Ross stared at her blankly, his mind miles away.
Her laugh was rueful as she rumpled his hair. "Oh, well, come on, let's go to lunch. I can talk. You can ignore me. We'll have a marvelous time."
Ross seemed to see her at last.
"Oh. Sorry, Marlena. I can't have lunch today. I don't have time." He rose, pat ted her absently and started for the door. "Charity Ames has asked me to be her husband," he called back, shrugging, his face still furrowed in thought. "And I guess I'm going to do it. I'm on my way over there now."
Marlena made a strangled, gurgling sound, but no real words came out.
He left the office, whistling as he went down the hall to the elevator. He'd never been a husband before and he wasn't sure just what was involved, but he was ready to try. The Ames holdout had been a thorn in his side for too long. He had a growing conviction that if he played this one just right, he was about to pluck it out.
"Well, I don't know."
Mason Ames shook his elegantly shaggy head of hair doubtfully as he gazed about the room from his vantage point on the long sectional couch. Sun light was streaming in through the high windows, but there was still an air of gloom and doom to the place.
"Maybe if you took a blowtorch to your entire apartment you could convince Aunt Doris you'd had a fire and were now in the midst of repairs. I don't see any other hope for it."
Charity Ames threw herself down on the other end of the couch and glared at her brother. "Don't make fun of my decorating," she said. "It looked great when I first did it."
Mason laughed and rolled off the couch to sit cross- legged on the floor. "I don't mean to be snide, Char, but that must have been a long, long time ago."
Charity looked around the room at the elongated paintings and the tall, contorted sculpture of a strange human form in the corner. The couch was low and form less, and huge pillows served as chairs on the other side of the slab of deep azure marble that formed her coffee table.
"I was in the middle of my blue period then," she said with dreamy remembrance. "I was searching for mean ing, searching for goals. That's why everything's done up in long lines and indigo." She sighed. "Looks kind of bleak now, doesn't it?"
"Kind of," he said with emphasis. "Am I to take it that you're over that lost, melancholy stuff?"
"Oh, yes." Charity smiled at her sibling, and when she smiled, her dark eyes could light up a room. "I've got the restaurant now. It's filled my life. And I know what I want now, where I'm going." She laughed softly. "I guess you could call this my in-the-pink phase."