Danielle Steel - The Promise

The early morning sun streamed across their backs as they unhooked their bicycles in front of Eliot House on the Harvard campus. They stopped for a moment to smile at each other. It was May and they were very young. Her short hair shone in the sunshine, and her eyes found his as she began to laugh.

Well, Doctor of Architecture, how do you feel?

Ask me that in two weeks after I get my doctorate. He smiled back at her, shaking a lock of blond hair off his forehead.

To hell with your diploma, I meant after last night. She grinned at him again, and he rapidly swatted her behind.

Smartass. How do you feel, Miss McAllister? Can you still walk? They were hitching their legs over the bicycles now and she looked back at him teasingly in answer.

Can you? And with that, she was off, pulling ahead of him on the pretty little bike he had bought her for her birthday only a few months before. He was in love with her. He had always been in love with her. He had dreamed of her all his life. And he had known her for two years.

It had been a lonely time at Harvard before that, and well into his second year of graduate school he was resigned to more of the same. He didn't want what the others wanted. He didn't want Radcliffe or Vassar or Wellesley in bed with him. He had known too many of those girls during his undergraduate days, and for Michael there was always something missing. He wanted something more. Texture, substance, soul. He had solved the problem for himself very nicely the summer before, with an affair with one of his mother's friends. Not that his mother had known. But it had been fun. She was a damned attractive woman in her late thirties, years younger than his mother, of course, and she was an editor at Vogue. But that had been merely sport. For both of them. Nancy was different.

He had known from the first moment he had seen her in the Boston gallery that showed her paintings. There was a haunting loneliness about her country-sides, a solitary tenderness about her people that filled him with compassion and made him want to reach out to them and to the artist who painted them. She had been sitting there that day in a red beret and an old raccoon coat, her delicate skin still glowing from her walk to the Charles Street gallery, her eyes shining, her face alive. He had never wanted any woman as he wanted her. He had bought two of her paintings, and taken her to dinner at Lockober's. But the rest had taken longer. Nancy McAllister wasn't quick to give her body or her heart She had been too lonely for too long to give herself easily. At nineteen she was already wise and well versed in pain. The pain of being alone. The pain of being left. It had plagued her since she had been put in the orphanage as a child. She could no longer remember the day her mother had left her there shortly before she died. But she remembered the chill of the halls. The smells of the strange people. The sounds in the morning as she lay in her bed fighting back tears. She would remember those things for the rest of her life. For a long time she had thought nothing could fill the emptiness inside her. But now she had Michael.

Theirs wasn't always an easy relationship, but it was a strong one, built on love and respect; they had meshed her world and his, and come up with something beautiful and rare. And Michael was no fool either. He knew the dangers of falling in love with someone different, as his mother put itwhen she got the chance. But there was nothing different about Nancy. The only thing different was that she was an artist, not just a student She wasn't still searching, she already was what she wanted to be. And unlike the other women he knew, she wasn't auditioning candidates, she had chosen the man she loved. In two years he had never let her down. She was certain he never would: they knew each other too well. What could there possibly be that she hadn't already learned? She knew it all The funny stuff, the silly secrets, childhood dreams, the desperate fears. And through him she had come to respect his family. Even his mother.

Michael had been born into a tradition, groomed since childhood to inherit a throne. It wasn't something he took lightly, or even joked about. Sometimes it actually frightened him. Would he live up to the legend? But Nancy knew he would. His grandfather, Richard Cotter, had been an architect, and his father as well. It was Michael's grandfather who had founded an empire. But it was the merging of the Cotter business with the Hillyard fortune, through the marriage of Michael's parents, that had created the Cotter-Hillyard of today. Richard Cotter had known how to make money, but it was the Hillyard moneyold money that had brought with it the rites and traditions of power. It was, at times, a heavy mantle to wear, but not one Michael disliked. And Nancy respected it too. She knew that one day Michael would be at the helm of Cotter-Hillyard. In the beginning they had talked about it incessantly, and then again later, when they realized how serious their affair really was. But Michael knew that he had found a woman who could handle it, the family responsibilities as well as the business duties. The orphanage had done nothing to prepare Nancy for the role Michael knew she would fill, but the groundwork seemed to be laid in her very soul.

He watched her now with almost unbearable pride as she sped ahead of him, so sure of herself, so strong, the lithe legs pedaling deftly, her chin tucked over her shoulder now and then to look at him and laugh. He wanted to speed ahead and take her off the bike there on the grass the way they had the night before the way He swept the thought from his mind and raced after her.

Hey, wait for me, you little twerp! He was abreast of her in a few moments, and as they rode along, more quietly now, he held out a hand across the narrow gap between them. You look beautiful today, Nancy. His voice was a caress in the spring air, and around them the world was fresh and green. Do you know how much I love you?

Oh, maybe half as much as I love you, Mr. Hillyard?

That shows what you know, Miss Nancy Fancypants. She laughed, as always, at the nickname. Michael always made her happy. He did wonderful things. She had thought so from the first moment he walked into the gallery and threatened to take off all his clothes if she didn't sell him all her paintings. I happen to love you at least seven times as much as you love me.