Turn Back the Dawn Read Online Free PDF

Ben. I don't even know if you're married, for God's sake."
    He tilted his head. "Do I act married?"
    She laughed. "In a way, yes."
    He didn't smile. "When I was married," he said slowly, "and I don't mean to sound sanctimonious — but I did not act as I have with you. In the first years of my marriage I never even looked at another woman."
    "And then what happened?" she asked quietly.
    "Something I'll never let happen again. We drifted apart, as they say. It's such an overused expression that it sounds trite, only partially true. But that was exactly what happened, in the most classic of ways. We had our kids, Eliza and Christopher, only a year and a half apart. F rom the moment Eliza was born — and then Christopher, so quickly afterward it seemed like weeks — we did nothing hut talk about the kids. I went to work — I was a teacher then—came home, and from the moment I was home until I left the next morning, all that was on either of our minds was the kids. We stopped talking, really. We were both reciting, going through questions and answers, litanies of the day. I' d tell her a few things about work, she'd tell me a few things about the babies, and we might as well have been talking to walls, though neither of us noticed because we were so damn wrapped up in our problems. We caught ourselves when I decided to try my hand at advertising. I think Eliza was three at the time."
    "Why did you switch?" Kate asked, settling more com fortably back in her chair.
    "Money," he said simply. "I was already working a twelve-hour day. And I knew we weren't going to be able to raise two kids the way I wanted to on my salary."
    "Are you sorry you switched?"
    "Sometimes, yes. I went back to teaching after Celia and I were divorced. She was working by then and refused anything but child support." He paused and took out his pipe. "But anyway," he said, packing the sweet-smelling tobacco in and then lighting it, "it worked for a while again, when I began in the ad business. We thought of it as a new beginning, and we acknowledged that we needed
    one. But it never did work after that." He puffed on his pipe, and then smiled, his eyes flickering with warmth. "So much for getting down to business," he said. "How did we get on to marriage?"
    She smiled. "You were telling me that you never looked at another woman at the beginning of your marriage."
    "Well, I seem to have taken us off track once again." He smiled. "Maybe we should actually get started."
    He took out two cups of coffee he had brought in a paper bag — a nice and surprising touch, she felt — along with the layouts Tommy Sullivan had sketched out, and they set to work. He began by reviewing the basic concept — talking quietly, slowly, intensely. He was relaxed but totally absorbed, and as Kate listened and occasionally questioned him, she was silently congratulating herself for having been wise enough to choose Ben Austin's campaign. Without him it would have been very, very good. With him and all the attention and enthusiasm he would bring to it, it was destined to be nothing short of wonder- ful.
    They worked hard until lunch, and Kate was annoyed to find that it was she, not he, who tended to break the businesslike mood. She was constantly breaking her promise against giving double messages. When he would look up from a chart or sketch or layout he was showing her, she would catch his gaze in a look that said not, "How interesting," or "I agree," or anything relating in any way to what he had said. All she said with her eyes was "I wanl you." At those moments he tried to fight back. At the beginning, at least. He would look away as if he hadn't seen, or look at her in reproach and surprise, as if to say,
    "I'm keeping up my end of the bargain. Why can't you?" Yet, for a reason she couldn't fathom, she kept it up: simmering glances, gentle touches on the hand or knee, her softest, lowest, most bedroom-seductive voice.
    When the intercom buzzed and she rose to answer it,