In Serena's Web Read Free Page B

single-handedly start a soup kitchen for street people in one large city and refurbish an orphanage in another city, and carried her bodily from a picket line she’d joined after hearing ten minutes of passionate rhetoric on a street corner.
    He was torn between an urge to tie her up and load her instantly on a plane to California, and the fascinated desire to see what she’d do next.
    Serena never
tried
to get into trouble, Brian thought with a sigh as he paced. She was soft-spoken, sweet-natured, tenderhearted, polite … and somewhere underneath all those gentle layers was the soul of a kamikaze pilot.
    She could punch a cop in the eye for threatening to arrest a derelict old man (whom Serena had just met), then tie on an apron and ladle out soup in a kitchen founded—in a single afternoon out of Brian’s sight—in an abandoned building while various bewildered businessmen found themselves unloading their personal cars full of contributionsof canned goods or their personal wallets of dollars for Serena’s cause.
    She could dive gleefully over the side of a steamboat on the Mississippi because she wanted to swim, then offer to baby-sit three toddlers so that their mothers could have an hour or so of peace on the boat. She could defeat Brian soundly at poker by dealing with a dexterity that would have had her instantly blackballed in any casino in the world, then drag him to a movie during which she could cry silently over the death of the hero.
    She could stand up to the Scrooge-like administrator of a tumbledown orphanage and call him names that had made
Brian
blush, then sit among a group of enthralled children while telling gentle fairy tales.
    Three weeks …
    Brian felt that he hadn’t quite dared to breathe during those weeks. It was an emotion somewhere between fascination and horror, leaving him with sleepless nights but a smothered chuckle somewhere deep inside him.
    And now—
now
—this enigma of a woman, thisgentle, kind, compassionate, sweet,
ruthless
woman had her sights set on the playboy of the Western world. She thought she’d get married. As simple as that.
    Restless, Brian paced over to the sliding glass door leading out to his balcony. He went out into the warm night, leaning against the railing and gazing absently over the secluded garden three floors below. Moments later he stiffened unconsciously, his eyes following two people as they walked along one of the winding paths.
    The man was tall but virtually unrecognizable in the soft lights concealed in the shrubbery, but Brian knew the woman; he would have known that midnight-blue evening gown anywhere.
    He barely felt the railing cut into his hands as he gripped it, and only half heard the soft curses that escaped without his volition. Damn the woman, he thought, she was really going to do it.
    She was going to try to catch a rake.

TWO
    B RIAN WASN’T QUITE sure that Serena would show up as usual for their breakfast together. He was early himself, primarily because he’d decided to stay up until after five A.M., watching the sunrise with a jaundiced eye. That was sometime after he’d grown tired of reminding himself that Serena was certainly of age, and it was no business of
his
if she didn’t return to her room until after dawn….
    If she returned to her room while he was staring moodily at a truly spectacular sunrise, hedidn’t hear her. And he had his door ajar. Accidentally, of course.
    Showering and shaving had given Brian time for reflection, but it hadn’t really helped. After three weeks of Serena’s nerve-racking company, he could hardly feel anything other than a strong sense of responsibility toward her. She was, he told himself fiercely while narrowly avoiding the amputation of his right earlobe, as incapable of taking care of herself as a week-old kitten.
    Never mind, his intellect sneered, that she appeared to have survived quite intact for twenty-six years. That was different.
He
hadn’t known her then.
    He did now.
    By