Forever by Margaret Pemberton Page A

alone.’
    She was sitting on the porch swing. The rose-pink dress had been discarded. Her father would be home soon. Dying of love though she was, she could not allow her father to know. It would cause too many questions, be an invasion of her grief. Instead of her habitual jeans and T-shirt, she wore a white silk dress with a slim, gold rouleau belt. Her hair had been carelessly caught in a ribbon in the nape of her neck. Her face was devoid of make-up. Bradley thought she had never looked so beautiful.
    â€˜I thought you might like dinner tonight; at Agostino’s.’
    A flicker of interest pierced Gussie’s grief. She wondered how Bradley Hampton knew she had a penchant for Sicilian food. She’d cried for so long that she couldn’t remember when last she’d eaten. Agostino’s did a marvellous Spiedini Al serri-Rotoli . For a moment she was tempted and then she remembered Beau and that he was dead and that she was going to devote the rest of her life to grief.
    Tears hovered in her violet-dark eyes. ‘If you don’t leave I’ll call Louis and have him remove you.’
    A brief smile touched Bradley’s mouth. ‘I think he would find that a little difficult, Gussie. I don’t leave anywhere unless it’s of my own free will.’
    Gussie blinked back her tears and looked across at him. She had never realized before how tall he was, or how broad-shouldered. Nearly as broad-shouldered as Beau.
    â€˜You’ve overstayed your welcome, Bradley Hampton,’ she said, springing to her feet, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I don’t want you to come here again. I don’t want anyone to come and see me. Not ever again.’ Covering her face with her hands, she rushed into the house and the sound of her sobs could be heard fading into the distance until at last her bedroom door silenced them.
    Bradley remained on the porch, a savagery on his usually good-humoured features that would have stunned his friends and shocked even Gussie. Damn Beau Clay. He was exercising as powerful an effect on Gussie dead as he had when he had been alive. His eyes blazed with fierce determination. He would take no notice of Gussie’s request. He would come back tomorrow and the next day and the next. He would come back until she had forgotten her dream of Beau Clay, and until she fell in love with flesh and blood reality: until she fell in love with him.
    In her room, above her sobs, Gussie heard his car door slam and the engine rev. She ran to the window and peeped surreptitiously outside. It was strange that she had never noticed before how handsome Bradley Hampton was. But not as handsome as Beau. No one was as handsome as Beau had been.
    She sank onto the bed and began to sob bitterly, remembering Beau’s devastating down-slanting smile, the way he had held her at the New Year party, the feel of his body close to hers.
    At her request, the maid told her father that she had a headache and did not want to be disturbed. As the evening drew on into night she gave herself up to grief for Beau Clay, but occasionally, insidiously, his lean dark face merged with that of Bradley Hampton’s. Angry whenever it did so, she buried her face in her pillows, reminding herself that she was inconsolable. That the rest of her life was to be spent in grief for Beau.

Chapter Three
    Beauregard Clay was buried by his grieving father and a multitude of friends three days later. In death he had taken on a stature that he had never enjoyed in life. His father would have liked the ceremony to have a semblance of privacy but that proved to be impossible. The staid and respectable felt it their duty to be present, and Beau’s contemporaries came from as far away as La Jolla and New York. Not until they actually saw the lifeless body being laid to rest in the family mausoleum would they be able to believe that Beau was really dead. Young women the Judge had never set eyes on before wept