Bittersweet by Danielle Steel Read Free Book Online Page A

Amie. I was looking forward to it, until he got me all riled up.”
    “Drink enough wine, and you'll forget all about it. Which reminds me, I'm having lunch with Dan again on Tuesday.”
    “I think that's a dumb thing to do,” India said bluntly, putting a box of tomatoes into her basket. “What's that going to do for you?”
    “Amuse me. Why not? We're not hurting anyone. Rosalie is in love with Harold, and Jeff will never know, and he'll have my undivided attention for six weeks in Europe.” To Gail it seemed like perfect justification, but to India it didn't.
    “It seems so pointless. And what if you fall in love with him?” That was a whole other issue. If what Gail wanted was to be madly in love again, one of these days it might happen. And then what would she do? Dump Jeff? Get divorced? To India, the risks just didn't seem worth it. But on that score anyway, she and Gail were very different.
    “I'm not going to fall in love with him. We're just having some fun. Don't be such a spoilsport.”
    “What if Jeff were doing the same thing, wouldn't you mind?”
    “I'd be bowled over,” Gail said with a look of amusement. “The only thing Jeff ever does at lunch is go to his podiatrist, or get his hair cut.”
    But what if he wasn't? What if they were both cheating? To India, particularly in her current mood, it seemed pathetic.
    “You need to get a haircut, or a manicure, or a massage or something. Do something to cheer yourself up. I'm not sure giving up a story about dead babies in Korea is something to get so depressed about. Get depressedabout something that would be a shame to miss, something fun …like an affair….” She was teasing her then, and India shook her head and grinned ruefully at her.
    “How can I love you, when you are the most immoral person I know?” India said, looking at her with affectionate disapproval. “If you were a stranger, and someone told me about you, I'd think you were disgust-Lag.”
    “No, you wouldn't. I'm just honest about what I do, and what I think. Most people aren't, and you know that.” There was certainly some truth to that, but Gail went a little overboard both with her point of view and her honesty about it.
    “I love you anyway, but one of these days you're going to get yourself in one hell of a mess, and Jeff is going to find out about it.”
    “I'm not even sure he'd care. Unless I forgot to pick up his dry cleaning.”
    “Don't be so sure about that,” India assured her.
    “Dan says Rosalie has been sleeping with Harold for two years, and he had no idea until she told him. Most guys are like that.” It made India wonder suddenly if Doug would suspect if she were having lunch with another man. She liked to think so. It was one of the many things she believed about him. “Anyway, I've got to run. I have to take the kids to the doctor for checkups before we leave for Europe. They're going to camp as soon as we get home, and I haven't even filled out their health forms.”
    “Maybe if you stayed home for a change, you could do it at lunchtime,” India teased her, as Gail waved andhurried off to the checkout counter, and India finished buying what she needed for the weekend. It was certainly not an exciting life, but maybe Gail was right. The assignment in Korea would have been a very depressing story. She would have wanted to come home with an armful of Korean babies to save them from getting murdered when no one else would adopt them.
    She was still in a somber mood later that afternoon when she picked up the kids and drove home. Jason and Aimee had friends with them, and they all made so much noise that no one noticed that she wasn't talking.
    She fixed a snack for all of them, and left it on the kitchen table when she went to take a bath. She had called a sitter that afternoon, and she was going to put dinner together and rent videos for them. For once, India had some free time on her hands, and she luxuriated in the bath, thinking about her