Tides of the Heart by Jean Stone Read Free Book Online Page B

staining her fingers in brown-yellow tinge. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she managed to say. “I didn’t know …”
    “Well, you do now.” Loretta abruptly closed the door, leaving Jess alone on the stoop.
    Jess slipped her hands into her coat pockets and stared at the door, as if waiting for it to open again, as if expecting Miss Taylor would be there this time, saying what a terrible tease her sister was and always had been, and why didn’t Jess please come in and sit down.
    She stared at the door, but it did not open. Slowly, Jess realized that it would not. She stood there, feeling a dull pull on her heart, the pull of yet another loss, another thread torn from the fabric of her life.
    Miss Taylor was gone.
    Miss Taylor was dead.
    As the blunt knife of reality carved a new hollow inside her, Jess also realized that without Miss Taylor, she might now never know the truth. Miss Taylor, the one person Jess had been able to trust.
    The sky grew darker. A sudden spray of sleet began to pelt her face.

Chapter 4
    Maybe she was just a little bit horny. Ginny sat on the edge of her bed and laughed, knowing that being a little bit horny was probably like being a little bit pregnant.
    She touched her hand between her legs; she slowly rubbed the warm, dry spot within.
    Nothing.
    Not the tiniest tingle nor the dewiest drop of moisture hinted that her hormones needed tending to.
    She flopped her naked body back on the bed where she’d been for nearly forty-eight hours and flung her hand over her head.
God
, she thought,
I’m not even freaking horny.
    She closed her eyes. Why was she feeling so uncomfortable, so damned displaced, as if her mind had left her body and was floating around in outer space, looking for another ride? Looking for a better place to live?
    She wondered if this was grief: the kind of shit those mindless people on those mindless talk shows went on and on about, as if they were the only ones who’d ever been screwed by life.
    Somehow, Ginny doubted if her problem was simply grief. She’d been there. She’d done that. But grief for herhad always meant a time of living, a time of screwing, a time to reaffirm the fact that she was still alive, that she was still a person. Grief was party time. Grief was not the time to lie across the bed naked and alone, touching herself to see if she had any desire left at all. Touching herself and coming up with a sad, pathetic nothing.
    No, this couldn’t be grief. She shuddered at the thought that maybe Jake had had the last of Ginny’s sex, that he’d had the last of her predictable, gushable, wondrous orgasms. As a lover, he hadn’t even been that good, with a smaller-than-average uncircumcised penis that spent more time drooping toward his balls than pointing up at her. It had been, she knew, the reason he’d tolerated her escapades with all the others—the tight-assed, washboard-stomached others whose dicks knew where to go and how to make her beg for more.
    But something had happened after Ginny found Lisa. Something weird and strange. For finally she’d stopped running; she’d stopped needing more. She had her husband; she had a daughter. They both wanted to be a part of Ginny’s life, though who the hell knew why.
    She rolled onto her side now and ran her hand across her flesh, over the humps of her firm, silicone-implanted breasts, bought and paid for with Jake’s money, like everything else in her life.
    It had been a miracle that he’d never learned about Brad.
    Pinching her nipple, waiting for the spark between her legs that did not come, Ginny thought about the night she’d fucked Jake’s son.
    She’d been dressed in one of her hottest dresses, the white trapeze, unbuttoned nearly to her navel, the hem grazing her suntanned thighs. Jake was gone. Out of town again, leaving her alone. She’d hit Club LeMonde, in search of action. But the guy who picked her up turned out to be a virgin and thought she was his mother.
    So she’d come home. Drunk.