Beloved Stranger Read Free Page B

it once. From self-pity she had progressed to her present state of mind, which could be summed up by one question: what am I going to do?
    Ricardo had foreseen this possibility. He had told her to get in touch with him, and given her his address. The regular baseball season had opened a few weeks ago. Susan, who had never followed baseball in her life, had taken to reading all she could get her hands on about the New York Yankees and about Ricardo Montoya in particular. Consequently, she knew that he had signed a multimillion dollar contract in February and that he had had a sensational spring. The Yankees were universally expected to win the American League Pennant this year.
    Ricardo would be home in Stamford. Should she write him?
    She took out a fresh sheet of loose-leaf notebook paper and began to compose a letter. After three sentences she stopped, looked at what she had written and tore it up. “I sound like an idiot,” she muttered disgustedly. She stood up. “I am an idiot.” She got her raincoat from the closet and ran down the stairs. She needed to get away from her own company.
    The student lounge was more filled than usual due to the rainy weather. Susan spotted a group of friends and went over to join them. One girl had a copy of a national news magazine on her lap and Susan felt a jolt of shock when she looked down and saw the picture on the cover.
    “May I see that for a moment, Lisa?” she asked rather breathlessly.
    “Sure,” the other girl answered. “You can join in the general drooling if you like. We’ve all just decided that that is the man we would most want to be stranded on a desert island with.”
    “Would you?” asked Susan, and stared down at the picture. Ricardo was wearing his baseball uniform but not the hat. His thick, straight, dark brown hair had fallen slightly forward over his forehead. He looked lean and brown and his smile was the irresistible grin that she remembered so vividly. But it was the eyes that caught and held you, the large, beautiful, thick-lashed brown eyes.
    “You could travel halfway round the world and you wouldn’t find another man like that,” one of the girls was saying.
    Susan cleared her throat. “Where is he from? I mean, he’s not American, is he?”
    “He’s Colombian. Or his parents are Colombian. He was born in the States, so that makes him an American citizen. It’s all in the article.”
    “May I borrow the magazine. Lisa? I’ll give it back to you.”
    Lisa grinned. “Susie! Now we know why you find all your dates so uninteresting. You’re holding out for Rick Montoya.”
    Susan could feel herself flushing and the other girl reached over to give her hand a quick squeeze. “Of course you can borrow it. But I do want it back.”
    “Lisa wants to hang Rick’s picture over her bed,” one of the other girls teased, and everyone laughed. About ten minutes later Susan made her escape, clutching the magazine securely under her arm. Up in the solitary shelter of her bedroom she read the cover story through. Then she went to lie on her bed and stare out at the rain. Rick Montoya. It was impossible to make herself believe that the man she had just read about was the same man who had given her shelter from the storm and had made such tender and rapturous love to her.
    She couldn’t write to him. Everything the article said had removed him further and further from her. He was wealthy from baseball, she knew that, but according to the article, he had been born wealthy. His father was a director of Avianca Airlines and he had grown up partly in Bogota and partly in New York. He had been drafted by the Yankees after college and had consistently been one of the best hitters in baseball ever since. He averaged thirty-eight home runs a season and had a lifetime batting average of .320. Susan didn’t know much about baseball but she gathered from the article that these were highly impressive statistics. He was twenty-eight years old. He was