Read Online Sins of Omission by Fern Michaels - Free Book Online

after my best friend at the orphanage. Well, he was my best friend before someone took him to work in their factory. I really missed him. I think about him a lot and wonder if he signed up when I did.”
    Something pricked at Reuben, something he couldn’t identify at first. And then he had a name for it: jealousy. Daniel had never mentioned Jake until now. Here he was going to name his dog after this fellow. Well, he’d go Daniel one better: he’d get the dog for him. It would be his flesh-and-blood gift, more important than a silly name.
    When he began to describe the exterior of the château to Daniel, he forced a lightness he didn’t feel into his voice. “It looks smaller than it really is from the road because the major part of the house is in the back. Reminds me of a fairy-tale house; you’d almost expect gnomes and elves to come running out. The roof is tiled, real clay tiles, those half-round gray ones. And most of the windows are stained glass, the top of them anyway. That’s another thing—when the sun shines through them there’s a rainbow in the room. And some of the windows have designs on them. We couldn’t see them last night when we drove up, but the entrance leading to the house has huge stone columns that have frescoes on them. See, I know that word because Mickey uses it. They’re kind of weathered and the paint is peeling, but they’re still elegant-looking. In the spring, flowers and rosebushes must surround the house. I didn’t look in the greenhouses yet. Well, that’s it, Daniel. Someday I’m going to have a house like this. I’ll call it my summer home, just like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers I read about in the newspapers back home. I’ll pattern the house after this one. I can smell money here, pal. And when you have money, you have power. I think that’s what I want more than the money, but they go hand in hand. Power! I even like the sound of the word.”
    Daniel flinched under his compresses. The reaction rose from a combination of things. First was the intensity in Reuben’s voice. Daniel believed that Reuben would indeed be powerful someday. Wealthy and powerful, an awesome combination. But the second reason was personal: his life was in Reuben’s hands, and his friend’s words served to bring everything he had been thinking about right out into the open.
    The truth was, Daniel had never before slept in a room such as the one he had slept in last night. Large, luxurious, and, best of all, private—the fact that it was all his made him want to run back upstairs and look at it and touch it to make sure it was real. He was overwhelmed by the sumptuous environment Reuben had just described. Mickey was a dream come true for both of them, but to Daniel she was truly the angel he had heard about, more nurturing and generous and bountiful than he could ever have imagined.
    It was a miracle being in this house, and when his eyes were closed he was desperate to open them again and feast on his surroundings. With all his heart and soul, he hoped that Reuben knew what he was doing.
    The road back to where he came from rose eerily in his mind. It was studded with places like his spare cot in the barrackslike dormitory of the orphanage, the deathly lonesome, seemingly eternal holidays he had endured there, in the place where he had felt utterly lost from God’s eyes. From there he’d moved even further, into the black hole of the war…. The thoughts began to paralyze him with sadness, especially now that he was finally experiencing the real thing: a home.

Chapter Three
    Mickey returned home after the shroud of evening had fallen. She came in like a whirlwind, chattering easily about her day. “Beastly, darlings, the trip was beastly, but I had to do it. Now my time is yours for the next few days. More rest for you today, but tomorrow I will begin your French lessons. We will play chess and