Maidenstone Lighthouse by Sally Smith O' Rourke Read Free Book Online Page A

room, staring at my scarred front door like a lovesick teenager and absolutely positive that I’d never lay eyes on him again.
    Nevertheless, after a couple of hours, Bobby returned, bringing with him a huge container of steaming chicken and matzo ball soup—in honor of my injured jaw, he explained—and pastrami sandwiches from the corner deli. He also brought a bottle of delicious Chilean red wine and a bouquet of dewy spring flowers, which I ceremoniously enshrined in a priceless Steuben Crystal bowl that I was minding for an antique-dealer friend.
    Later, we sat cross-legged on my authentic but sagging Duncan Phyfe sofa, eating the deli take-out and listening to classic country-western CDs while Bobby quizzed me about my life, my work and my dreams.
    Sunday morning was just dawning as we slipped into the bedroom and made shy, gentle love for the first time.
    Except for one brief foray to a neighborhood market for supplies, we remained together in the apartment all day Sunday, cooking, laughing and making love to the soothing sound of the gentle spring rain.
    Early Monday morning, Bobby left on his trip, promising to call me when he arrived in Greenland.
    I stayed home from work that day, nursing my jaw, which had gone from being grotesquely swollen to merely turning a hideous shade of purple. Too agitated to concentrate on a book or the stack of appraisals I had brought home to write up on my laptop over the weekend, I alternately dozed and watched a mindless parade of game shows, soaps and other trash TV as I attempted to assess what had happened to me.
    Handsome and gentle, wild and adventurous, Bobby Hayward had swept into my life out of nowhere. Like the lead character in an idyllic, never-never land romance novel he had cared for me with the utmost concern and tenderness, talked with me for hours about books, music, life and philosophy. And, finally, perhaps more as the result of my desire than his own, for I certainly was no competition for Cindy Crawford and he was clearly fearful of further aggravating my injuries, he had made sweet, exquisitely thrilling love to me…
    Then he had flown off to a faraway place that I hadn’t previously imagined even had such normal, everyday things as people and airports and houses.
    Expecting my romantic bubble to burst at any moment, I hovered by the phone at the appointed hour when he’d said he was scheduled to arrive in Greenland.
    Miraculously, the phone rang and, sounding like he was across town and not in some distant, frozen land where the nights were six months long, Bobby confessed that he’d thought of me all the way across the North Atlantic. And I haltingly admitted that he had been on my mind as well. Then, suddenly, we were both talking and laughing like we’d known each other all our lives, and I had insisted on going out to the airport on Thursday to meet him.
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    God, it was all just so perfectly beautiful and exciting that it defies description. I never, ever wanted it to stop. And, except for the all-too-frequent times when Bobby was away on extended long-distance flying assignments, it didn’t. Not really. For though we’d had problems—mostly having to do with his erratic, often dangerous work and the amount of time he was gone—the time we did have together was fantastic.
    Bobby moved in with me the week after he returned from Greenland. Eighteen months later, we bought the loft on lower Broadway, which we were slowly remodeling. And we had been talking very seriously of late about getting married and having a baby…two or three babies, in fact.
    Then, just as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had all begun, my life with Bobby had ended.
    He’d been gone for over a week, flying three top executives of the oil company halfway around the world to conclude a merger with an Indonesian producer. And he was supposed to be coming home the next day, a Friday.
    I’d happily planned a long, lazy New York