The Last Chance Read Online Free

important to me.
    She did love him. He was sexy and bright and cuddly, but she felt she was beginning to need more; not another man, but a part of her own life where she could be completely selfish. She was forty-two, with fresh, bright coloring and bouncy hair, a firm, curvy body—she looked no more than thirty. Even in the middle of summer she always looked as if she’d just come from a bath in a wonderful air-conditioned room. Her clothes were never wrinkled, her nail polish (she was the only woman she knew who even bothered to wear any) was never chipped. She was always carrying tote bags the size of small suitcases in order to look that way, but it was all part of her struggle to have something just for herself.
    She had met Robert when she was in college and he was at law school; he was three years older. She was twenty when she graduated, and they were married the day after her graduation. They had both grown up in the suburbs and it seemed natural to them to buy the farmhouse as soon as they could afford the first down payment. When the twins were old enough to walk to the school bus by themselves she started working part time in New York because she was bored. First she was a fill-in secretary, then a reader, and then an editor. She was working full time when the girls were in high school, and it never seemed to bother them any. They always enjoyed their time together more, and she was pleased to be able to say that Dorothy and Lynn were nice people, that she would have liked them even if they weren’t her daughters.
    She was dressed and having her second cup of coffee when Robert came into the kitchen. She kissed the back of his neck and his hand lingered on her rear end. “Nice ass,” he said. He said that every morning.
    “Thank you. It’s comforting to be appreciated at my age.” She grinned when she said it because she really did think she was thirty; it was always a shock to see the numbers when she had to write her date of birth on a document.
    “You’re just a baby,” he said.
    “I’m going to be late tonight, sweetheart. I have to have business drinks. Do you feel like driving into New York and taking me to dinner, or should I leave something here, or what?”
    “Or what,” he said.
    “No, come on, tell me.”
    “How late will you be?”
    “Nine thirty if I have to come back, seven thirty if we meet in New York.”
    “I’ll wait and take you out to dinner here. Take the express to Stamford and I’ll meet you at the station. Then you won’t have to cook. I have some work to do anyway.”
    “Then I’ll leave my car here and you can drive me to the station now.” She saw his raised eyebrow. “I mean, will you drive me to the station?”
    “Sure. When I’m dressed.”
    She looked at her watch. “Shit, it’s not going to work.”
    “Why not?”
    “I have a meeting at nine. It’s important. If I wait for you to drive me, I’ll miss my train.”
    “Well, then, why don’t you just come home and we’ll eat something here?”
    “Okay.” She took two steaks out of the freezer and put them on a shelf in the refrigerator. “They’ll be thawed by tonight.”
    “Goodbye,” he said, taking his cup of coffee into the bathroom.
    “Bye, darling.”
    That was really a scintillating conversation, Nikki thought with unaccustomed anger as she drove her car out of the garage. I wouldn’t have missed that conversation for the world. It was worth traveling two hours this morning and getting up at six A . M . just to have that conversation. What do a brilliant lawyer and a successful editor talk about at home, folks? Now you know.
    The train was only five minutes late, and Nikki settled into a window seat with the manuscript she was going to read on the trip. She was a fast reader and could usually finish a whole manuscript each way. She hadn’t bothered to tell Robert that her business drink wasn’t exactly a business drink, even though she could put it on her expense account because