Taking Her Time Read Online Free

was Tucker’s lie that Carly and he were planning a private party of their own in another motel room that pointed the finger of a movie-star’s seduction night away from Carly. Tucker had said that he tried to stop Billy Bob Smith’s beagle from running through the partially opened motel door—the dog was gone when Norma arrived, of course—but that was when they’d both discovered the dead man. And, Tucker had added, he’d just happened to overhear how Simon Gifford, star of one pitiful film ten years ago, loved wearing women’s nighties.
    It was Tucker’s lie—that he was there with the intent to seduce Carly—that made her father decide that they would be married right away.
    The Incident had gotten her wedded and bedded before her time. Before she was someone in her own right.
    The motel—the only one in town—was also where Tucker and Carly had spent their wedding night. And for every moment thereafter in their two-year marriage, Carly had resented their “shotgun wedding”—but her father would hear of nothing less than marriage.
    It was where on her wedding night that she’d learned that Tucker hadn’t waited for her, and Ramona Long had nabbed him first.
    Now Carly’s father resided in a cemetery outside town and her mother had remarried and Anna Belle’s house was Tucker Redford’s—to say nothing of Livingston, whom Carly had always adored.
    After working fourteen-hour days, she’d planned to unwind by tending those roses and the yard and baking cookies and polishing old beloved furniture…. The pretty picture she’d had of coming home to Anna Belle’s house had crumbled, the pieces drifting away on the fragrant summer air.
    Cars passed slowly by on the street, and she recognized the few people who waved at her. No one stopped because they knew exactly her history with the Last Inn Motel and how she was trying to deal with it. Of course, they only knew that she and Tucker had discovered Simon Gifford’s body accidentally. They probably thought that now she would leave Toad Hollow for good, but she wasn’t ready just yet.
    Not with Tucker in possession of her grandmother’s house.
    She closed her eyes and leaned back against the car’s headrest. She didn’t have her grandmother’s house. She didn’t have her grandmother’s parrot, and worst of all she had no place to stay in Toad Hollow. On her way to the reading of the will, she’d picked up her boxes from the post office and she was homeless—not counting her Denver apartment.
    â€œTucker.” He’d stood there in the July sun, tanned and fit and big, with water dripping down his too-long wavy hair and his blue eyes as cold as ice, just like his heart.
    The water had dripped down onto his tanned chest and when he’d crossed his arms, muscles jumped beneath those smooth hard pecs, and so did his nipples. Back when they were comparing boy and girl nipples, Tucker could always move his more than she could—
    Carly groaned and let another tear slide down her cheek. She just had to know why Anna Belle let Tucker buy her house when Carly had always wanted it.
    And there was something in that house that Anna Belle had been keeping for her that Carly wanted more than the house—the diary that told everything she’d ever done or felt or experienced with Tucker. If it ever surfaced, her humiliation would be complete.
    As it was, her humiliation was only half-complete.
    She had to get in that house.
    She had to know why Tucker had the house and Livingston.
    If he had already found the diary she’d left in Anna Belle’s keeping—
    Carly felt an odd warmth creeping up her cheeks. She didn’t want to think about Tucker reading her most intimate thoughts, about her lust for him, about how every argument in their marriage had crushed her—she wouldn’t let him see how badly she’d