Birthright Read Online Free PDF

to participate. Abraham Steele had implied that he would help bankroll the program, but he died before we got anything down on paper.”
    She turned back to him. “You came here for money?” she asked, sounding suspicious.
    “Yes.” No sense trying to sugarcoat it.
    She regarded him for a long silent moment. “Why?”
    Because your husband left you drowning in cash, he wanted to say. Instead, he relied on tact. “I’ve talked to lots of people about making donations. It’s a good program, but with adequate financial support it could be great.”
    “Thirty dollars a week from the participants isn’t enough?”
    “No.”
    “Then why don’t you charge more?”
    “Like I said, this is for kids whose parents can’t afford expensive summer programs.”
    “They can’t afford it, and yet you’re charging them thirty dollars.”
    “Because if we didn’t charge anything, they wouldn’t value it as much,” he explained. “If their parents pay thirty dollars, they’re going to show up every day and appreciate it. If it was free, they’d come now and then, when they remembered. Itmeans more to them if it costs money, even if it’s just a nominal amount.”
    She nodded. Then she turned from him and gazed out at her backyard. A detached garage stood in one corner at the end of the driveway. A trellis on the side of the building held climbing yellow roses. The lawn was as uniformly green as in front of the house, but it was broken up with little patches of flowers. An apple tree stood close to the porch, its blossoms long gone.
    She was thinking, and he let her. A bird chirped somewhere nearby, and the breeze rustled the leaves of the tree. He returned his attention to her painting, wondering why she’d chosen to paint that jug, instead of the tree, or the flowers, or anything else on her well-cultivated property.
    She finally met his gaze once more and broke the silence. “Did someone tell you I was rich?”
    He used to be a pro when it came to lying, and although he was out of practice, he didn’t think he’d lost his touch. But he couldn’t bring himself to lie to her, not about this. He sat up straight. “I heard about your husband dying,” he said. “I’m real sorry.”
    She turned away again, her gaze traveling from her painting to the screened back door, to the porch’s freshly painted white railing. “Thank you,” she said in such a dull, flat voice he almost questioned her about it. Did she think he was just paying lip service to her loss? Did she think he was happy her husband had died? Even when he’d been spending the better part of every night dreaming about her, he’d known she was never going to be his, so her marrying someone else didn’t matter to him. If her husband hadbeen poor, his death would have been sad. As it turned out, he’d been rich and it was still sad.
    So why did her eyes appear so hollow? Why was she looking at him as if he wasn’t even there? All he’d done was offer his condolences. Nothing unusual about that.
    Unless there was more to her husband’s dying than he knew.
    He didn’t want to know. All he wanted was for the life to come back into her eyes.
    “All right,” he said, leaning forward again as if he could will her to cheer up. “Yes, I’ve heard rumors you inherited some money. This is a small town. People talk.”
    His candor brought a spark back to her eyes. “No kidding,” she muttered, evidently not pleased that people talked—even though he couldn’t imagine anyone ever saying anything bad about her.
    “So I thought I’d give you a try. It’s a terrific program, and if I can get a little extra money, I can hire an assistant and handle more than ten kids a week. I also want to hire a certified water-safety instructor so the kids can use the pool when they aren’t playing hoops. Right now I can’t budget any of that into the program.”
    She appraised him, her gaze steady and mildly intrigued. “You have only ten children in this