Read Online A Gift for All Seasons by Karen Templeton - Free Book Online Page A

cousins had excelled at when April was fourteen, and they’d been only too willing to help her with her boy problems. They should only know how little progress, actually, she’d made on that particular front in the intervening years.
    Although, if this went down the way she suspected it would, they were about to find out.

Chapter Four
    A pril couldn’t quite tell whose mouth was hanging farther open, although she gave the edge to Blythe.
    “Get out . You’re still a virgin? ”
    “Yep.”
    Okay, so she hadn’t really meant to lead with the punch line, except her cousins had overwhelmed her with all this advice, and it sort of...popped out.
    They exchanged flummoxed glances, then Mel frowned at her. “But you were—”
    “Married. I know.”
    And Patrick thought he was the freak. Heh.
    “So, see...” April frowned at her overstuffed shrimp salad sandwich, wondering how she was going to pick it up without half of it plopping back on the plate. “I really don’t have a whole lot of experience. Or any, really. When it comes to, you know...”
    “Seduction?” Blythe offered—kindly, it should be noted—and April’s eyes shot to hers.
    “Oops,” Mel muttered, her pink hoodie clashing with the maroon vinyl booth seat. “Deer in headlights, straight ahead.”
    “I hadn’t exactly thought of it like that,” April said, finally picking up the bulging sandwich. Plop . She scooped up an escaped shrimp and bit into it. “But I guess I have to start somewhere.”
    Both women were still staring at her, absolutely still except for their chewing mouths. April sighed.
    “My marriage...” She devoured another shrimp. “It wasn’t about romance. Clayton and I were doing each other a favor.”
    “As opposed to doing each other,” Blythe said, and Mel swatted her.
    “I know, it sounds weird—”
    “You think?”
    “For God’s sake, Blythe,” Mel said, “will you shut up and let the girl tell the story?”
    As in, the whole story. Instead of the uber-edited version she’d offered when they’d first reconnected in September, when she wasn’t sure how her cousins would react to something that still sounded surreal, even to her.
    “Okay,” she said on a breath, then met their dual gazes. “Five years ago an agency in Richmond sent me to interview for a companion position to Clayton’s mother, Helene, who lived with him. Which was bizarre in itself, since I have no idea why the agency thought I’d be a good fit. But I’d had so many rotten jobs by that point—” already privy to her sketchy childhood and her father’s predilection for pipe dreams, her cousins nodded in sympathy “—that this one sounded too good to be true. It didn’t require any real skills, which I didn’t have, anyway. And it paid well.” She blushed. “ Really well. And Clayton was desperate, since the old gal had run off no less than six companions in the previous year.”
    Mel’s eyes widened. “He told you that?”
    “No. She did. Within a minute of meeting me.”
    “Sounds like a peach.”
    “But that’s the thing—we hit it off right away. Not sure why—maybe because she reminded me of Nana, rattling around in her big old house. So there was nothing she could do or say I hadn’t seen or heard before. I stood up to her, I guess. Wouldn’t take her guff.” She smiled, remembering. “Within a week, she was making faces when it was time for me to leave. Clay was her only child, and had never married, and I think she thought of me as the granddaughter she never had.”
    Blythe forked in a bite of her lobster salad. “So you tamed the beast?”
    April laughed. “Not hardly. Old gal was a pain in the butt until the day she died.” She sighed. “Six weeks after Clay did. I knew how to deal with her, is all. Clay was stunned.” She felt a smile warm her insides. “And very, very grateful.”
    “So...?” Blythe gently prodded, buttering a homemade cheese biscuit.
    April let her gaze drift outside, to the marina