It's like, how can she get romance and money at the same time.' 'Dancing's fun, and I guess romance is okay as long as it doesn't make you stupid. The quick tug on the braid only made Mac giggle. So I'm going to be a ballbuster and go to parties with Madonna.' She lives on the Upper East Side and goes to parties with Madonna. She tells my mother how she doesn't have time for marriage, and she doesn't need a man to be complete and stuff.

'Uh-uh.' With her tongue caught in her teeth, Laurel tirelessly twined another section of Mac's hair into a long, thin braid. 'But you have to have romance,' Emma insisted. 'When I'm a successful businesswoman living in New York, I won't have time for romance.' Laurel, her own sunny blond hair streaked with green from a lime Kool Aid treatment, worked her fashion sense on Mackensie's bright red. Brown would come in now and then to see what they were up to.īut mostly, it was just the four of them.

Grady, the housekeeper, would bring the cookies and milk. In the spring, her favorite time there, she loved to stand on the bedroom terrace, smell the gardens of the Brown Estate and the green from the grass if the gardener had cut it that day. When they had a sleepover at Parker's, they were allowed to sit or play on the terrace outside her bedroom until midnight if the weather was okay for it. They could stay up as long as they wanted, even all night. When they had sleepovers, they talked and talked for hours about everything, and listened to music or watched movies. She longed to dance in the moonlight in a secluded garden.īecause she could see so clearly how it should be - would be - she described the scene, every detail, to her best friends. The way her heart would beat (the way it beat now as she imagined it). She could imagine it, the scent of summer roses, the music drifting out of the open windows of a ballroom, the way the light turned the edges of everything silver, like in the movies. Dancing in the moonlight in a secluded garden, now that reached the height of romantic on her scale. A woman with romance in her life lived as grandly as a queen, because her heart was treasured.įlowers, candlelight, long walks in the moonlight in a secluded garden.

Romance made every woman beautiful, and every man a prince. ROMANCE, IN EMMALINE'S OPINION, MADE BEING A WOMAN special.

Bed of Roses by Nora Roberts