The Summer Cottage Read Online Free PDF

on the fifth floor of a building in Astoria that probably ought to have been condemned—and
     Russell refused to stay over there. So he found me an apartment on the Upper West
     Side, a nice one-bedroom I saw for the first time when he gave me the key and told
     me it was already furnished and the rent paid up for the entire year. He bought me
     clothes for work, and when I tried to refuse, he hinted gently that my professional
     wardrobe reflected on him and his office, so I didn’t really have a choice.”
    She had to pause, to get control of the unacceptable shake in her voice. “I know what
     you’re thinking. He doesn’t sound like a monster, does he? In fact, I’m the one who
     doesn’t come off so great in this story, letting this man pay my bills and help me
     professionally in return for sex. I know exactly how that sounds.”
    “I promise you,” Logan said, with his eyes still closed though his voice was taut
     with suppressed emotion. “You have no idea what I’m thinking.”
    Jessica laughed to break the tension, but it came out a little choked and raw. “Right,
     of course. You’re a genius—how could I know what’s going on in that giant brain of
     yours?”
    He sat up in a controlled rush, planting his feet widely on the ground and clenching
     his fingers on the rough wooden bark at his hips. “What I’m thinking is that Russell
     Owens is a dead man, if I ever meet him.”
    Shock dried Jessica’s mouth. No one she’d ever told had reacted this way, including
     her own mother. “What?”
    “He systematically took control of your entire life,” Logan snarled. “Let me guess
     at the next part of the story. He also monopolized your off-work hours so that you
     lost touch with your friends. Of course, you had to keep your relationship a secret
     at work, and I’d lay good money on him giving you some reason why you couldn’t discuss
     it with anyone else, either.”
    Jessica swayed in the ocean breeze. A higher wind would have knocked her off her feet.
     “I didn’t have any friends in the city, actually. I moved there after college and
     got the job at Crown Hotels almost immediately. And the reason he asked me not to
     talk about our relationship with my parents was…”
    She nearly gagged on the shame of it, the unbearable sense of having been stupid and
     weak, led astray from what she knew to be right, but this was the worst of it. Once
     she got this out, it was nearly over, and Logan would know everything.
    The fact that he seemed to know, or to have intuited most of it already didn’t make
     it easier to force the words out.
    “When I met Russ, he wore a wedding band.” Jessica wrapped her arms around her rib
     cage and held on for dear life. “The minute he saw that I’d noticed it, he gave me
     this sad smile and told me all about his marriage and how he and his wife were separated,
     in the process of getting divorced.”
    “And if you mentioned your affair to anyone, it might complicate and delay the proceedings,”
     Logan guessed.
    Miserable, Jessica nodded as she averted her gaze to stare blindly out to the horizon.
     “I never questioned it. He spent every evening at my apartment! Well, the apartment
     he’d paid for. He didn’t sleep over, but that was because he had a long-standing arrangement
     with the company to send a car to pick him up from his house, and if he asked them
     to pick him up from my place instead—God. He had an answer for everything, so smooth
     and plausible and reasonable. Eventually I stopped asking questions.”
    “And then,” Logan prompted gently when she broke off.
    Wearily, she lanced the rest of the wound and drained the last drop of poison out
     onto the ground between them. “And then, after three years of buying me earrings and
     bracelets to distract me from the fact that it was never the engagement ring he kept
     promising, I found out that he was still married. Not separated, not nearing the end
     of a long, drawn-out