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staring dizzily at the ceiling when she discovered that closing her eyes only made the sense of floating intensify.
    Marco and Stephen had both been good looking men, although Marco, in her opinion was by far the best looking of the two. Unfortunately, he also seemed to be the youngest. It had been dark inside the club, and there hadn’t been a lot of light outside, but she was pretty sure that Marco was probably barely legal.
    In any case, she thought he was just trying to be nice. He had seemed to be flirting, but she thought that might just be his personality.
    She didn’t know what to think about Constantine. Physically, he was pretty close to drop dead gorgeous in a completely classical sense. His facial features were almost too perfect, almost too symmetrical. It made her want to simply gape at him and at the same time more than a little uncomfortable to look at him. She doubted his physique was nearly as perfect as his face. He’d sounded European and they weren’t like Americans about such things. They weren’t constantly on a quest for physical perfection.
    It was hard to convince herself of that when he’d looked so fabulous in that suit 17
    he’d worn, but then maybe the suit made the man and not the other way around?
    Not that it mattered. He was way out of her league and even if he had been remarkably generous as a host she didn’t believe for a moment that he had any particular interest in her. She thought she’d probably looked as good tonight as she ever had in her life, but she knew her limitations and she didn’t doubt that they’d been very apparent to him.
    Then, too, he didn’t look to be much more than thirty if he was even that. She hadn’t had much opportunity for experiencing interaction with men, but she’d had plenty of opportunities to observe and it seemed to her that all of the men, whatever their age, wanted the women who were eighteen to twenty-five. That had certainly been the case of most of the couples that had passed through the boarding house. Married or not, they almost inevitably went into ‘pointer’ mode when a young girl walked by and everyone else was invisible.
    The thought prompted memories of her own attempts to date and her spirits took a nosedive.
    Sighing, she punched her pillow and rolled over.
    God! One mistake! And she was going to have to live with it forever, it seemed!
    Looking back, she wondered what had possessed her to confide her ‘deep, dark secret’ to her ‘best friend’. If she’d just kept her mouth shut no one would ever have known what a freak she was! But no, she’d just had to talk it out and Mary Ellen had just had to share that juicy tidbit with her cousin who’d had a mouth the size of Texas!
    Trying to evade the memories of all the awful things that she’d endured as a consequence, she rolled onto her back again and stared up at the ceiling. The unwelcome specter of times past descended on her in spite of all she could do, however, and Johnny Patterson’s hazy image filled her mind. Oddly enough, she couldn’t really see his face clearly anymore—just that smile that had charmed the sense right out of her and her pants off.
    She’d thought he was different, that he wasn’t like the boys she’d grown up with that had already been tormenting her for years. He was new to town, and she’d been stupid enough to think he hadn’t heard the rumors about her.
    She should’ve known better. Nanna had tried to warn her, but she’d been ‘in love’. She hadn’t listened and she’d paid for her stubbornness with pain and humiliation—and not just the pain of losing her virginity to a boy that knew very little more about sex than she did, who’d been rough and careless enough she’d cried. Then he’d topped it off by getting pissed off with her because the rumors weren’t true. She didn’t have two pussies! He was outraged, actually—and then he’d gone back to school and lied through his teeth to the other jocks, telling