Read Moonlight in the Morning for Free Online Page A

his looks. She had seen through him, into him, had asked about him as a man. It occurred to Tristan that it wouldn’t have made any difference to Jecca if he’d been disfigured.
    Addy said that Tris never made an effort to win a woman, and that’s all he’d done with Jecca. But he’d failed. Every attempt to meet her again had fallen through.
    So what the hell was this about Reede Aldredge? What did he have to do with Jecca? And why had Kim kept whatever had happened—the “thing”—a secret all these years?
    With disgust, Tris looked at his arm in the cast. How was he to win a woman’s affections with this albatross around him? Reede went around the world saving people in spectacular ways. How could Tris compete with that? He knew from experience that incapacitated men tended to bring out the nurse in women. But Tris didn’t want a nurse, he wanted—
    He wanted to meet Jecca as a man, with all his faculties in good working order.
    He’d lied to Kim when he said he didn’t remember about the cruise his parents were planning. His father had bellyached about it enough. Tris had loved the idea. If his father left, that meant Tris could return to his own practice, even if his arm was still in a cast. But Tris hadn’t heard that his mother—he was sure she’d done it—had contacen 2;had cted Reede and got him to agree to return.
    Tris picked up his cell phone and touched the calendar to check the dates. He had little time between when his father left and Reede arrived. But cast or no, he was going to meet Jecca on the day she arrived.
    And this time he’d make sure she remembered him!

Two

    As Jecca drove down the winding road that led into Edilean, the overhanging trees made it seem that she was going through a dark, secret tunnel. It was as though she was about to enter an enchanted place, somewhere not quite of the real world.
    She told herself to quit being so fanciful. No matter how many times she visited the little town it never seemed to change. It still felt as though she was entering a place as remote and hidden as Brigadoon. If it weren’t for her constant contact with Kim and her many visits, Jecca would have said it was possible that Edilean didn’t really exist. Maybe it was a place she’d made up in that long-ago summer when she’d escaped the hardware store for two glorious weeks of painting.
    The memory of those weeks came back to her. How she threw herself at Kim’s older brother! Even now, she was embarrassed just thinking about it. Thank heaven he’d not taken her up on her blatant offers. At the time, his pain had seemed romantic, but since then she’d been through the breakup of a serious relationship and she knew there was nothing in the least romantic about what had happened to him.
    In all her other visits, she’d flown into Richmond and someone had picked her up. This was the first time that she had driven here, and this visit was to be all summer. But no matter how she arrived in Edilean, it still always amazed and fascinated her.
    As the forest of trees parted, she saw the beginning of the town. There were pretty little houses lining the road, nearly all of them with deep front porches. Rather than being a depository for whatever didn’t fit inside, the porches had chairs on them, and some of them held people who were watching the passing cars. As she slowed down to twenty-five miles per hour, she lifted her hand to an old man and he waved back. Jecca had an idea that if she stopped he would ask her to “sit a spell” and have a glass of homemade lemonade.
    She kept driving and came to the “downtown” area. Since she’d spent the last few years in New York City, the idea that this was the central business district was almost laughable. There was a square with adorably cute little shops around it, and another one with an ancient oak tree in the center.
    When she stopped at the only traffic light in town, Jecca watched people strolling about the very clean streets. No one