Beloved Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page B

wheel.
    Susan closed the door and slowly walked back to the living room. Maria, the Colombian maid who did the cooking and cleaning for Ricardo, had been given the afternoon off in honor of the wedding, and Susan was alone. She stood silently in the middle of the living room and stared at the lovely marble fireplace. This was “home.” It didn’t feel like home, was nothing at all like the comfortable old clapboard house she had grown up in, but she was going to have to grow accustomed to it, she told herself firmly. She looked carefully around the large, high-ceilinged room. It was lovely, she admitted. The molding and wainscoting were beautiful, as was the shining wood floor. It just was far more elegant than what she was accustomed to. Far more rich.
    Ricardo’s home was a stately Georgian colonial, built of brick and slate and set on a wooded couple of acres in north Stamford. He had bought it two years ago, he told her when she first arrived home with him, and his mother had furnished it for him. The furniture was not the style Susan would have chosen, but she found herself liking the carved Spanish pieces very much.
    Perhaps it was a good sign: she would have something in common with the mother-in-law she had yet to meet. Ricardo’s mother had lived in Bogota since his father’s death and came north only once or twice a year to visit her son. Ricardo also had two sisters, both quite a bit older than he, and both married and living in Bogota. “When the season’s over we’ll go visit them,” he had told her casually.
    “Ricardo, the baby is due in October,” she protested.
    “We’ll go for Christmas, then, and bring him along. My mother will be thrilled. You know how women are about babies.”
    It was not a visit that Susan looked forward to. Ricardo’s mother might be thrilled to see the baby, but Susan very much doubted if she’d be thrilled to see the bride her son had so hastily wedded.
    Oh well, she thought, as she walked slowly about the downstairs rooms of her new home, no use borrowing trouble. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. She passed through the large dining room, which also boasted a marble fireplace, and into the two rooms she was most familiar with: the breakfast room, where they ate their meals, and the family room with its lovely french doors leading out to the slate patio. “It’s scarcely what one would call a starter home,” she said out loud with a laugh of real amusement.
    There was only one room on the first floor that she hadn’t been in and that was the study. She walked in now and looked around slowly. The room was paneled and lined with bookshelves. Susan went over to one wall and looked at the titles; they were almost exclusively nonfiction. There were a number of books, both in Spanish and English, about Latin American politics. There were quite a lot of books on sports; not just baseball but soccer, tennis, golf and skiing. There was an Encyclopedia Americana and a full set of Sherlock Holmes. There was a small assortment of best-selling thriller-type novels. My God, thought Susan. There is so much I don’t know about him. She collapsed heavily into a comfortable leather armchair and stared at a photograph of Ricardo that was hanging on the wall. It looked as if it were a newspaper photo that had been blown up and framed. It showed what was clearly a moment of victory; the three men in the picture were all laughing and one of them was pouring a bottle of champagne over Ricardo’s head. His face, dark, vibrant, filled with triumph, was the dominant point of the photograph. Susan looked at that thoroughly male picture and inwardly she quaked.
    How on earth were they going to build a marriage, she thought almost despairingly. If she had searched the earth over, it would have been impossible for her to find a person so utterly opposite to her. She was quiet and introspective, reserved and shy. That night in the blizzard had been completely out of character for