The first few days Ross was back were sheer heaven on earth. He didn't say he loved her. She was still waiting for that. But he did everything a perfect lover could to make her feel loved. Charity was happy.
It was only when she thought about his mother that she felt butterflies and the doubts began to surface. Was his mother right? Would Ross be better off without her?
Of course she knew-or at least suspected-what his mother had been up to with the tennis party, the litany of famous ancestors, and even with Kenny being so atten tive. Mrs. Carrington would just as soon Ross found him self someone else to love and marry. And Mrs. Carrington was a woman who acted on her druthers.
If only she had first met his parents at the restaurant, or at some other more formal occasion where she could have dressed the part of Ross's girlfriend. Things might have been different. Their first picture of her had been as a South Seas girl, and that picture would stay forever. If only...
But she knew she'd only be postponing the inevitable. Actually, Ross had been right all along to make her meet his parents in a sarong. That was the way she really was. That other persona, the one who ran the restaurant, was the imposter. The barefoot island girl with flowers in her hair was the real Charity Ames, and this South Sea Is lands girl didn't fit in with Ross's family at all.
His family knew it. She knew it. The only one who didn't seem to know it was Ross himself. He didn't show any signs of understanding what his parents had seen right away-that she didn't belong out there in the Romanesque mansion.
She didn't come right out and tell him about her growing fears. She knew he would laugh at her and deny them. But she did allow herself one little complaint.
"I wish you came from a more normal family," she sighed one night as they walked in the moonlight. "Why do they have to be so…so…rich?"
"Rich?" He looked at her, surprised she even cared about things like that. "Listen, plenty of my relatives aren't all that well off. It varies between brothers and sisters and it varies between cousins."
He squeezed her hand. "Tell you what. Meet me for lunch tomorrow. Meet me down by the embarcadero. I'll take you to a little café where you'll get a better idea of what I mean."
"Great." She didn't think it was going to make a difference to what worried her most, but she was willing to try.