Legacy of Secrets Read Online Free PDF

dancers, and she thought how strangely lonely he looked for a man with so many friends.
    Buffy was watching him too. She gave him that cool “Buffy” look and Shannon knew just what she was thinking. She could read her stepmother like a book. There always were only two things on her mind. Money and position.
    Buffy had always hated being poor. At twenty she had pictured herself growing older, struggling to maintain her social position and beauty on a pittance, just the way she had throughout her girlhood, and she had decided to marry money. She knew what she needed was an “entrepreneur,” a New Age man who made money as though he had just invented it. She had found him in Bob O’Keeffe.
    She had been twenty-six and Bob was in his forties. The wedding was a lavish one, with all her family and her many friends as guests, and his daughter, eight-year-old Shannon, as flower girl. The O was discreetly shaved fromO’Keeffe and she became Buffy Keeffe and Shannon became her stepdaughter. She was the perfect hostess; she knew everybody who counted on first-name terms and she was beautiful. And yet she knew that within a year of their marriage her husband had taken a lover and that there had been others since. Yet Buffy and Big Bob Keeffe remained a social legend, the smartest couple in New York and Palm Beach.
    Shannon stepped back from Wil Davenport’s arms. She said, laughing, “Give me a break, Wil. I’m all out of breath. I need water and fresh air.”
    “I’ll get you both,” he said gallantly, escorting her out onto the lawn and going in search of a glass of water.
    Shannon smiled as she watched him go. She had known him exactly three months and she couldn’t wait to spend the rest of her life with him. He was tall and dark and as handsome as any young man had the right to be. He was romantic—he sent flowers
all
the time. He wooed her with words and small presents. He wasn’t very rich, he’d told her, impressed by her father’s wealth, but she knew that didn’t matter, her father had not started out rich either.
    She didn’t remember her own mother but she did remember when her father had married Buffy, and herself as a bridesmaid in lemon silk taffeta so stiff it crackled when she walked down the aisle. She had stood still as a statue, afraid to move in case her noisy skirts drowned out the holy words. And after that Buffy had simply taken over their lives.
    By the time she was eleven years old Shannon was too tall for her age, skinny as a jackrabbit with a mop of fiery red hair. She had freckles she despised and teeth that protruded so much she just knew they’d need years of braces. And her knobbly knees stuck out of the hateful short, pretty frocks Buffy liked to dress her up in, which made her look exactly like Raggedy Ann. She had huge dark-lashed sweatshirt-gray eyes and an offhand manner that was a cover for her insecurities. Her face was wide-boned and symmetrical and her nose slightly dented from thetime she’d fallen off her pony at the age of eight, a defect her stepmother insisted must be corrected later.
    Buffy saw that she attended the right schools and had the proper friends, and that she went to parties with children “of her own sort,” but the truth was the two had little in common except her father.
    Still, her childhood had been happy enough, because she was the apple of her father’s eye. But even though Bob Keeffe adored her, he was not an attentive father; he was far too busy making money for that. Yet he always made sure to show up for the main events, and he was proud of his only daughter.
    “You’ve got it all, baby,” he would say admiringly. “You can be anything you want, just like your dad. But remember this, little darlin’, you’ve got to go after what you want and you’ve got to want it real hard. That’s the difference between us Irish and these old-line rich folk. They came over on the
Mayflower
and we came over on the coffin ships. And just look at us