Love's Golden Spell. William Maltese

Janet couldn’t help smiling. She shouldn’t have smiled; it gave him the proverbial inch that would encourage him to go for the mile. “There,” he said; “isn’t that better?”

      It was better. It was some of what she wanted; it was what she feared, too.

      “I didn’t mean to sound pompous,” she said. He was right. There would be no miraculous conversions in their short time together. She knew that when she came down the elevator to meet him in the lobby. That was never her real purpose. She wanted a piece of her past. She was willing to settle for one day of renewal, here and now. Offered the chance of that day, she would be a fool to refuse it.

      “We won’t mention it again,” he said, sounding too triumphant.

      She didn’t like losing ground. “Tell me about this girl who I remind you of,” she said.

      “I thought we were going to have fun?” he demanded, his golden eyes shooting condemning daggers.

      “How can you have fun when I remind you of someone you’d rather forget?” Janet replied, hurt by his change of mood, even though she had anticipated it. She feared giving in to inner needs that could weaken her resolve.

      “There are good memories as well as the bad,” he said. She shouldn’t have pried for that admission. Despite her heartache, it was easier thinking he remembered only the bad. “Nothing is ever truly black or white,” he said, turning his face toward her, unreadable. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that it is. Relationships are painted in grays.”

      “I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. “For some reason, I feel compelled to be on the offensive.”

      “We do seem to be having our problems, don’t we?” he said, the humor back in his voice. She was glad for the return of lightness; it was contagious. “So, I will apologize, too,” he said, “and bring us back to square one. After all, why shouldn’t you be curious? Who knows, it may do me a world of good to talk about it.”

      Janet didn’t want him to talk about it. She didn’t want to open that can of worms, appalled that she had been the one to provide the instrument. He would paint her the villain of the piece. It would be easy to do. She had never answered his letters, never even read them, fearful that they held the magic to seduce her from her father. Janet couldn’t join in her father’s betrayal, and only Christopher had had the power to make her do so. She had hated her father for taking her from Africa and from Lionspride—from Christopher. The hate had been there, as well as the love, when his heart attack killed him. And she felt guilty, prepared to compensate for her feelings of disloyalty.

      “I knew her when we were children,” Christopher said, making Janet uneasy. How could she stop him? His memories weren’t hers, and time distorted things. The reality of her dreams might be inaccurate. “She hated to see animals killed,” he said. “She liked sliding down the banister at Lionspride. You see the similarities?”

      “I like her already,” Janet said, nervously glancing from the car window. Mine tailings stretched to either side of the highway. She and Christopher were driving the Golden Arc of the great South African gold fields. Millions of years ago, heat, cold and storms scoured debris from gold-bearing mountains into a great inland sea that was now the Transvaal Highveldt and the Orange Free State.

      “She was very likable…” Christopher said.

      “But?” Janet prodded. Pure curiosity made her want to hear the rest.

      “But she was a child,” he said. Maybe he understood after all. “I wasn’t more than a child myself.”

      “First love?” she suggested. She was torturing herself, making things worse. She was hoping he would recognize her as that thirteen-year-old girl.

      “Actually, I fared far better in my teens than most,” he said, steering toward an end to that line of conversation. He was laughing it off. It wasn’t special; it was only a phase of adolescence that everyone went through. Children grew up. Things that seemed world shattering were recognized later as mere childish exaggerations.