Keeping Secrets Read Online Free

chin then kissed my neck, igniting me. “You tricked me,” I said with a gulp.
    â€œYou’re absolutely right,” he answered, then pulled me against him and kissed me hard, and it was good, so good to kiss him back and feel his hand move up and loosen the bow around the neck of my blouse, then, one by one, to fiddle the buttons loose. He picked me up and carried me to the bedroom, which I had darkened earlier for my own protection, and we shed each other’s garments easily, naturally as though we had done this many times before. He was dealing the cards now, and could have had it any way he liked but he took it slowly and gently, caressing my neck, stroking my hair, fondling my breasts, moving his hard thighs between my legs and still going slowly, slowly, giving me time to find my own joy with him first, over and over again, before I felt the final deep thrust, the quick rush, flowing warm inside, which left his body spent and limp above mine. We held on to each other for a long time afterward. It seemed almost as though the years had not come between, and I was doing the thing I had so ardently wished to do the day I watched him walk away … to hold him.
    Much later in the evening, when finally he rose, he said, “I’ll keep no key to these rooms. Think it over for as long as you like, and when you’ve decided, give me a call at my office downtown. I’ll leave my card on the dresser.”
    At the door he added, “My man Hope has been told a woman—a widow named Mrs. Dexter—is visiting the city. She’s an old friend of mine. Should she call while I’m out, he is to find me immediately.”
    This was my first acquaintance with Emory’s style: no bouquets, no bended knees or anxious eyes awaiting the reply; yet I had to smile at his thoroughness. When he was gone I fell asleep and didn’t awake until very late the following morning.

3
    One week later we were married in a tiny chapel hidden within the confines of a monstrous cathedral. My decision had not been without reservations, which I openly discussed with Emory beforehand. First, there was to be no mention of what he knew of my past. Ever. Neither was he to question me about the parts he did not know.
    Secondly, there was the matter of children. I felt a man so well established would expect offspring from a marriage, so when I explained I was barren I watched his expression carefully for signs of disappointment. To my surprise he said quickly, “I got a bellyful of squawling brats growing up. I have no desire for any of my own.”
    â€œAnd you’re certain you won’t ever change your mind, come to resent me?”
    â€œYou can count on it.”
    Once we had that businesslike conversation behind us, I felt more confident. Somehow this tying up of loose ends helped me to accept the fact that for the first time in twenty years I was truly letting my heart rule my actions. Emory had awakkened something in me that I had thought long since dead. Perhaps I’d loved him through the years as he claimed he’d loved me. Yet if so that feeling for him certainly lay dormant until he appeared in my life again. From the morning I awoke in the hotel suite, I missed him terribly.
    I tried cold reasoning. I tried mentally listing all the risks that lay at the altar for me. I tried not thinking about him. I tried to convince myself that I would get over him; after all, what were a few hours compared with all the time I’d managed to survive without him? But through it all I kept going back to the day so long ago when he’d walked away from me in Childers, and how it hurt, and somehow that quickly closed the chasm which had widened between us with the years, and I knew that I would be a fool to let the only man I ever cared about walk away again.
    On the day before the wedding Emory drove me through a pouring rain to see a house he wanted to buy for us, located a few blocks from