Read Online Belinda by Peggy Webb - Free Book Online Page A

the kiss and
pressed it against his own lips.
    The engine idled louder, catching Reeve’s
attention. What was he doing? Had he lost his senses?
    He tore out of the driveway as if the hounds
of hell were barking at his heels. Belinda was still at the window.
He didn’t have to look back to know; he could
feel
her
there, watching him with her big dark eyes, waving that lovely
expressive hand.
    He touched his lips again.
    An image of Sunny floated up before him—Sunny
with her bright hair and her bright laughter, Sunny with her charm
and her laughing eyes. She had always seen him off. She used to
walk down the staircase with him, arm in arm. At the doorway she
would stand on tiptoe and kiss him goodbye. It was a ritual he’d
cherished.
    Her image began to fade, and in its place
came the face of Belinda with her impertinent mouth and her
mysterious eyes, Belinda with her rhinestoned stockings and her red
spike-heeled shoes. She was outrageous and unconventional, a woman
whose education had been on the back roads and in the beer joints
and the cheap rooming houses of the world. And yet... twice she had
blown him kisses in a manner as eloquent as any finishing-school
lady, kisses he foolishly coveted and secretly longed for.
    What was happening to him? It was a damned
good thing he was going to San Francisco. As soon as he got back,
he would drive Belinda Diamond to downtown Tupelo and let her out
on Main Street, just as he had promised. With the money he was
planning to pay her, she would be set for a long time, certainly
long enough to find a decent job.
    And then she wouldn’t be his concern anymore.
Once again she would be a stranger to him, and his life would go on
as it had before she came, its carefully structured schedules
hiding whatever flaws there were in the fabric of his daily
routine.
    o0o
    After he had checked into his hotel in San
Francisco, the first thing he did was call home. It was a part of
his routine. The children needed to hear his voice and he needed to
hear theirs. It would be mid-afternoon back home, almost time for
their snack.
    He dialed his home number and waited.
    “Hello, there. I mean, Lawrence
residence.”
    Reeve’s hand tightened on the receiver.
Belinda’s voice brought her into his room as plainly as if she had
made the trip to San Francisco with him.
    “Where’s Quincy?” He knew he was being rude,
but he excused himself by claiming flight fatigue. His lack of
manners had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that he had
hoped a thousand miles would take Belinda Diamond out of his life,
at least temporarily.
    “She’s a dragon.”
    “She’s a what?”
    “Well, you see, it started raining along
about noon, and I decided to build a castle in the den. So we set
up the card table and draped it with a sheet, and Betsy decided the
castle needed a dragon, and since I was the queen and she was the
princess and Mark was the dashing knight in shining armor, Quincy
had to be the dragon.”
    “That explains it, of course.” Reeve couldn’t
disguise the indulgent tone of his voice. When Belinda told a
story, she had a way of involving the listener, so that right now,
standing in the middle of his generic hotel room with its standard
puffy comforter on the bed and its ubiquitous white towels hanging
on the bar in the bathroom and its strip of paper certifying that
the toilet was sanitary, he was caught up in Belinda’s make-believe
castle.
    The fantasy made him homesick. He couldn’t
remember the last time he’d been homesick.
    “Quincy’s down on the floor now, growling. Do
you hear her?”
    Belinda must have held the receiver out
toward the castle, for Reeve caught the sounds of laughter and a
deeper, more guttural sound that must have been Quincy’s
dragon.
    “Did you hear her?” Belinda sounded
breathless and cheerful. He wondered if she was wearing stockings
with rhinestone hearts on the sides.
    “She sounded right fierce to me.”
    Belinda’s laughter pealed through