"TXT - Nora Roberts - Dream 03 - Finding The Dream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberts Nora)

And she was so much in love.

He had hinted at marriage, gently. She understood that this was to give
her time to consider. If only she knew how to let him know she had
already considered, already decided he was the man she would spend her
life with.

But a man like Peter, Laura thought, needed to be the one to make the
moves, the decisions.

There was time, she assured herself. All the time in the world. And
tonight, at the party to celebrate her eighteenth birthday, he would be
there. She would dance with him. And in the pale blue dress she'd chosen
because it matched his eyes, she would feel like a princess. More, she
would feel like a woman.

She dressed slowly, wanting to savor every moment of preparation. It was
all going to be different now, she thought. Her room had been the same
when she'd opened her eyes that morning. The walls were still papered
with those tiny pink rosebuds that had grown there for so many years.
The winter sunlight still tilted through her windows, filtering through
lacy curtains as it had done on so many other January mornings.

But everything was different. Because she was different.

She studied her room with a woman's eyes now. She appreciated the
elegant lines of the mahogany bureau, the glossy Chippendale that had
been her grandmother's. She touched the pretty silver grooming set, a
birthday gift from Margo, studied the colorful, frivolous perfume
bottles she'd begun to collect in adolescence.

There was the bed she had slept in, dreamed in, since childhood--the
high four-poster, again Chippendale, with its fanciful canopy of Breton
lace. The terrace doors that led to her balcony were open, to invite the
sounds and scents of evening inside. The window seat where she could
curl up and dream about the cliffs was cozy with pillows.

A fire burned sedately in the hearth of rose-grained marble. Atop the
mantel were silver-framed photos, the delicate silver candlesticks with
the slim white tapers she loved to burn at night. And the Dresden bud
vase that held the single white rose Peter had sent that morning.

There was the desk where she had studied all the way through high
school, where she would continue to study through what was left of her
senior year.

Odd, she mused, tracing a hand over it, she didn't feel like a high
school student. She felt so much older than her contemporaries. So much
wiser, so much more sure of where she was going.