Love Is Lovelier Read Online Free Page B

Charlotte said. “Now I’d better get going before Julie hunts me down.” Her assistant had a nose a bird dog would envy.
    Anne watched as her daughter walked away, pleased that, for once, Charlotte had voiced a concern to her.
    And wondered how much longer the two of them could keep deceiving one another with pep talks when all around them, darkness was encroaching.

    “G- MAMA !” a small voice cried out an hour later.
    “Thank you, Leo.” Anne patted the arm of the hotel’s longtime bartender, though the gossip he’d passed along was disturbing. “I’ll talk to you later.”
    “Sure thing, Miss Anne.” He turned with her, his face wreathed in grins. “So there’s my girl.”
    “Hi, Mr. Leo.” Daisy Rose bounced from one foot to the other. “G-mama’s taking me to the zoo!” She looked up at Anne. “Right?”
    “Absolutely.” Anne bent to pick her up, not as easy a proposition with a nearly-four-year-old as with a toddler, but Daisy Rose was petite, thank heavens—and Anne wasn’t ready to give up the pleasure.
    “Mama, she’s too heavy,” Anne’s third daughter Sylvie protested. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
    “I will not.” Mentally sighing at yet another overprotective child, Anne closed her eyes and indulged in a cuddle.
    “I love you, G-mama.” As free with her emotions as her mother, Daisy Rose snuggled into Anne’s embrace.
    “I love you, too, precious.” In a rhythm as instinctive as it was familiar, Anne stood there, rocking from side to side as she had done so often with her own babies.
    How had her daughters become grown women so quickly?
    Daisy Rose peered up at Leo with enormous blue eyes. “Mr. Leo, I’m pretty thirsty.”
    He laughed, knowing exactly what was coming and having the sense to silently consult Sylvie with raised eyebrows.
    “As if it would do any good to say no,” Sylvie said with a smile. “You’d just indulge her when I left for the gallery.”
    “Got me there.” He turned to Daisy Rose. “I just might have the makings for my special fruit punch somewhere around here. Want to see?”
    “Yes!” Agile as a little monkey, she shinnied down from Anne’s arms. “I’ll be right back, G-mama. Can you wait for me?”
    Anne pressed a kiss to her curly hair, a shade darker red than Sylvie’s. “I’ll wait, but the elephants might not.”
    The little girl’s eyes rounded. “I’ll hurry.”
    “Only a little drink, Leo,” Sylvie called out. She turned to Anne. “I didn’t pack any extra panties today. Sorry, Mama.”
    “Daisy Rose does very well, I think. Better than someone I know,” Anne reminded her daughter with a grin.
    “Sure, rub it in that I was the slowest to potty-train. Not my fault that Charlotte’s an overachiever or that Renee and Melanie caught on faster.”
    “You always took your sweet time getting to any destination,” Anne said as she observed her daughter’s unique style of dress. Today it was a long, slim eggplant skirt and blouse with an eye-popping lime green belt and scarf. “But your journeys were generally more colorful than your sisters’.”
    Her daughters were so distinct from one another. They didn’t always see eye to eye—seldom did, in fact. But the bond among them held strong and true. That was, in the end, all that mattered.
    “Except with Jefferson,” Sylvie said of her fiancé, whom she’d known only a matter of weeks. “My head is still spinning.” Her expression sobered. “You don’t thing we’re moving too quickly, do you, Mama?”
    Anne studied the face of her free-spirited child, uncharacteristically hesitant. “He isn’t what any of us would have predicted for you,” she said. Jefferson Lambert was twelve years older and a widower with a teenage daughter. “But when you know, you just…know. It was like that with your father.”
    “I sure didn’t feel that way at first.” Sylvie laughed. “I was furious with my sisters for hooking me up with an old fogey lawyer.”
    “That