Forbidden Dreams by Judy Griffith; Gill Read Free Book Online Page A

feel better.”
    She stared at him as memories swirled around in her mind, solidified, clarified, brightened. “Jasie?” she whispered, as if tasting the word. “Jasie … Not Jason but … Jasie.” She shook her head as she looked at him. “O’Keefe doesn’t ring any kind of bell.”
    “Maybe you never knew my last name.”
    “Maybe. Good grief … such a long time ago. Sand castles, chocolate-covered raisins, and—” She gulped. “Crabs.” She shuddered with remembered disgust. “Oh, yuck!”
    Gazing at each other, they shared a moment’s laughter, warm and friendly, connected by a vivid image dredged up out of the past.
    Jase’s heart did strange things as Shell’s laughter rose in an irrepressible tide, bubbling out of her as she stared at him in mingled delight and disbelief. She smiled as her laughter died, a big, wide, all-over-her-face smile that lit up her eyes and crinkled her nose, and Jason O’Keefe came closer to falling in love than he ever had before.
    That day, Shell remembered, she’d sat on the beach in her yellow bathing suit—it had had ruffles around the rump and across the top, and strings that tied behind her neck—and built a castle with Jasie on a little patch of sand in front of a small house very similar to the one they sat in now. Lord! A whole continent away. A whole lifetime ago. A summer of magic and joy and castles in the sand.
    Castles, of course, had needed occupants, and the tiny crabs, no bigger than a child’s thumbnail, that lived under the rocks at the edge of the sand spit were available. Jasie had been sharing his chocolate-coated raisins with her, and she, off in one of her frequent flights of fancy, with one hand full of candy, other full of crabs, had momentarily forgotten which hand was which …
    “After you’d spit out the crabs,” Jase reminded her, “and washed out your mouth and finished all my raisins to take the taste away, you told me you loved me best of all and that when we were big, we’d get married, and I could kiss you, and then we’d have lots of babies.”
    She looked at him in wonder. “I was six.”
    He nodded. “Six-and-a-half as you frequently reminded me. And I was ten.” They gazed at each other, and Shell could almost feel the heat of the summer sun. She remembered the long days of play, the feel of the sand, the scent of salt and driftwood and smoke from beach fires along the Rhode Island shore. She closed her eyes to savor the memories, recalling, too, the taste of ripe, juicy peaches, the slow, flooding sweetness of strawberries crushed against the roof of her mouth, the delight of chocolate-covered raisins and having a friend for the very first time in her life.
    “Jasie … I imagine you outgrew that name a long time ago.”
    He chuckled. “No one else ever called me that. I’m sure if there’d been other kids around, I’d have made you stop, or at least pretended my middle name was Charles or something, and that ‘Jasie’ was ‘J.C.’ ”
    “I’m sure if there’d been other kids around no ten-year-old boy would have been caught dead playing with a six-year-old girl.” Smiling, she shook her head. Of course there had been other friends since, other summers and other treats, but that summer had been special, not only because of having a friend. It had given her the one thing she had never enjoyed before—total privacy and her mother all to herself. No one had known who she was, or more important, who her mother was.
    There had been no huge Hollywood house with its servants and security, no on-location trailer. There had been no governess, no big car with its driver who took her mother away every morning before Shell awoke and sometimes didn’t return her until after Shell was in bed. There had been no cameras, no flashbulbs dazzling her eyes, no prying questions or gushy reporters wanting to touch her hair or fluff out her dress or admire her and ask her if she wanted to grow up to be exactly like her beautiful