скачать книгу бесплатно
Sophie's Secret
Tara Taylor Quinn
One secret leads to another Sophie Curtis lives a big secret. She’s been having an affair with Duane Koch. Their days and nights together are their own oasis away from the world. It’s unconventional but, given the difference in their ages and her troubled past, it works for them. Then Sophie finds out she’s pregnant. An instant family could lose Duane his once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity.The right thing would be for her to bow out of his life. But when he surprises her with a proposal, will she have the strength to walk away from the man she loves?
“Welcome home, babe.”
With knees gone uncharacteristically weak, Sophie managed to take the two steps to reach Duane and leaned forward to kiss him.
Long.
And again.
Her mouth opened, her tongue meeting his, and she didn’t want to let go, to break away from this perfect moment.
Time, society, ages, past mistakes and bulimia all faded away, leaving only what mattered most, what would go with her into the next life – her heart. And the heart to which hers was irrevocably attached.
“I missed you,” she said, finally pulling back far enough to reconnect with those deep chocolate eyes that could look at her with such warmth.
“Here.” Duane held out her glass, the smile on his lips completely genuine. “Here’s to you coming home to me.”
Sophie’s Secret
By
Tara Taylor Quinn
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
About the Author
With more than forty-five original novels, published in more than twenty languages, TARA TAYLOR QUINN is a USA TODAY bestselling author with over six million copies sold. She is known for delivering deeply emotional and psychologically astute novels. Ms Quinn is a three-time finalist for the RWA RITA® Award, a multiple finalist for the National Reader’s Choice Award, the Reviewer’s Choice Award, the Bookseller’s Best Award and the Holt Medallion. Ms Quinn recently married her college sweetheart and the couple currently lives in Ohio with two very demanding and spoiled bosses: four-pound Taylor Marie and fifteen-pound rescue mutt/cockapoo Jerry. When she’s not writing or fulfilling speaking engagements, Ms Quinn loves to travel with her husband, stopping wherever the spirit takes them. They’ve been spotted in casinos and quaint little small-town antiques shops all across the country.
Available in August 2010from Mills & Boon®Special Moments™
Daddy on Demand by Helen R Myers & Déjà You by Lynda Sandoval
A Father for Danny by Janice Carter & Baby Be Mine by Eve Gaddy
The Mummy Makeover by Kristi Gold & Mummy for Hire by Cathy Gillen Thacker
The Pregnant Bride Wore White by Susan Crosby
Sophie’s Secret by Tara Taylor Quinn
Her So-Called Fiancé by Abby Gaines
Diagnosis: Daddy by Gina Wilkins
For the three penguins:
we know who we are and we know what we do.
In this life and beyond.
Chapter One
“GO, 344. GO 345.” Sophie Curtis spoke sotto voce into the microphone protruding from the headpiece she wore. She stood in the pitch-black area left of stage, reading the sheet on the podium by a penlight. Just three more cues and…
“Fade lights. Go curtain.” The heavy, velveteen drape slid quickly down.
Dancers, singers and actors scrambled, bumping into each other, cursing, mumbling, then, three seconds later, fell into place, a perfect shape of bodies and colors, all smiles and glitter and…
“Go lights. Go curtain.”
Applause thundered through the large, Midwestern university theater, the crowd at this January fund-raiser growing louder with each carefully choreographed bow. The sound rumbled inside her. Like bilious waves on a rocky sea.
The applause reached excruciating heights when Damon Adrian, off Broadway’s newest heartthrob—a sure star for the silver screen—stepped forward.
One minute. Two. And then…
“Go curtain. Go house lights.”
Sophie pulled off her headset, dropped it on the podium, then desperately pushed her way through the throng of moving bodies high on adrenaline. Pushed all the way through the dancers’ dressing room, to the restroom then to the farthest stall.
Where she promptly threw up.
FUNNY HOW BATHROOM TILE all looked the same. Did the world have an agreement—everyone use the same tile so people would immediately recognize the place for what it was? Feel at home there? Or was it simply the cheapest flooring material that could withstand public use?
This stuff needed to be re-grouted. But then—
“Soph?”
Recognizing her friend’s voice, Sophie grabbed some toilet paper, wiped her mouth again—then pulled another wad for her eyes—and stood. Prayed she was done.
“Yeah?”
“Hey.” There was a tap on the stall door. Annie’s bluetipped tennis shoes, her strong dancer’s ankles, were planted on the other side. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Sophie swallowed. “I’m fine.”
But she wasn’t. She was scared to death. And as soon as Annie saw her face, she’d know it.
“Soph? Open the door.”
Déjà vu. Like old times. Sophie had thought she was done with all that. Had confidently told Annie so just the night before.
“Sophie…”
How concern and authority could blend so painfully in one word, Sophie didn’t know. Had never known.
But she recognized the tone as though she was still that twenty-year-old undergrad at Montford University in Shelter Valley, Arizona, rather than the twenty-eight-year-old successful theatrical producer she’d become.
Like that twenty-year-old she’d once been, she opened the door. And couldn’t meet her friend’s eyes.
