The Creed Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page A

there was no denying that Welsh was attractive. He’d graced the cover of People as the World’s Sexiest Man, not just once, but twice. He was intelligent, charming and witty, not to mention rich and famous. She’d seen all his movies, loved every one of them.
    But he was married.
    He was a father.
    Those things mattered to Carolyn, even if he’d temporarily lost sight of them himself.
    After fending off his advances—Ardith had been away on a movie set somewhere in Canada at the time—Carolyn had resigned, packed her belongings and, once a friend had arrived to pinch-hit as Storm’s nanny, left that house for good.
    Within a few months, the property was quietly sold to the founder of a software company, and Gifford, Ardith and Storm, reportedly having purchased a sprawling ranch in Montana, never set foot in Lonesome Bend again.
    Even now, years later, standing in the kitchen of her apartment, Carolyn remembered how hard, and how painful, it was to leave Storm behind. The ache returned, like a blow to her solar plexus, every time she recalled how the little girl had run behind her car, sobbing and calling out, “Come back, Carolyn! Carolyn, come back! ”
    Before that—long, long before that—another little girl had frantically chased after another car, stumbling, falling and skinning her knees, getting up to run again.
    And that child’s cries hadn’t been so very different from Storm’s.
    Mommy, come back! Please, come back!
    “Breathe,” Carolyn told herself sternly. “You’re a grown woman now, so act like one.” Indeed, she was a grown woman. But the child she’d once been still lived inside her, still wondered, even after twenty-five years, where her mother had gone after dropping her daughter off at that first foster home.
    “Reow,” Winston remarked, now perched on the kitchen table, where he was most definitely not supposed to be. “Reow?”
    Carolyn gave a moist chuckle, sniffled and patted the animal’s head before gently shooing him off the table. He immediately took up residence on the wide windowsill, his favorite lookout spot.
    Being something of a neat freak, Carolyn moved her portable sewing machine aside, replaced the tablecloth beneath it with an untrammeled one and washed her hands at the sink.
    The gypsy skirt, the creative project of the moment, hung on the hook inside her bedroom door, neatly covered with a plastic bag saved from the dry cleaner’s.
    Carolyn retrieved the garment, draped it carefully over the side of the table opposite her sewing machine and silently reveled in the beauty of the thing.
    The floor-length underskirt was black crepe, but it barely showed, for all the multicolored, bead-enhanced ribbons she’d stitched to the cloth in soft layers. She’d spent days designing the piece, weeks stitching it together, ripping out and stitching again.
    It was exquisite, all motion and shimmer, a wearable fantasy, the kind of original women like Ardith Sperry wore to award ceremonies and premieres.
    Carolyn hadn’t sized the piece for a movie star’s figure, though. It was somewhere between a ten and a twelve, with plenty of give in the seams, allowing for a custom fit.
    Carolyn, a curvy eight since the age of seventeen, had deliberately cut the skirt to fit a larger figure than her own, for the simple reason that, if she could have worn it, parting with it would have been out of the question.
    She’d been making purposeful sacrifices like that since she’d first learned to sew, in her sophomore year of high school. Once she understood the basics, she hadn’t even needed patterns. She’d sketched designs almost from day one, measured and remeasured the fabric, cut and stitched.
    And she’d quickly made a name for herself. While other kids babysat or flipped burgers for extra money, Carolyn whipped up one-of-a-kind outfits and sold them as fast as she could turn them out. That made two things she did well, she’d realized way back when, with a thrill she could