You Belong to My Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

silky pale hair at her temple. “I was afraid. Afraid you might not feel the same way. Afraid you were too young and—”
    “Too young?” she scoffed. “Too young! Why, I’m fifteen years old.”
    “I know,” he said, smiling, so totally charmed, so much in love with this pretty child-woman, it was all he could do to keep from wrapping his arms around her and squeezing the very life out of her. “I know, sweetheart.”
    “My goodness, my mother married my father when she was eighteen,” Mary Ellen told him, “and she had me when she was nineteen and…and…Why, I have an unmarried cousin in South Carolina who is twenty-one and everyone says she’s an old maid. So don’t you dare go thinking that I’m still a child, because I certainly am not.” She paused, smiled, and told him, “I’d kiss you, but I don’t know how. Will you teach me how?”
    “I don’t know how, either,” Clay admitted.
    “Okay, let’s learn,” she said, closed her eyes, puckered her lips, and leaned eagerly to him.
    “Mary, I can’t kiss you here. There are people all over the street.”
    Her dark eyes opened. “Oh! You’re right, of course.” She laughed then with the sheer joy of being young and happy and in love. She pressed Clay’s hand more closely to her bosom. “Feel my heart, Clay. I may die any minute, it’s pounding so hard and so fast.”
    His hand opened directly below her left breast. He felt her heart beating strongly, rapidly, against his palm. It thrilled him so, his own heart started to race.
    He looked into her dark, flashing eyes and said, “Promise me, Mary, that your heart will never beat this way for anyone but me.”
    “How could it when it belongs to you?”

4
    F OR ALMOST A YEAR , their sweet innocent romance remained just that: a sweet innocent romance. Hand holding and chaste, awkward kisses. They made no attempt to hide their feelings for each other. And since they didn’t, Mary Ellen’s parents didn’t worry too much about them. The Prebles, specifically John Thomas Preble, felt sure that if anything were actually going on between the two youngsters, Mary Ellen’s and Clay’s behavior would reveal it. Neither child acted the least bit guilty. They were as free and open with each other as they had been when they were little.
    John Thomas Preble reasoned that it was entirely natural for Clay to be Mary Ellen’s first real or imagined beau. The two had grown up together. Clay had watched after Mary Ellen, had been her best friend and fierce protector. She looked up to Clay, depended on him, trusted him. So now, anxious to be all grown up and have a beau like some of her more mature girlfriends, Mary Ellen had chosen Clay to step into the role.
    Temporarily.
    “She will outgrow him, won’t she, darling?” Julie Preble asked.
    “Yes, of course she will, my sweet,” said John Thomas Preble.
    It was bedtime.
    Julie Preble, wearing a flowing sky blue negligee, sat at her vanity table, brushing her long silken hair.
    Suave and handsome in a maroon satin smoking jacket and dark trousers, the master of Longwood crushed out his newly lit cigar, closed the book he was reading, and rose from his easy chair. He walked directly to his seated wife, went down on his knees behind her, and cupped her milky white shoulders with his strong hands. He leaned close, pressed his warm lips to the nape of her neck, then kissed a slow, wet path around to the side of her throat. At last he raised his head and his dark eyes met his wife’s in the mirror.
    “Mary Ellen thinks she’s a woman,” he said, half amused. “But she isn’t. She’s only a child, and she’ll fancy herself in love a dozen times before she grows up.” He smiled reassuringly at Julie. “Soon there’ll be so many eager young suitors coming to call at Longwood, we’ll have trouble keeping track of them.”
    Julie Preble nodded thoughtfully.
    Concerned with their only daughter’s happiness, they had discussed Clay Knight’s