LITMIR.BIZ

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averted her gaze and stood up. “I’ve done all the bidding I came to do. I’ll see you around, Simon.”

      She picked up her long black leather coat and folded it over her arm as she made her way out of the row and up the aisle to the exit. Eyes followed her, and not only because she was one of only a handful of women present. Tira was beautiful, although she never paid the least attention to her appearance except with a critical scrutiny. She wasn’t vain.

      Behind her, Simon sat scowling silently as she walked away. Her behavior piqued his curiousity. She was even more remote lately and hardly the same flamboyant, cheerful, friendly woman who’d been his secret solace since the accident that had cost Melia her life. His wife had been his whole heart, until that last night when she betrayed a secret that destroyed his pride and his love for her.

      Fool that he was, he’d believed that Melia married him for love. In fact, she’d married him for money and kept a lover in the background. Her stark confession about her long-standing affair and the abortion of his child had shocked and wounded him. She’d even laughed at his consternation. Surely he didn’t think she wanted a child? It would have ruined her figure and her social life. Besides, she’d added with calculating cruelty, she hadn’t even been certain that it was Simon’s, since she’d been with her lover during the same period of time.

      The truth had cut like a knife into his pride. He’d taken his eyes off the road as they argued, and hit a patch of black ice on that winter evening. The car had gone off the road into a gulley and Melia, who had always refused to wear a seat belt because they were uncomfortable to her, had been thrown into the windshield headfirst. She’d died instantly. Simon had been luckier, but the airbag on his side of the car hadn’t deployed, and the impact of the crash had driven the metal of the door right into his left arm. Amputation had been necessary to save his life.

      He remembered that Tira had come to him in the hospital as soon as she’d heard about the wreck. She’d been in the process of divorcing John Beck, her husband, and her presence at Simon’s side had started some malicious rumors about infidelity.

      Tira never spoke of her brief marriage. She never spoke of John. Simon had already been married when they’d met for the first time, and it had been Simon who played matchmaker with John for her. John was his best friend and very wealthy, like Tira herself, and they seemed to have much in common. But the marriage had been over in less than a month.

      He’d never questioned why, except that it seemed unlike Tira to throw in the towel so soon. Her lack of commitment to her marriage and her cavalier attitude about the divorce had made him uneasy. In fact, it had kept him from letting her come closer after he was widowed. She’d turned out to be shallow, and he wasn’t risking his heart on a woman like that, even if she was a knockout to look at. As he knew firsthand, there was more to a marriage than having a beautiful wife.

      John Beck, like Tira, had never said anything about the marriage. But John had avoided Simon ever since the divorce, and once when he’d had too much to drink at a party they’d both attended, he’d blurted out that Simon had destroyed his life, without explaining how.

      The two men had been friends for several years until John had married Tira. Not too long after the divorce, John had moved out of Texas entirely and a year later that tragic oil rig accident had claimed his life. Tira had seemed devastated by John’s death and, for a time, she went into seclusion. When she came back into society, she was a changed woman. The vivacious, happy Tira of earlier days had become a dignified, elegant matron who seemed to have lost her fighting spirit. She went back to college and finished her degree in art. But three years after graduation, she seemed to have done little with her degree. Not that she skimped on charity work or political fundraising. She was a tireless worker. Simon wondered sometimes if she didn’t work to keep from thinking.

      Perhaps she blamed herself for John’s death and couldn’t admit it. The loss of his former friend had hurt Simon, too. He and Tira had become casual friends, but nothing more, he made sure of it. Despite her attractions, he wasn’t getting caught by such a shallow woman. But if their lukewarm friendship had been satisfying once, in the past year, she’d become restless. She was forever mentioning Charles Percy to him and watching his reactions with strange, curious eyes. It made him uncomfortable, like that crack she’d made about kindling jealousy in him.

      That remark hit him on the raw. Did she really think he could ever want a woman of her sort, who could discard a man she professed to love after only one month of marriage and then parade around openly with a philanderer like Charles Percy? He laughed coldly to himself. That really would be the day. His heart was safely encased in ice. Everyone thought he mourned Melia—no one knew how badly she’d hurt him, or that her memory disgusted him. It served as some protection against women like Tira. It kept him safe from any emotional involvement.

      Unaware of Simon’s hostile thoughts, Tira went to her silver Jaguar and climbed in behind the wheel. She paused there for a few minutes, with her head against the cold steering wheel. When was she ever going to learn that Simon didn’t want her? It was like throwing herself at a stone wall, and it had to stop. Finally she admitted that nothing was going to change their shallow relationship. It was time she made a move to put herself out of Simon’s orbit for good. Tearing her emotions to pieces wasn’t going to help, and every time she saw him, she died a little more. All these years she’d waited and hoped and suffered, just to be around him occasionally. She’d lived too long on crumbs; she had to find some sort of life for herself without Simon, no matter how badly it hurt.

      Her first step was to sell the Montana property. She put it on the market without a qualm, and her manager pooled his resources with a friend to buy it. With the ranch gone, she had no more reason to go to cattle auctions.

      She moved out of her apartment that was only a couple of blocks from Simon’s, too, and bought an elegant house on the outskirts of town on Floresville Road. It was very Spanish, with graceful arches and black wrought-iron scrollwork on the fences that enclosed it. There was a cobblestone patio complete with a fountain and a nearby sitting area with a large goldfish pond and a waterfall cascading into it. The place was sheer magic. She thought she’d never seen anything quite so beautiful.

      “It’s the sort of house that needs a family,” the real estate agent had remarked.

      Tira hadn’t said a word.

      She remembered the conversation as she looked around the empty living room that had yet to be furnished. There would never be a family now. There would only be Tira, putting one foot in front of the other and living like a zombie in a world that no longer contained Simon, or hope.

      It took her several weeks to have the house decorated and furnished. She chose every fabric, every color, every design herself. And when the house was finished, it echoed her own personality. Her real personality, that was, not the face she showed to the world.

      No one who was acquainted with her would recognize her from the decor. The living room was done in soft white with a pastel blue, patterned wallpaper. The carpet was gray. The furniture was Victorian, rosewood chairs and a velvet-covered sofa. The other rooms were equally antique. The master bedroom boasted a four-poster bed in cherrywood, with huge ball legs and a headboard and footboard resplendant with hand-carved floral motifs. The curtains were Priscillas, the center panels of rose patterns with faint pink and blue coloring. The rest of the house followed the same subdued elegance of style and color. It denoted a person who was introverted, sensitive and old-fashioned. Which, under the flamboyant camouflage, Tira really was.

      If there was a flaw, and it was a small one, it was the mouse who lived in the kitchen. Once the house was finished, and she’d moved in, she noticed him her first night in residence, sitting brazenly on a cabinet clutching a piece of cracker that she’d missed when she was cleaning up.

      She bought traps and set them, hoping that the evil things would do their horrible work correctly and that she wouldn’t be left nursing a wounded mouse. But the wily creature avoided the traps. She tried a cage and bait. That didn’t work, either. Either the mouse was like those in that cartoon she’d loved, altered by some secret lab and made intelligent, or he was a figment of her imagination and she was

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