Voyage of the Dreadnaught: Four Stella Madison Capers Read Online Free PDF Page A

my family.”
    “Hogwash! Even face lifts and Botox have to
be disguised with fancy hairdos and make up. You haven’t a thing
under that oil but your natural skin.”
    “Must be the Swedish coming out in me,” she
mused. “Did I ever tell you my mother’s family immigrated to
Minnesota from Sweden, Oliver? Way back in… the late eighteen
hundreds, I think it was.”
    He sighed and sat down at the desk, again,
so heavily that the leather squeaked under the strain. “After all
we’ve been through, Stel. It’s disappointing you feel you have to
hide anything from me.”
    “It isn’t as if I made a conscious effort to
hide it. It’s just that the subject never came up. And now, only
because you flipped through my passport.”
    “It was sitting right here on my desk, where
Gerald dropped the mail this morning —both of ours came—I was just
taking them out of the envelopes. Besides, that’s not the point.
I’m talking about whatever it is that’s makes you feel it necessary
to pass yourself off as someone twenty years older. I already said
I don’t believe the eighty-one-year-old bit. Not for a minute, I
don’t.”
    Stella didn’t know what to say about that,
so, she didn’t say anything.
    “Well… I’m sure you’ll tell me the real
story whenever you feel safe enough. Let’s just let it go at that,
my dear.”
    How odd that he should use the word,
safe.
    “I suppose it’s this whirlwind romance of
ours.” She gave a relieved sigh at having barely avoided
catastrophe. “Do you realize I know as little about you as you do
me? A military career and you write hero books. That’s all I know
about you: outside of being divorced and having two grown-up sons
you never see—they’re so busy off in the military, themselves. Why,
for all I know, you could be a… a former inmate of a mental
institution.”
    “Oh, Stella – for crying out loud – don’t
you think I’d have told you if there were something as serious as
that in my past?”
    “Not really.”
    “Well, I would.”
    Better not go there, then, as that serious
omission might give him an even worse shock. Even though there was
a perfectly acceptable explanation if she was ever allowed to
explain. “People often try to get others to think differently of
them than they actually are,” she pointed out. “It doesn’t always
mean they’re hiding something criminal. Take Mason, for
instance.”
    She got to her feet and walked over to push
back a shock of gray curls that had fallen onto his forehead. “He
lets everyone assume he’s nothing more than a self-centered,
hard-drinking carpenter, and in reality, he won some sort of Medal
of Honor he doesn’t want anyone to know about. Imagine being
ashamed of a Medal of Honor!”
    “Soldiers often feel guilty if they happen
to survive when so many of their comrades don’t.”
    She settled comfortably onto his lap and he
locked his arms around her waist.
    Thank goodness! She didn’t think she could
stand it if there had been any true rift between them. “And look at
Millie. All that fuss about Sam’s memory and… they weren’t even
together until just before he died. He left her for a younger
woman.”
    “Maybe she likes to forget the bad parts and
remember it that way, herself.”
    “My point exactly, dear. Not to mention they
were still married the whole time, so it wasn’t exactly an untruth,
either. Still, it all hit her terribly hard. No money of her own to
fall back on. Did you know she spent years squirreling things away
for hard times? And not just food, either.”
    “I take it you saw the famine chest.”
    “A famine chest I can understand—we should
all have one. Hers is a monstrosity, but I can understand it. But
the art! Less than two weeks after J.D.--Mr. Willoughby, I mean—so
graciously forgave her for selling off all that other stuff, too.
There’s no way she could be trading it in to pay electricity and
repair bills, anymore. Where could she cash something that