Moonlight in the Morning by Jude Deveraux Read Free Book Online Page A

started driving again but couldn’t help wondering if Kim could have been wrong, as the trees seemed to be getting closer together. She could believe that the world ended at Aldredge Road. But then there was a sharp left turn and the space opened up in a striking way. Before her was a big white house, two stories, with dark brown shutters at the windows, and a green roof with dormer windows. Surrounding the house was a perfectly mown lawn with enormous shade trees that looked like they should be in a botanical garden.
    She slowly drove over the gravel to the front and stopped her car. “Hello?” she called as she got out, but there was no answer. She looked around for a moment and had that age-old feeling that someone was watching her, but she saw no one. Probably her imagination. Stretching, she breathed deeply of the fresh air. It certainly wasn’t New York!
    She tried the front door of the big house, and it was unlocked. Tentatively, she stepped inside and found herself in an enormous living area with a fireplace to the left. There was a beautiful arrangement of furniture. The mixture of styles, ranging from wood frame to Edwardian plush, with some art deco thrown in, looked as though all of it had been put together over several generations. The fabrics were in good shape, not really new, but worn enough that they looked lived-in. The big, round-arm sofa lookd orm sofaed inviting.
    As an artist, Jecca admired the room. It looked as though everything had been gathered over eighty or so years—or one truly brilliant decorator had created it.
    There was a doorway beside the fireplace and she went through it to enter a dining room that had to be thirty feet long. There was a long table at one end, but the room could have held something befitting a banquet hall. “Arthur and all his knights could fit in here,” she said aloud.
    To her left she heard a door open and close. She went through the double doorway toward the sound and entered a long, narrow conservatory, with three walls and a ceiling of glass. Shades with thin bamboo sticks sheltered the room from too much sun.
    At one end was a cozy circle of chairs, again of different styles and fabrics that had been skillfully chosen to seem mismatched but that were perfectly attuned to one another.
    Around the furniture were plants. There was a variety of them, but for the most part, there were hundreds of orchids. They hung from the ceiling in square wooden pots, their white and green roots peeping out, their long, graceful leaves arching, the stalks of exotic, colorful orchids floating above. A bench went around the perimeter of the room, and it was covered with a mixture of potted plants. There were feathery ferns nestled among the exotic flowers.
    She’d never seen such a variety of orchids. There were big, wide ones that looked like giant butterflies and ranged in color from brilliant fuchsia to dazzling white. Tiny flowers, some of them speckled, clustered on other stems. She saw big gaudy flowers, the kind matronly women wore on their shoulders in the time of President Eisenhower.
    On the floor were huge pots, some of the containers so big they’d need a crane to move them. Spilling out from them, cascading down, were thousands of the beautiful flowers. Under the shelf, in complete shade, were strange-looking blooms that had a sac at the bottom, with petals of deep purple and green.
    Jecca did a slow turn to look about the room. “Gorgeous! Truly breathtaking,” she said, as words seemed to fail her.
    “I’ll pass on the compliment to Tris.”
    Jecca turned to see her friend emerge from the plants and for several moments there was squealing and hugging.
    “You look great!”
    “So do you!”
    “Have you lost weight?”
    “I love that color on you!”
    They hugged more, truly glad to see each other. They’d met on their first day in college when they’d been assigned as roommates, and they’d never parted. They had shared a dorm room and later an