Holiday Magic (Second Chance) Read Online Free Page B

soul mates and friends. Friendship is too precious to throw away. You may think that the love isn’t there anymore, but the opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference. If you didn’t feel something, you wouldn’t still be suffering so badly.”
    Georgia’s face hardened as she pulled her hand away. This was a fine time for her sister to become perceptive, more insightful than she would have preferred.
    “Friends don’t do what he did. There is nothing he can say to undo what happened. He cheated on me, Eleni, three weeks before our wedding! She was my friend and she got pregnant. That’s not a small thing. You can’t just say ‘oops, sorry,’ and move on. At least, I can’t.”
    “ Georgia,” said Eleni trying to be conciliatory. “Honey, I know you can’t, and I know that you don’t want to hear this, but I’m sorry. Lucy was equally responsible. In fact, I’ve always said she should have taken most of the blame, and as for the pregnancy, it was a false alarm. I never liked her. She used you and your contacts to get accepted by our crowd, but she was a viper, a poisonous one at that, and you just wouldn’t see it. What was she doing letting him into her apartment in the first place? Why wasn’t she with the rest of us?”
    “ You know the answer to that better than I do. I refused to speak to her as well. I was shocked when she had the nerve to send me that wedding invitation.”
    “ No one ever accused her of having a surplus of tact. Her excuse was pretty lame as far as I was concerned—too much cold medicine, my you-know-what! If he did show up there in a snow storm, she could have let him crash on the couch. At least she didn’t accuse him of forcing himself on her,” Eleni mumbled the last, just loud enough for Georgia to hear. “He’s a nice guy, an honorable man. Look, for what it’s worth, he doesn’t remember anything about that night. You’d know that if you let me talk about him once in a while.”
    “ An honorable man would have kept it in his pants,” Georgia sighed. “If he’d wanted sex that night, why didn’t he come to me?”
    And that’s the sticking point, she thought. It’s not as if I’d have turned him away. We weren’t celibate. Our sex life was just fine. Since she had stopped taking her pills, they might have created their child that night, but instead her world had fallen down around her. When she thought of it, she still wanted to curl up in a ball and die.
    The waiter came and cleared their plates away, giving Georgia time to compose herself. She was about to renege on the deal when Eleni looked at her with the ‘kicked puppy dog look’ that always got her what she wanted, and Georgia could never refuse. She had been prepared to face him, so why did having to see him more often seem so much worse?
    “Seriously, if you can’t do it, I’ll find a way to get out of the contract. It won’t be easy and may cost me the business…”
    Georgia sighed and shook her head. Eleni was a master manipulator. She knew how to push all the right buttons. She had been Daddy’s little princess, the one who always managed to need rescuing, while Georgia had been his little soldier, going out to take on the world and take care of her sister. When had that ended? When had she lost the ability to face the world?
    She could not deny her sister anything. She had used this as her excuse to finally leave New York. She wouldn’t back out now.
    “ I said I’d do this for you, and I will, but I’m setting some ground rules. You can inform Mark that I’ll accompany him to the Ball, but I will not be his date . There is only so much I can take. As soon as I can leave, I’m out of there. As for the rest of it, he can do what he has to do, but we aren’t friends anymore. In fact, other than business, we really shouldn’t have anything to say to one another. If he can’t abide by that, Meg or Sam can mind the store. I won’t leave Philly right away, and when I do, I