Read Just a Kiss Away for Free Online Page B

colored splotches that represented her father’s new posts. As she got older, she’d looked up the countries in Collier’s, trying to imagine her father amid the colorful images described in the encyclopedia. But her image of him held no vivid color; it was little more than a sepia-toned figure in a photograph, like the one she kept near her bed at home. She had vague bits of remembrances of him, but seventeen years had dimmed those memories.
    At times, alone up in her rooms at Hickory House, she’d imagined what her life would have been like if her daddy had been there and if her mama hadn’t died. She knew it would have been different, and she wasn’t sure if her fantasies came from a deep yearning for something she’d never had or from boredom with what she did have.
    Her brothers loved her in their own way; she knew that, and that they cared for her. They took their duty seriously, so much so that there were times when she felt smothered and chained. As a child she’d dreamed of a mother’s gentle hand and soft words. Someone who smelled like gardenias and would hold her against a soft neck to make the childhood hurts go away.
    As a sensitive young girl on the verge of womanhood, with no confidence, she’d dreamed of a mother’s wisdom and experience. Someone she could emulate. Someone who knew how she felt when her brothers placed all those tags on her. They didn’t understand that it hurt to be thought of as too young, too fragile, and naive. It hurt to be thought of as a jinx and most of all as helpless, and she’d wanted someone who could make that hurt go away, or at least understand why it hurt her.
    But most recently, as a young woman, she’d dreamed of having a mother’s listening ear. Someone who’d really listen to her, who’d stand up for her against her brothers’ notions. Someone who would tell her about love and men and marriage, and someone to whom she could tell her deepest secrets and all those insecurities she hid. For as much as she tried to fight it, as much as she wanted to be otherwise, she knew she truly was afraid to be on her own. Things did seem to happen to her when she was alone, like today.
    Her purpose had been to go out and buy a fan. Instead she’d come home fanless and she’d lost her parasol, broken a shoe, not to mention almost getting her throat cut and being kidnapped. She just wasn’t very capable, and deep down inside she worried that maybe because she was inept, it was difficult for people to find something about her to love.
    She wondered, as always, if maybe she would have been different if she’d had at least one real parent. Her mother had died, so she couldn’t be there, but Eulalie tried desperately to be the exact image of what her mother had been, a lady. She wasn’t very good at that, either.
    But her father hadn’t died. He had chosen not to be there, and though she had tried to be like her mother, hoping that might bring him home, he’d never come. He’d written to her from all the faraway places, just as he had written to her brothers. But it just wasn’t the same. Her father had been there when her brothers were growing up. He hadn’t been there for her. And all her life she’d wondered why.
    She glanced around her father’s study. Seeing no answers there, she closed the shutters and crossed the room. Then she turned for one last glance at the study, shoulders down, a vacant, unsure feeling wedged in her chest, and she walked out of the room, more alone and more vulnerable than she had been in a long time.
    The note had arrived two hours ago. He was coming home. Eulalie paced the reddish plank flooring of her room for what must have been the hundredth time. She stopped and smoothed out the imaginary wrinkles on her dress. Though she’d worn it when she waited earlier, Josefina had pressed all of the wrinkles from the gown. It was pink—Calhoun pink, the color her mother had worn in the huge portrait that hung in its place of reverence