew she wasn’t pregnant. But her love for James hadn’t eased. She watched for him; she listened for the phone. But he didn’t even try to get in touch with her. In desperation she accepted his brother Larry’s invitation to a party at the Harris home, hoping for just a sight of James, a sign that he wasn’t really through with her. It had just been an argument, after all. He’d talked about marriage, about an engagement. Perhaps he was giving her time to think. Of course, that was why he hadn’t called. And all that gossip about James and Cherrie was just that—gossip. So what that Cherrie was the daughter of a prominent local attorney, and a voluptuous blonde? It was Keena whom James really cared for.

      She accepted Larry’s invitation, wondering if he knew how she felt about his brother, if that might account for that odd, vague pity she often read in his eyes. In later years she’d wondered, because Larry had seemed to wait deliberately until she was in earshot to talk to James the night of the party.

      She’d worn a dress of white crepe, which she’d made from material bought with money she earned working in the local grocery store at the checkout counter. Even then she’d had a flair for fashion, creating her own design. The dress had caused a mild sensation, even on a mill worker’s daughter. But James had only spared her a sharp glance when she’d walked in on Larry’s arm. He hadn’t asked her to dance or greeted her. Neither had his father or mother, in fact, unless those cold smiles and curt nods could be classified as such.

      She’d been only a few feet away when she heard Larry ask James, “Doesn’t Keena look like a dream tonight?”

      “I hadn’t noticed,” came the terse reply. “Why in hell did you have to invite her here tonight? Mother may play Lady Bountiful to the workers, but she won’t care much for her son dating one,” James reminded him with a short, cold laugh. “Keena’s father is, after all, just one of our spreaders. He isn’t even an executive.”

      “He’s nice,” Larry had defended.

      “My God, maybe he is, but he’s as dull as a winter day, just like his skinny daughter. She’s plain and stupid, and she’s practically flat-chested to boot. Believe me, it was like making love to a man...”

      She’d felt Larry’s shock, even at a distance. “Making love?” he breathed.

      Keena hadn’t stayed to hear any more. With her eyes full of tears and her makeup running down her white face, she’d left the house and walked every step of the way home in the dark without thinking about danger. And those cold, hurting words had stayed with her ever since. They’d been indirectly responsible for her success, because her hatred for James Harris and her thirst for revenge had carried her through the lean, hard times that had led up to her enrollment in the fashion design school. All she’d wanted in life from that terrible night forward was to become something more than a mill worker’s daughter—an outsider. And she had.

      There was a discreet tap on the door before Mandy came in like a small, dark-haired whirlwind, her dark eyes sparkling.

      “Brought you some coffee,” she said, placing a tray on the coffee table. A plate of doughnuts rested temptingly beside it. “Come on, you’ve got to eat something.”

      Keena grimaced at her housekeeper. “I don’t want food,” she said. “Just coffee. You be a love and eat the doughnuts.”

      “You’ll blow away,” the older woman warned. “Why bother to bring me down here with you if you aren’t going to let me cook?”

      “It gets lonely here,” she replied. She gazed around her at the towering near-ruin of a house. It must have been a showplace years before her father bought it, but lack of care and deterioration had taken their toll on it. Without some substantial repairs, it was going to fall in.

      “Did you reach the construction people?” Keena asked as she stirred cream into a cup of steaming coffee.

      “Yes,” Mandy replied, looking disapproving. “Look, it’s none of my business, but why are you going to funnel good money into this white mausoleum?”

      Keena ran a lazy hand over the faded, worn brocade of the antique sofa. “I’ll need to have