Her Secret Read Online Free PDF Page A

into smooth and unbroken wall.
    Danial led me over to his bedroom’s small
anteroom. The fire within his wood stove was burning cheerily, the
warmth relaxing.
    “Sit down with me.”
    I sat down in front of him obediently. When
he sat down behind me, I tucked myself into the hollow created by
his shoulder and neck, leaning back into his arms.
    “I’ve missed you,” he said softly. “We sat
here many nights like this, you and I.”
    Danial had built this room for me. We’d
enjoyed it often in the year and a half I’d lived with him. It
closely resembled the central room at my house, his wood stove the
same model that I had at my home. I’d missed this too, but
admitting that would lead to more confessions. “It’s good to be
here with you, too.”
    “Now that we’re relaxed, what is inside the
envelope?” Danial said pointedly. His arms tightened over me. “It’s
clearly something you didn’t want Theo to find. Marking it with the
name of your first husband wasn’t safe enough. You had to bring it
here.”
    My relaxed mood vanished in an instant.
“Poetry from Devlin,” I admitted. “It was in the box with the
boots. Theo’s going to be alone in the house tonight, and he knows
the safe’s combination. I couldn’t risk him finding it by some
freak accident.”
    I didn’t mention the gold choker with
Devlin’s emblem of the grizzly bear that was also in the envelope.
If Danial discovered that, he would not just be furious, he’d
surely destroy it.
    “Who was the poet?” Danial asked.
    “There was a book of poetry and some he’d
written himself. I burned the book, but I couldn’t bear to destroy
his words to me. No one ever wrote me poetry before.”
    Danial was as tense as a board behind me.
“Did he ask you to come to him?”
    “Yes,” I said softly.
    “Then he gave you a way to get in touch with
him,” Danial replied. “Have you contacted him yet?”
    “No,” I said honestly. “And I’m not going
to.”
    “Sar, I know how much you liked being with
him,” Danial said jealously. “Don’t tell me you’re not going to go
back for seconds now you’ve tasted all that he is.”
    I pulled away angrily and stood. “Don’t
presume that you know what I feel for him. Even if it was more than
physical with us, which it isn’t, I can’t trust him. Dev wouldn’t
restrain himself like you just did, no matter how important it was
to my welfare.”
    “Darling,” Danial said sarcastically. “I know
exactly what you feel. It’s in your voice like syrup when you speak
of him.”
    “If I was going to go with him, I’d have gone
when he asked me that night,” I said angrily. “I’m old enough to
know that men don’t always mean the words ‘I love you’ even when
they say them repeatedly.”
    Danial’s mouth dropped open. “He said that to
you? When? During sex?”
    I blushed, casting him a reprimanding look.
“He said it many times.”
    “What did you do to him?” Danial said
in wonder, looking at me as if he’d never seen me before.
    I blushed deep red, thinking about Devlin’s
ardent cries of love as we’d sated ourselves in the front seat of
his Hummer. “Nothing, um...abnormal.”
    Danial gently drew me down again and hugged
me. “You should have told me this. It explains everything.”
    “Devlin said a lot of things that day, and
I’d be surprised if half of them were true,” I said bitterly. “But
that’s my fault. I asked him to lie to me, to tell him he cared for
me as part of my fantasy. Don’t put too much stock in spoken
words.”
    “He may have lied as part of your fantasy,
though I’d be surprised even at that,” Danial said slowly. “Dev is
always very careful and deliberate about the words he says, even
when he seems flippant. In any case, he would never have lied after
the sex was done. What would be the point? He’d have just told you
goodbye and left.”
    “There was weirdness,” I said
conspiratorially. “He gave me lines about wanting to