Moonlight Plains by Barbara Hannay Read Free Book Online Page B

turned to him. ‘Earth to Josh? I was asking if you’d like to go to Greece.’
    ‘I can’t,’ he said simply.
    Sally blinked at him in surprise. ‘Really? Why not?’
    Josh was dark enough to look as if he had Greek heritage – black hair and eyes and lovely olive skin. Fancifully, she imagined some long-held family secret that prevented him from ever going to the country of his forefathers. But Josh was looking at her so sadly that she felt an icy chill.
    ‘I can’t go with you, Sally.’ He looked far more serious than her casual suggestion warranted.
    ‘Josh, what’s wrong? I don’t understand.’
    To her horror, Josh was starting to fade before her very eyes. As they stood there on the rocky outcrop looking out at the bay, with the sun shining on their backs and a gentle sea breeze wafting pine scents over them, her husband grew fainter and fainter.
    ‘Josh!’ she cried in panic, but now he was no more than a ghostly outline. ‘Josh!’
    She woke, gasping, to find herself lying in a strange room, and cruel reality crashed over her. A soft moan escaped. Josh was gone.
    Dead.
    The horror of it seized Sally, sickened her. Once again she had to face the awful truth. She’d lost Josh forever. He was never coming back.
    Now, with the dream and the regret so fresh and raw, she looked around her, appalled to find herself at Moonlight Plains, in Luke Fairburn’s bedroom, in his swag on the floor.
    She’d slept with another man. For the first time in her life, she’d slept with a man who wasn’t Josh.
    Silver moonlight had given way to the creamy blue of early morning and Luke was already out of bed. The smell of frying bacon drifted from the kitchen. On the wall in front of Sally, Kitty Mathieson’s pink dress hung from a coat hanger on a hook, and Sally remembered taking it off very carefully last night. Luke’s hired suit was on another hanger beside a shelf that held his other roughly folded clothes – signs that commonsense had prevailed before the longing and passion had overtaken them.
    Sally winced now, as she remembered how that longing and passion had played out.
    What have I done?
    She couldn’t shake off the dream and the happiness of being with Josh. For precious moments, he’d been so real, so gorgeous. She’d been able to touch him, to smell him, and she’d been euphoric, buoyed by an over-the-top joyousness and sense of wellbeing, as happy as she’d been on the night of the surprise birthday party she’d organised for him, when she and their friends had hidden in the flat, waiting in happy expectation for his knock on the front door.
    Instead two sombre policemen had arrived to tell her about Josh’s accident. ‘Mrs Piper? Mrs Joshua Piper?’
    Once again, Sally was gripped by the horror of losing her husband, and remorse clung to her like wet clothing, making her feel terrible about last night . . . as if she’d sinned.
    It was so hard to believe she’d let it happen.
    Clearly, all the loneliness and the isolation of the past thirty months, all the suppressed longing had been ticking inside her like an unexploded grenade. And last night it had seemed as if the whole world was waiting for her to take a step . . . and that step had taken her into Luke’s arms . . . his bed . . .
    She couldn’t have been luckier, really. He’d been lovely.
    More than lovely. He’d swept her away and lit flames of longing that had taken her by surprise. She’d gone a little wild, she remembered now, blushing.
    But thinking about it so soon after her dream, her guilt came back tenfold. Now she felt as if she should apologise to Josh.
    Her social experiment – primarily to please her friends – had gone too far. Way too far. How could she have behaved like that, as if . . .
    As if she was available?
    Luke turned from the frying pan and sent Sally a smile as she came into the kitchen. He looked as attractive as ever with his rumpled, sun-bronzed hair and the whole cowboy thing