Read Online Blessing in Disguise by Eileen Goudge - Free Book Online
Authors: Eileen Goudge
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that she was the only one who hadn’t been happy about it. But maybe that had been the secret to her parents’ success, Hannah thought. Maybe the real truth was that people weren’t meant to be together all the time. If families didn’t spend so much time around each other, they wouldn’t get so attached.
Hannah thought about Grace’s father dying when Grace was almost fourteen, and decided that, as tough as it must have been for Grace and her mother and sister, the fact was that, in a way, he’d already left them. Because, whether it was a father being buried or merely walking out the door, it boiled down to the same thing: your dad not being around when you needed him.
Chapter 3
“There’s just one little problem.” Dan Killian leaned back in his swivel chair, his hands forming a steeple over his bulging purse of a belly. “To be perfectly honest, it could be a rather sizable problem. Now, don’t get excited, Dellie, not till you’ve heard me out.”
“I’m listening, Dan.”
Cordelia Clayborn Truscott did not allow herself to wilt back into the masculine leather embrace of the wing chair opposite Dan Killian’s scrolled walnut desk, nor did she give in to the urge to toy with the rope of pearls that hung straight as a hangman’s noose down her bosom. I won’t let him see me squirm, she thought. Instead, she sat up even straighter, fixing Dan with a pleasant, attentive gaze that was in direct defiance of the wild hammering of her heart.
Don’t you dare back out on me, Dan Killian ... not YOU, of all people. Dan, with whom she’d hunted tadpoles in the creek below her house when they were both young enough to run about half naked without anyone’s batting an eye. And who, by the time they were sixteen, had become downright fascinated with the hidden fruits of her formerly flat chest, even going so far, one moonlit April evening in the greenhouse, as to unhook her brassiere. To this day, she couldn’t smell peat moss without recalling the guilty thrill of Dan Killian’s pale, trembling hand on her breast. She’d loved him then, as much as any sixteen-year-old can, which, she realized now, was about as close to true love as their wading in the creek at age five was to swimming.
Was he going to renege on his promise simply because she’d refused to lie down with him all those years ago? Was this brought on by some long-simmering resentment of his?
Cordelia caught herself smiling at the thought. Heavens, the very idea! Dan, with his three chins and five grown children, married forty-odd years to the Robert E. Lee High Dixie Queen of 1948.
No, his abrupt about-face had to have been spurred by something far more recent. She could sense what he was about to say, and she had to fight to keep from jamming the heels of her hands against her ears. To be so close to having her dream realized, only to have the rug pulled out from under her—oh, how could she bear it?
She could see it in her mind so clearly: Gene’s library, a cathedrallike building filled with sunlight and books, and with his speeches, letters, articles, the laws he’d stayed up to all hours drafting. An image so real to her that she could almost envision it springing full-blown onto the lovely grassy rise at the south end of the Latham campus, where the old Henley dorm had burned down several years back.
Cordelia could think of no stone she’d left unturned in attempting to raise the six million or so it would cost. As chairwoman of the Eugene Truscott memorial committee, she had approached more foundations than the Lord knew existed and had gotten money from dozens of them, had even managed to wrangle a small federal grant. She’d been to banks, oil companies, gotten a nice little gift from Gene’s old fireman union. But she was still short more than a million—eight hundred and fifty thousand of which had been promised to her by Dan Killian—and she was tired. Lately, she’d been at meetings like this where she momentarily
Hannah thought about Grace’s father dying when Grace was almost fourteen, and decided that, as tough as it must have been for Grace and her mother and sister, the fact was that, in a way, he’d already left them. Because, whether it was a father being buried or merely walking out the door, it boiled down to the same thing: your dad not being around when you needed him.
Chapter 3
“There’s just one little problem.” Dan Killian leaned back in his swivel chair, his hands forming a steeple over his bulging purse of a belly. “To be perfectly honest, it could be a rather sizable problem. Now, don’t get excited, Dellie, not till you’ve heard me out.”
“I’m listening, Dan.”
Cordelia Clayborn Truscott did not allow herself to wilt back into the masculine leather embrace of the wing chair opposite Dan Killian’s scrolled walnut desk, nor did she give in to the urge to toy with the rope of pearls that hung straight as a hangman’s noose down her bosom. I won’t let him see me squirm, she thought. Instead, she sat up even straighter, fixing Dan with a pleasant, attentive gaze that was in direct defiance of the wild hammering of her heart.
Don’t you dare back out on me, Dan Killian ... not YOU, of all people. Dan, with whom she’d hunted tadpoles in the creek below her house when they were both young enough to run about half naked without anyone’s batting an eye. And who, by the time they were sixteen, had become downright fascinated with the hidden fruits of her formerly flat chest, even going so far, one moonlit April evening in the greenhouse, as to unhook her brassiere. To this day, she couldn’t smell peat moss without recalling the guilty thrill of Dan Killian’s pale, trembling hand on her breast. She’d loved him then, as much as any sixteen-year-old can, which, she realized now, was about as close to true love as their wading in the creek at age five was to swimming.
Was he going to renege on his promise simply because she’d refused to lie down with him all those years ago? Was this brought on by some long-simmering resentment of his?
Cordelia caught herself smiling at the thought. Heavens, the very idea! Dan, with his three chins and five grown children, married forty-odd years to the Robert E. Lee High Dixie Queen of 1948.
No, his abrupt about-face had to have been spurred by something far more recent. She could sense what he was about to say, and she had to fight to keep from jamming the heels of her hands against her ears. To be so close to having her dream realized, only to have the rug pulled out from under her—oh, how could she bear it?
She could see it in her mind so clearly: Gene’s library, a cathedrallike building filled with sunlight and books, and with his speeches, letters, articles, the laws he’d stayed up to all hours drafting. An image so real to her that she could almost envision it springing full-blown onto the lovely grassy rise at the south end of the Latham campus, where the old Henley dorm had burned down several years back.
Cordelia could think of no stone she’d left unturned in attempting to raise the six million or so it would cost. As chairwoman of the Eugene Truscott memorial committee, she had approached more foundations than the Lord knew existed and had gotten money from dozens of them, had even managed to wrangle a small federal grant. She’d been to banks, oil companies, gotten a nice little gift from Gene’s old fireman union. But she was still short more than a million—eight hundred and fifty thousand of which had been promised to her by Dan Killian—and she was tired. Lately, she’d been at meetings like this where she momentarily
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