Matters of the Heart by Danielle Steel Read Free Book Online Page B

She could hear people speaking Italian, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, German, and French as well as English. And Finn ordered a martini as soon as they sat down. Hope ordered a glass of champagne, as she looked around. The same cartoons were on the walls. Nothing had changed since the last time she’d been there with Paul. It had been years.
    “Tell me how you got started taking pictures,” Finn asked as their drinks were served, and Hope took a sip of her champagne.
    She laughed at the question. “I fell in love with cameras when I was nine. My father was a professor at Dartmouth, and my mother was an artist. My grandmother gave me a camera for my birthday, and it was love at first sight. I was an only child, so I was good at entertaining myself. And life was pretty quiet in New Hampshire when I was growing up. As long as I had a camera in my hands, I was never bored. What about you?” she asked him. “When did you start writing?”
    “Just like you. When I was a boy. I was an only child too, so I read all the time. It was my escape.”
    “From what?” she asked with interest. Their art forms were different, but their creative talents were nonetheless a bond.
    “A lonely childhood. My parents were very close, and I think I felt left out a lot of the time. There wasn’t a lot of room for a child in their lives. They were older. My father was a doctor, and my mother had been a famous beauty in Ireland. She was fascinated by his work, and a lot less interested in me. So I developed a rich fantasy life, and spent all my time reading. I always knew I wanted to write. I wrote my first book at eighteen.”
    “Was it published?” she asked, impressed. And he laughed as he shook his head.
    “No, it wasn’t. I wrote three that were never published. I finally got published with my fourth. I had just graduated from college by then.” She knew he had gone to Columbia and then later Oxford. “Success didn’t come till a lot later.”
    “What did you do until you were published?”
    “Studied, read, kept writing. Drank a lot.” He laughed. “Chased women. I got married fairly young. I was twenty-five, it was right after my second book came out. I worked as a waiter and a carpenter too. Michael’s mother was a model in New York.” He smiled sheepishly at Hope. “I’ve always had a fatal weakness for beautiful women. She was a terrific-looking girl. Spoiled, difficult, narcissistic, but she was one of the prettiest women I’ve ever seen. She was young too, and things fell apart very quickly when we had Michael. I don’t think either of us was ready to have a child. She stopped modeling, and we partied a lot. I didn’t have a lot of money, and we were both miserable.”
    “How did she die?” Hope asked gently. What he was describing sounded more like a divorce in the making than a tragic loss for him, and she wasn’t far off the mark.
    “She was hit by a drunk driver, coming back from a party in the Hamptons late one night. We’d been separated off and on before, and thank God, she always left Michael with me when she went somewhere like that. She was twenty-eight years old, and I was thirty-three. We probably would have gotten divorced eventually. But I still felt awful about it when she died. And suddenly I was alone with my son. They weren’t easy years. But fortunately, he’s a great kid, and he seems to have forgiven me most of the mistakes I made, and there were quite a few along the way. I’d lost my own parents by then, so there was no one to help us, but we managed. I took care of him myself. It made us both grow up.” He smiled the smile that was half-boy, half-handsome prince that had been melting women’s hearts for years. It was easy to see why. There was something so honest and open and ingenuous about him. He didn’t try to hide his flaws or his fears.
    “You never remarried?” Hope was fascinated by his life story.
    “I was too busy with my son. And now I feel like it’s too late. I’m