Lucky Penny by Catherine Anderson Read Free Book Online

laid all her eggs in a communal nest. The nuns had been affectionate, but their attention was spread thin. Only determination and an abundance of individuality made Brianna stand out. To this day, she could remember how she’d yearned for her favorite nun, Sister Theresa, to notice her. Maybe that craving had pushed Brianna into becoming bolder. A harsh reprimand from the sweet little nun had been better than no special consideration from her at all.
    Brianna frowned thoughtfully as she fixed a gathered sleeve to the armhole of the garment. It had been from Sister Theresa that she’d first heard the proverb “Pride goeth before destruction.” Those had been only words to Brianna as a child. It had taken the harsh lessons of experience years later to teach her their meaning.
    Well, she had learned, all right, and the events triggered by her reckless behavior at age eighteen would haunt her for the rest of her life. Tears of regret stung Brianna’s eyeswhenever she thought of those times, for it had been her sister, Moira, who had paid the price for Brianna’s indiscretions, her sister who ultimately was destroyed.
    Spilled milk, and no sense in crying over it
. Moira had been dead for more than six years, and the time for weeping had passed. Now all Brianna could do was keep her promise to raise Moira’s daughter as her own. She’d been unable to do it in fine fashion, but at least she’d managed. Not even Daphne knew Brianna wasn’t her real mother, and unless Brianna allowed herself to dwell on the past, she seldom remembered it, either. Daphne was her child in every way that counted.
    Running footsteps thumped outside on the boardwalk. Then, as if Brianna’s musings conjured her up, Daphne burst into the shop. Brianna didn’t have to see the child to know it was her. No adult would create such a clatter and bang with door and bell. Biting back a smile, Brianna turned, swept aside the curtain that separated her cubicle from the display room, and settled a censorial gaze on her daughter, who now added to the din, slamming the portal closed without a thought for the additional noise.
    “Quiet! You know how angry Miss Martin gets when you make a racket!”
    Flushed from running in the chill breeze, the six-year-old bounced across the plank floor, golden curls tumbling over her shoulders. Sometimes Brianna wondered where the girl had gotten her church-angel fairness. From the man who’d raped her mother, she supposed, for neither Brianna nor Moira had ever been blond, even in early childhood. Daphne had blue eyes instead of green. Only her finely arched brows, so like Brianna’s own, marked her as an O’Keefe. Right now she shifted from one foot to the other with excitement as she waved a fat envelope beneath Brianna’s nose.
    “It’s from Papa!” she cried. “Look, Mama! He sent heaps and heaps of money! I just asked for one new dress, but this is enough for a hundred!”
    Papa?
    Bewildered, Brianna plucked the envelope from herdaughter’s hand. A cold sense of unreality washed over her as she perused the return address, written in a bold, masculine hand:
Marshal David Paxton, No Name, Colorado.
    It couldn’t be. David Paxton didn’t exist. Brianna had invented him one long-ago night in Boston, and forever after she had claimed he was her husband and the father of her child. He wasn’t an actual person, only a man she’d dreamed up to lend her an air of respectability in a world that ostracized women who bore children out of wedlock.
    “Look, Mama!” Daphne cried. “He sent lots and lots! Maybe even enough for”—the child gulped before voicing her dearest and most oft-repeated wish—“shoes, too?”
    Trembling with shock, Brianna shushed the child again and parted the envelope to peer at the currency.
Dear God in heaven.
In all her twenty-six years, she’d seen this much money only once, after she’d left Charles Ricker’s employ and emptied her five-year savings account to rent the attic