Leap of Faith by Danielle Steel Page B

longed to kiss her, but knew she would never let him.
    “You’re going to lend it to me?” she asked, lapsing into French. She couldn’t believe it, but he shook his head in answer.
    “I’m not lending you anything, Marie-Ange. It’s a present. It’s all yours. Your school bus.”
    “Oh, my God! You can’t do that!” She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him fiercely. “Are you serious?” she asked, as she pulled away to look at him. It was the most extraordinary thing anyone had ever done for her, and she hardly knew what to say to him. He had made her dreams come true, and was literally giving her the gift of college, by giving her a way to get there.
    “I can do it, and I did. It’s all yours, baby.” He was grinning from ear to ear, and she wiped the tears from her cheeks as she watched him. “Now how about giving me a ride home before your aunt comes out with her shotgun again and shoots me?” They both laughed at the ugly memory, and she went inside to tell her aunt she’d be back in a few minutes. She didn’t explain about the car, she was going to do that later.
    Billy drove on the way back to his farm, and Marie-Ange sat close to him, exclaiming over how wonderful the car was, how incredible the gift, and how she shouldn’t accept it.
    “You can’t be uneducated forever. You have to get an education so you can get out of here one day.” He knew he never would, he had to help his family keep their farm, and it was always a struggle for them. But he knew his greatest gift to Marie-Ange was her freedom from Aunt Carole.
    “I can’t believe you’d do this for me,” Marie-Ange said solemnly. She had enormous respect for him, as a person. And she had never been as grateful for anything in her life as she was to him at that moment. And he was happy to see her so ecstatic. She was as excited as he had hoped she would be. He loved everything about her.
    She dropped him off and hurried home, and when she told Aunt Carole about what he’d done, at dinner, she forbade her to accept it. “It’s wrong for you to accept a gift like that from him, even if you’re planning to marry him,” her aunt said sternly.
    “Which I’m not, we’re just friends,” Marie-Ange said calmly.
    “Then you can’t keep it,” Aunt Carole said with a face like wrinkled granite.
    But for the first time in seven years of living with her, Marie-Ange was determined to defy her. She would not give up college on the whim of this mean old woman. For seven years she had deprived Marie-Ange in every way she could, of emotion, and food, and love, and money. Theirs had been a life of deprivation in every sense of the word. And now she wanted to rob her of an education, and Marie-Ange would not let her do it.
    “I’ll borrow it from him then. But I’m going to use it for school,” she said firmly.
    “What do you need school for? What do you think you’re going to be? A doctor?” Her tone was derisive.
    “I don’t know what I’m going to be,” she said quietly. But she knew that it would be more than Aunt Carole. She wanted to be like her mother, although she hadn’t gone to university, she had married Marie-Ange’s father. But Marie-Ange wanted more than a life on this bleak farm in Iowa, with nothing to enjoy, nothing to celebrate, and nothing to live for. And she knew that one day, when she could escape at last, she would go somewhere, and preferably back to France, at least to visit. But that dream was still on the distant horizon for her. First she had to get an education so she could escape, just as Billy had suggested to her.
    “You’ll look like a damn fool running around in that old jalopy, particularly if people know who gave it to you.”
    “I don’t care,” she said defiantly for once, “I’m proud of it.”
    “Then why don’t you marry him?” Carole pressed her as she had before, more out of curiosity than real interest. She had never understood the bond between them, and didn’t care