AFTERGLOW by Catherine Coulter Read Free Book Online Page A

dinner."
    Elliot rose, hugged her against him and said, "Let's go marvel over the little devil together, okay?"
    Mrs. Cambrey, their live-in nurse, appeared at that moment. She smiled. "You heard him, I guess?"
    "Oh, yes, Anna. Why don't you go relax? Papa and I are going to do the honors."
    "You two do too many of the honors now," Anna said. "I'm getting lazy and fat."
    "It'll be my turn tomorrow," George said. "I'm going to pig out at a Mexican restaurant with a very dear, starving friend of mine."
    George eyed Chelsea speculatively as she sipped her spritzer. It was a beautiful clear day, and they were lunching at Chelsea's favorite Mexican restaurant in Mill Valley.
    George had waxed eloquent about her perfect son for a good fifteen minutes, giving Chelsea time to down one glass of white wine.
    "I understand you're working under a deadline," George said, finally changing the subject as she crunched on a tortilla chip. "Hmm, yummy hot sauce."
    Chelsea blinked. "You know I'm not. Where did you ever get that idea? I'm in the middle of the third book of the San Francisco trilogy."
    "Oh, dear," George said, looking guilty, "I forgot. Forgive me, Chels. Have you decided what to order yet?"
    "George," Chelsea said, bending her patented stare on her friend, "come clean."
    "I think I'll try the macho burrito, with beef, not chicken. Come clean? It's just a silly misunderstanding, I'm sure. It's just that David told Elliot he wanted so much to apologize to you, and you told him you didn't have the time for him."
    "So I lied," Chelsea said, shrugging elaborately. "I told you how obnoxious he was, George. Apologize, beans! That eastern uptight idiot probably doesn't know the meaning of the word."
    "What do you think, Chels? Do refried beans come with the lunches?"
    "George," Chelsea said in her most menacing voice. She had to put her flame on simmer because the waitress came up with a big smile and her pencil poised over her order pad.
    "Another white wine for my friend, please," George called after her a moment later, as she left with their orders.
    "Now," George said, "let me tell you something maybe you don't know about David." Unlike her husband, George was a firm believer in Machiavellian means. After all, she'd taken good care of her brother, Tod. Well, maybe not completely, but …
    "I don't want to hear anything about that jerk!"
    "It seems that what he said, the way he reacted to your joking around, was all the result of his first wife. It seems that once, when he had just finished a thirty-six-hour shift as an intern, he wasn't able to … well, perform. His wife laughed at him." Dear heavens, I should be an author! Brilliant!
    If Chelsea were wearing socks, she would have been startled out of them, George thought. Indeed, she seemed so upset that it didn't occur to her to think it unlikely that any man would admit to nonperformance, much less to a woman laughing at him about it.
    "But … but I wasn't laughing at him! How could he have thought that? We were joking around, talking about necking and Mark I and Mark II heroes, and we ended up on the sofa. All I did was nibble on his neck—maybe not all that funny, but I was kind of nervous. I just did a tiny bit of my Dracula routine. George, for heaven's sake, I'm not used to lying around with a man on top of me."
    I wasn't, either, until Elliot. She said in her most consoling voice—at least she hoped it was consoling—"Poor David, he's so lonely, you know. You must realize that he misses his kids something awful, and he works so hard. Sometimes eighteen hours a day, Elliot told me."
    Chelsea sat back in her chair, her white wine in one hand, her chin propped up on the other. "You know, he did very well with my crazy friends that night. And he was amusing, and funny. I just never thought that … well …"
    "Exactly," said George. "Ah, here's my macho burrito!"
    Chelsea stared down at her nacho plate, but for one of the few times in her twenty-eight years she didn't have