Sutherland’s Pride Read Online Free PDF Page A

she walked into his office in that slow, graceful way she had. Even her perfume smelled the same. Pride had always favored a wild rose scent. It recalled their lovemaking to his mind instantly.
    Flynn shoved his hands in his pockets and paced the office. Perhaps her story might have been more believable if she hadn’t sprung it on him the moment he returned from spending several weeks in Europe on business. The moment he got home, eager to see Pride again, she informed him of her pregnancy.
    Pride Donovan had lied to him. She had topped off her lies by following him around for two weeks, demanding that he listen to her. It had been damned embarrassing. He’d better remember that, and quit dwelling on the green eyes and the lovely face with its sculpted planes. Otherwise, he was likely to find himself right back in the same situation.
    Flynn sighed. That might not be so bad, come to think about it. Only, this time he’d take damned good care to see that Pride didn’t have time to even look at another man.
    That trip to Europe had been really bad timing.
    • • •
    “I can’t believe I’m seeing this,” Gloria said.
    “You can’t believe anything else that’s happened today,” Pride observed. “Why should this be any different?”
    Gloria had marveled all day about Flynn Sutherland’s inability to recognize Johnny for what he was.
    “If I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Gloria said. “Johnny even looks like him.” She leaned forward to peer at her cousin’s face in the dresser mirror. “Add another one on this side. They look lopsided.”
    “Freckles always look unbalanced. That’s the beauty of them.” Pride dotted at her nose with a brown eyebrow pencil. “If Flynn wants to see freckles, here are lots of them to admire.”
    “You’re crazy,” Gloria said, with conviction.
    “Not me. I always aim to please my man.” Pride added a few more dots to her cheekbones with the eyebrow pencil and studied the effect. “Is that natural, or what?”
    “Or what,” Gloria said.
    “Oopsie.” Pride grinned at her own nose in the mirror. “Maybe I’ve gone just a tad overboard. Oh, well. It’s too late to do anything about it now. Flynn can consider it revenge for making my nose smell like coffee this morning.”
    “What are you wearing?”
    “An old favorite of Flynn’s. Daddy still had all my old clothes carefully preserved in the closet.”
    Pride rose, fished around in the closet, and withdrew a blue-green silk dress covered with a plastic bag. Flynn had claimed to dislike the dress on the grounds that it made her eyes look blue rather than his favorite green.
    “If Flynn wants to see the Pride of three years ago, then that’s what he’ll see.” Pride hoped Flynn suffered a little harmless annoyance over her antics.
    “Don’t you think you ought to tell him about Johnny?”
    “Come on, Gloria.” Pride unzipped the plastic bag and took out the dress. “Would you make things easy for him? You’re just sore because you had to pay for lunch.”
    Gloria grinned back, but her voice was serious. “It’s obvious that everything you said about Flynn’s single-mindedness is true. It just seems so unfair that his own blindness might rob him of something he’d probably give his right arm for.”
    “He’ll get over it.” Pride shored up her mental defenses with all her might in order to show him she was no longer the starry-eyed girl who had loved him so much.
    “You don’t mean that.” Gloria studied her closely. “If you want to know what I think, you’re just mad at him.”
    “You’ve got that right.” She shook out the dress and dropped it over her head. “This time, he’s going to have to come to a realization on his own. I’m through beating my head against the wall trying to talk to him. All that ended three years ago.”
    “Pride, don’t let your father’s sins wreck your life.”
    “No one is going to wreck my life,” Pride