How many times, during those years of doing shows together—Annie as a dance major and Sophie majoring in theater production—had she had to face her friend on the other side of a stall door?
“Oh, Soph. You said you were done with all that. That it had been years—”
She glanced up. “It has been.”
“Show me your finger.”
Sophie’s long nails were legendary, though they were shorter now than they had been in college, and the bold colors they used to be adorned with had toned down to pale pinks. She held out her right palm—middle finger extended straight up.
“It’s not broken off.” For years the nail of that finger had been a short stub necessitated by Sophie’s addiction to sticking it down her throat. Tonight, it was even with the rest—an eighth of an inch beyond her fingertip.
“I know.”
“So…”
“I didn’t consciously do it,” Sophie said, fighting panic—and myriad other emotions that were what got her into trouble in the first place. And every place after that, as well.
If she could keep the different parts of herself neatly packed away in their respective compartments, she’d be fine. It was only when the emotions took over, spilled over, that she had problems.
They hadn’t spilled over in years.
“I…really…I didn’t know what was happening.” At least not that she’d been able to acknowledge to herself.
She wanted to go home.
To lock herself inside her two-bedroom stucco abode on her acre of desert and sleep until she was better.
Frowning, Annie grabbed Sophie’s still-extended finger, holding on. “So you didn’t do it to yourself? You have the flu?”
One shouldn’t sound quite so happy at the possibility that one’s friend was sick.
Sophie couldn’t answer.
“Soph?”
“It didn’t feel like the flu,” she finally admitted.
“You were able to control it,” Annie said, knowing the signs, having gone through all the symptoms with Sophie the first time. “Your thoughts made it happen.”
When she’d been distracted with the show, the nausea had gone away. Did that count?
Sophie could have said the words aloud, but she knew the answer. Yes, it counted.
“I brought it on myself.”
Which was ridiculous. Most particularly here—at a show. Here she was a successful, confident woman. Period.
With Phyllis, her Shelter Valley friend and onetime counselor, Sophie could let the little girl inside come to the surface. Maybe. If she had to.
“Ah, Soph, I thought things were great. These past two weeks, working on the show, you’ve seemed so happy. Why didn’t you say something? We could have taken time away, really talked.”
Why hadn’t she said something? Why hadn’t she told her friend the whole truth? Why hadn’t she told Annie—someone who’d known her before, who would understand—that she was struggling? Why hadn’t she admitted, even silently, that she’d allowed herself to return to a place she’d vowed never to revisit?
Bulimia-ville.
“I didn’t know.” Sophie answered her own last question first. “I swear, Annie, this is the first time. And it really wasn’t a conscious choice. I just…I guess old habits really do die hard. Or don’t ever die. They just lie there, waiting to attack you when you’re at a weak point.”
“You know the signs, Soph. The symptoms.”
Nodding, Sophie thought over the past few months. The past two years. When her sexual being had come back to life.
She thought of Duane. And quickly shut that mental door.
“I didn’t see it coming,” she said. “I’m older. Successful. I have many reasons to feel good about myself. I really thought I wasn’t susceptible anymore.”
Another dancer, a guest performer in the evening’s closing performance, pushed through the door from the dressing room, said, “Sorry, I gotta pee,” then, with a smile in their direction, dashed into a stall.
“Let’s go find a place to get something to eat,” Annie said, pulling Sophie in the direction of the door.
“You’ve got a cast party to get to.” She’d been here two weeks and had managed to avoid any one-on-one personal conversation with the woman who’d once been such a close confidant. “And I really should hang around while they tear things down.”
“The local techies are going to get all of that.” Annie pointed out what they both knew. “And you’ve got time to finish up paperwork in the morning before your flight back to Phoenix.”
Sophie allowed herself to be pulled into the bustle of a quickly emptying dressing room. “But your party—”
“Is nothing compared to you,” Annie said softly. She approached her seat at the long, lighted dressing table, throwing things in her bag with an unusual disregard to orderliness. “It’s not like I haven’t performed with these people before, or like I won’t again.”
Sophie went to collect her things.
LIFTING HIS GLASS, Duane peered at the small, select group of men and women gathered in the living room of his Phoenix high-rise condo. The party was unofficial. A Saturday-night get-together of friends.
The friends just happened to be the most powerful political movers and shakers in the state of Arizona.
“You’re the one, buddy,” Robert Anvil said, touching his glass to Duane’s as the rest of the small group nodded.
Looking to Will Parsons, the one man in the room he truly trusted, one of the few people in the world he considered a friend, Duane waited. And only drank when he received Will’s quiet nod.
Any other evening he and Will got together it was at Will’s home in Shelter Valley, a small town an hour’s drive from Phoenix. Shelter Valley had been home to Will Parsons all his life, and a regular stopping place for Duane the past two years.
The two men had met in college—at Montford University, the Harvard of the West. Will was now president of the renowned educational institution. His wife, Becca, standing next to him tonight, was mayor of Shelter Valley.
Neither of those facts was the reason Duane considered them friends.
Toast completed, talk broke out among the twenty people who’d come together to informally offer Duane their party’s nomination for the senate seat in Arizona’s state election the following fall.
