Tempting Fate by Carla Neggers Read Free Book Online Page B

she’d handed it to Mattie. “Couldn’t she have taken a shower first?” But overall it was a good piece. Dani was as unpretentious and as totally honest as ever. Maybe she wasn’t as smooth and as prepared as she could have been, but her energy shone through every quote.
    But those gate keys…
    Feeling stiff and old, Mattie climbed slowly to her feet. She had to use the rail. She went back inside, where a ceiling fan, much like the one she remembered in her father’s house in Cedar Springs, helped keep her front room cool. She’d pulled the drapes to keep out the hot sun. The room seemed dark, crowded, too much like the Witt front parlor on West Main Street a thousand miles—a thousand years—away. Mattie concentrated on the roses and Prussian blue of her decor, colors her father would never have chosen. She caught her breath before going upstairs.
    In her small feminine bedroom she sat on the edge of her four-poster bed. A lace-curtained window overlooked the hidden garden behind her town house, where she spent many peaceful, solitary hours among her roses, hollyhocks, morning glories and asters. She had a good life here. Few regrets.
    She opened the old Bible on her bedstand. Even before she could talk, her father had taught her his favorite psalms. She remembered them all. They were a part of her. On dark nights they’d come to her, sometimes in her mother’s almost-forgotten voice, or Naomi’s, even her father’s. Never in the voice of the child she’d been. It was as if that girl had never existed.
    With a trembling hand she set aside the obituary of her father from the Cedar Springs Democrat that Joe Cutler had sent her, and the letter she’d received from his commanding officer telling her of Joe’s death three years later, because Joe had asked him to. That was before Quint Skinner, that snake, had written his book.
    She came to the photograph Joe had taken of Lilli and herself going up in the balloon that warm, clear August night. “I thought you’d want it,” he’d written.
    Mattie switched on her clock radio, just to have something to listen to. Frank Sinatra was singing.
    â€œThere’s nothing romantic between Nick and me,” Lilli had assured her mother-in-law during their balloon ride over Saratoga. “I’m not infatuated with him or anything like that—it’s just that no one understands me the way he does.”
    Mattie had known exactly how Lilli felt, and she’d tried so hard to explain. “Darling, it’s not that Nick understands you—it’s that he’s willing to let you be whoever you want to be. He demands it. He’s a rare man in that he has no expectations of you whatever.”
    On the flip side, Nick had no expectations of himself, either. For a woman who’d based her goals and ideas on the expectations of others—parents, husband, society—being exposed to Nicholas Pembroke’s talent and vision and enthusiasm for life, his love of freedom without responsibility, could be an enormously liberating and intoxicating experience. But there were costs. Always there were costs.
    For Mattie, those costs had been her home and family. To be free, she’d had to leave them behind all those years ago. There had been no opportunity for compromise, no possible middle ground. Yet even after six decades, the pull of home and family on her remained strong. Every day something would catch her off guard and trigger a memory of her stern father, of her dark-eyed little sister, of the people and oak-lined streets of Cedar Springs. Mattie didn’t regret her choices. She treasured her independence, her good years with Nick, their son, the work she’d done, the life she’d made for herself in New York. She’d had time to put the costs of her freedom into perspective.
    Had Lilli discovered, too late, what those costs would be for herself?
    Frank Sinatra stopped