Carolina Isle Read Online Free Page B

you?” she said nastily. In a way, she was jealous. She was jealous that he had someone in his life, while all she had was a scrapbook.
    â€œYeah,” he said, grinning in a lecherous way. “Britney.”
    Ariel looked away. She wished the man she loved was with her.
    David got off the bed and walked toward her. For a moment his arms hung at his side, as though he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. “You hang in there, kid,” he said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away. “Ariel,” he said softly. “I do understand. You maythink I don’t, but I do. It’s not me who’s the problem, it’s that you want a choice. You want to choose who you marry.”
    â€œChoice,” she said. “A concept that is foreign to my existence.”
    â€œMaybe you and I could—” He broke off as he stared, wide-eyed, at her scrapbook. Picking it up, he walked to the window and looked closely at the grainy newspaper photo. “You know who this is, don’t you?”
    â€œWho is what?” she asked.
    He pointed to a woman standing near R.J. She knew the man beside him. He was Charley Dunkirk, an old, rich man who had given R.J. his start in business and was still his best friend. “That’s Susie Edwards,” David said.
    â€œAnd just who is Susie Edwards?”
    â€œI forget that you’ve lived in a tiny world inside the tiny world of Arundel. Her picture is hanging in one of the corridors at the high school. She won every beauty contest in three counties from the time she was three until she left Arundel when she got out of high school. She went to New York, changed her name to Katlyn, and married one of the richest men in the world.”
    Ariel looked at the picture. The woman was pretty, yes, but in that well-preserved way that meant she’d had half a dozen face-lifts and spent her days in salons. “She’s from Arundel and she’s the wife of R.J.’s best friend? Hmmm.” Ariel’s head was whirling with this news. Her intuition told her that this woman was the way she was going to reach R.J. She’d already decided that the less Sara knew about her plans, the better. Unfortunately, this meant she couldn’t ask Sara’s advice about anything. What Ariel wanted to do was to get R.J. onto
her
territory, into Arundel. If her plan of impersonating her cousin was going to work, Sara needed to be near Ariel while they were pretending to be each other. Ariel knew she’d need help working for R.J., so she wanted Sara close. But how to get R.J.—and Sara went where he did—to tiny Arundel?
    Ariel put her hand on David’s arm, looked up at him, and gave him her best pleading sigh.
    â€œOh, no you don’t,” he said. “I’m not going to help you in this. When you elope with that man, I plan to be the innocent, jilted, almost-bridegroom. I want our mothers to think that Idid no wrong. I certainly don’t want either of them to think that I helped you.”
    â€œDavid, dear,” she said sweetly, “wouldn’t you love some tea? We could drink it while we have a nice, long talk.”
    â€œI’m going to regret this,” he said as he sat down on a chintz-covered chair.
    Smiling, Ariel started talking. David was so glad to see her happy again that he stayed the entire afternoon.
    In the end, David did help her. Through his girlfriend, Britney, and her connections in “that side of town,” he found a man who was sending Susie Edwards—a.k.a. Katlyn Dunkirk—information about Arundel.
    David got Mrs. Dunkirk’s address and Ariel wrote her a letter asking if they could meet if she ever happened to be in the area. As Ariel hoped, a letter came back soon, giving a time and place in Raleigh.
    On the appointed day, with David’s help, Ariel managed to escape her mother long enough to meet Mrs. Dunkirk for lunch in Raleigh.
    Ariel knew