My Way Back to You (Harlequin Large Print Super Romance) Read Online Free Page A

erratically again. “You surely can’t believe I would ever allow anyone to lay a hand on him.”
    “For God’s sake, Mags, tell me what we’re discussing here.” His grip became a near-squeeze.
    If she’d used her napkin as a gag, which she now wished she had, her mouth couldn’t have gone any drier. A sip of water helped lubricate the passage of the words she’d swallowed so many times. “The last week Zeke was alive...two days before he went into the coma...he told me he’d been having an affair for quite some time. Five of the six years we’d been married.”
    Sympathy softened Jeff’s stern look, but his shoulders sagged in obvious relief that this didn’t involve Russ. “Wow, that must have been staggering for you.”
    She nodded. “He told me he was deeply in love with her and had planned to ask me for a divorce. But then the brain tumor was diagnosed, and it seemed foolish to put everyone through that additional heartbreak.”
    “So why tell you at all?”
    Maggie sipped some more water, giving herself time to decide if she could get through this. “He wanted to see her.”
    Jeff released his hold and leaned back as if he needed to view her from a wider angle. “You didn’t...”
    “Yeah, I did.” The lead brick that had pressed on her heart for three years began to crumble as she finally shared the horrific details she’d kept bottled up. “I called and told her he was asking for her. She took more than a little convincing...seemed bent on the idea that I was luring her down there to make a spectacle of confronting her in front of people. But she finally came, and I gave them several hours alone to say their goodbyes. I put a no-visitors sign on the door so they wouldn’t be interrupted.”
    Jeff closed his eyes, and when he opened them he pinned her with a look that was a mixture of incredulity and disbelief. “Why?”
    “Why not?”
    “He was unfaithful and you rewarded him?”
    “He was dying. I would hardly call that a reward.”
    “But for you to be civil to her... Kind, even.”
    She shrugged. It was difficult to explain why she had handled things the way she did. “Something was never right between Zeke and me. We got along. Had a good time together. He was good to Russ. But I think I married him more out of loneliness than love.” She stopped short of admitting there had never been the rush of adrenaline for Zeke the way there had been for him—even her reaction at seeing him today. The surge of primal pleasure that time and emotional pain could not erase. She paused for breath and shook some propriety back into her logic center. “I shouldn’t be discussing this with you. It’s too personal. You and I are practically strangers now.”
    “We’ll never be strangers, Mags.”
    “Well, maybe not strangers,” she acquiesced. “But thirteen years without face-to-face contact is a long time.”
    His mouth rose slightly on one end. “Too long.” His tone brought a flutter to her stomach that she attempted to stymie with a gulp of wine. “So why didn’t you tell anyone? I mean, the sorrow and grief must’ve been unbearable. It might’ve helped to talk to somebody.”
    “I considered talking to Mom, but that felt like a knee-jerk reaction, and it would only upset her. I thought about counseling, but, with him gone, the affair seemed like more of a testimony against
me
than him. It was hard to admit to myself, much less somebody else, that I’d made such a huge mistake. Again.” Her voice broke on the last word.
    Jeff glanced away, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed hard. She knew that mannerism. It was what he did when he was upset or displeased, and she felt the weight of that displeasure in her stomach.
    Yeah, I failed at my second marriage, too.
She didn’t have to say the words. She knew what he was thinking.
    No longer hungry, she pushed her plate back and dabbed her mouth with her napkin.
    “Do you want dessert?” Sure enough, Jeff’s normally rich