The Quiet Seduction Read Online Free PDF Page B

had bought with such high hopes for the future.
    She’d made meat loaf and mashed potatoes for supper last night and served leftovers for lunch. Her mystery man had eaten little either time, and talked even less. Fine. He needed rest more than anything else, and she was too tired to make conversation.
    Funny, the way a dream could change, she mused as she washed the supper dishes. One dream simplymerged into another, and then another as time went on, evolving, but never quite losing the essential core.
    The only dream she had room for now was to guide her son safely through the next few years to try to make up for his lack of a father. It wouldn’t be long until she’d be dealing with an adolescent instead of a sweet child who was almost too eager to please—almost as if he were afraid she would go away, too, the way his father had.
    She had done everything she could think of to reassure him—they had talked to a counselor at the school. But Ellen knew that she alone was responsible for raising her son to be a decent, responsible adult. She didn’t know how much of a role model she could be, but she fully intended to give it her best shot. They would make it. One way or another, she would see to it.
    â€œAnd as for you, my mysterious stranger,” she whispered, “I’ll take care of you, too, for as long as you need me. I owe you.”
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    He was still sleeping when she glanced in again before heading upstairs to her own bed. This time she didn’t try to rouse him. It had been more than twenty-four hours now and there’d been no indication of a concussion. And he really did need his sleep. The sooner he healed and remembered, the sooner he’d be off her hands and the sooner she could get back to building Pete a legacy from a few horses and a few hundred acres.
    After pulling the light quilt up over his shoulders, she felt his forehead with the back of her hand, then tiptoed from the room, leaving the door ajar in case heneeded anything. It was almost like having two sons to care for.
    Oh, no, it wasn’t. She didn’t know what she felt toward the man called Storm, other than gratitude, but whatever it was, it wasn’t even faintly maternal. No way!
    He would probably insist on getting out of bed tomorrow. Men could be stubborn about such things, taking any kind of sickness or injury as a threat to their manhood. Jake had been the same way. He wouldn’t admit to having allergies even when he was sneezing his head off, his nose running and his eyes all watery. As if hay fever somehow negated his masculinity.
    Oh, Jake, she thought, sighing. She had long since run out of tears, but she still wept inside her heart. After more than two years she still caught herself glancing around, expecting to see him kicking the mud off his boots on the back porch, or hanging over the paddock fence, gloating over his precious horses. Two yearling mares, two geldings and a stallion. Hardly the mix he’d been planning on, but he’d bought the lot of them at a bargain price from a man who’d unexpectedly been forced to relocate.
    They had mapped it all out on paper—the buying, the breeding strategy, but they’d hardly got started when Jake had been diagnosed with a particularly virulent and fast-growing form of cancer. He had died just thirteen months after they had bought the ranch and moved to Lone Star County.
    And dear God, a part of her had died with him. If it hadn’t been for Pete, she didn’t know what she would have done. Going back home had never been an option. She didn’t know what her own father would have thought of his grandson if they ever met, but thatwasn’t going to happen. Never again would she beg. Leonard Summerlin had disowned her when she’d married against his will and turned his back when she had needed his help so desperately.
    Not for the first time, the irony of the situation struck her. Unless he fathered a son of