A Promise to Cherish Read Online Free PDF Page A

made his undeniably handsome face even more good looking.
    She tossed a limp forearm over her brow. Handsome is as handsome does, she thought tiredly. She’d chalk this day up to experience and forget she had ever laid eyes on the man.
    The face of Floyd A. Fat Thorpe nudged Brown’s aside, and Lee wondered which of the two was more disturbing. Thorpe was going to be more offensive than ever after this fiasco. Especially since she had deliberately disobeyed orders and stayed the night in Denver. There were times when competing in a man’s world didn’t seem worth it. But she had to prove to herself she could . . . hadn’t she? Hadn’t she had to prove it not only to herself but also to everyone else who had helped wreck her life?
    She fell into a fitful sleep with the faces of Thorpe and Brown mingling in a collage of other disturbing faces from her past—Joel’s, the judge’s . . .
     
     
    A WAKENING with a start, Lee jerked her wrist up—seven thirty!—slid off the bed, and began undressing all in one motion.
    She ran a tubful of water, took a quick refreshing bath, and cursed the thin motel towels and cheap soap that scarcely lathered. Drying herself, she stepped to the vanity, then tossed the towel aside while she rummaged for her brush and began smoothing her hair. It reached just below her shoulder blades—a coarse, black mane thicker than wild prairie grass, so thick she leaned sideways at the waist as if its weight made her list. She leaned in the other direction, then stood straight, watching her breast rise and fall rhythmically with each brush stroke.
    Her hand stopped in midair, the brush momentarily forgotten as she somberly assessed her naked reflection. Unbidden came the seductive pictures of the magazine and with them the vision of Sam Brown’s face, his bare chest, his bare feet. She stared into her own dark eyes until her eyelids trembled, and she lowered her eyes. Her gaze moved down the long, lean neck to medium, pear-shaped breasts with dark nipples.
    Hesitantly she brought the brush forward and ran the back of it around the outer edge of her right breast. The cool, yellow plastic was strangely smooth and welcome against her skin. She drifted it along the hollow beneath the breast, then up to the nipple. Tingles of remembrance came fluttering.
    It had been a long time.
    There were things a woman’s body needed.
    She closed her eyes as she turned the brush over, thinking of the whiskers on a firm jaw as she felt the light scrape of bristles along the side of her full breast, down her ribs, across her abdomen to the hollow of her hip.
    A deep loneliness aroused memories of a past when her youthful dreams had consisted of rosy pictures of how life would turn out. Marriage, children, happy ever after. What had happened to all that? Why was she standing alone in a motel room in Denver, Colorado, remembering Joel Walker? He was married to someone else now, and, truth to tell, Lee no longer loved him. What she loved was the memory of those dreams she’d had when they’d first met, the wild want of each other’s bodies that they’d thought was enough upon which to build a marriage. She ached for the time before all the mistakes had been made, before Jed and Matthew had been born.
    Lee opened her eyes to find an empty, sad woman before her. A woman with pale stretch marks snaking from hip to abdomen as the only reminder of two pregnancies. She spread her fingers upon them and slumped against the vanity. Then she pushed herself erect and lifted her eyes. Damn you, Lee, you promised yourself not to get bogged down in recriminations over what can’t be changed!
    She took a firmer grip on the brush and began styling her hair, angrily brushing so hard her scalp hurt, dragging the heavy black mass around the back of her head and securing it just above and behind an ear in a heavy, smooth knot. Her skin was naturally bronze and needed neither foundation nor blush, but she accented her eyelids with