Free Moonlight in the Morning by Jude Deveraux Page A

downright scary-looking.” She’d felt her way around the back of the chaise and came to touch the fingertips of his right hand.
    “Turn your back to me and go straight ahead ten steps.”
    “How long are the steps?”
    “Normal. Don’t do those long, pirate strides or you’ll bang into a wooden seat.”
    She took the ten steps, but could feel or see nothing. Bending, she moved her hands around. “No chair.”
    “Good. Now go three steps to the right, then slowly go forward four.”
    She did what he said and when she stuck out her hand, she felt the chair. “Very good!” she said.
    “Now please bring it back here to sit by me.”
    It took her only minutes. She bumped into the side of the big chaise, he grunted, she apologized, but she finally got it positioned near him and sat down.
    They were silent for a moment.
    “I have a question,” Tris said.
    “What is it?”
    “You are the one in the red bikini, aren’t you? I don’t have you mixed up with the other one?”
    Jecca couldn’t help laughing. She knew exactly what he was talking about. When they were juniors in college, Kim, Sophie, and Jecca had gone to a beach, and they’d taken turns photographing one another. There was a big rock sticking out of the sand, so in one photo, Jecca had leaned against it while Sophie had sprawled on top in her blue suit.
    “Sorry, but I’m the skinny one. Sophie’s the one with all the stick-out parts.”
    “Good,” he said, and she could feel him smiling. “I think quite enough of you sticks out.”
    “What kind of doctor are you? You don’t say things like that to your patients, do you?”
    “Of course not. In the office I’m purely professional. I never even make passes at my female patients outside the office.”
    “That’s good to hear.”
    “So, Jecca, tell me everything about yourself.”
    “Nothing much to tell. I grew up in New Jersey, my mother died when I was four, so I was raised by my father. My older brother likes to say he helped raise me, but he didn’t. Didn’t Kim tell me you have a sister?”
    “Addison. Addy. She’s married, her husband is just back from Iraq, and they gave me my eight-year-old niece.”
    “Gave her to you? You adopted her?”
    “No, we just enjoy each other’s company, that’s all.”
    Jecca was trying hard to see him but couldn’t. She couldn’t remember what Kim had told her about this particular cousin, but then there wer Chenhard toe so many of them. One was a lawyer, one wrote novels, a new one was a super jock, another one was a sheriff. The list seemed endless. And even though both he and Kim said she’d met this cousin, Jecca couldn’t remember him at all.
    “Okay,” Tris said, “we’ve now told each other all the happy, sugary things, so what’s bad in your life?”
    “’Fraid I don’t know you well enough to tell you that,” Jecca said.
    “So what’s the good of this? Sitting here in utter blackness, two strangers who will never meet again, if we don’t talk of something besides superficialities?”
    “We will meet again,” Jecca said. “And again. I’m going to be living next door to you for three whole months.”
    “And what is that in the scope of life? Three months to actually talk to someone? It’s not much.”
    Underlying his jesting, Jecca could hear the seriousness in his voice, and she remembered Kim’s story of how her cousin’s arm came to be broken. “Hit over the head,” Kim had said. “Pushed down a hill.” And the robber had wanted “something” Tris had. These were traumatic events.
    When Tristan had fallen over the chaise she’d put in his path, she knew he’d been in pain, but he’d acted as though he wasn’t. If he concealed pain, did he also hide his true feelings from people here in Edilean? Jecca knew that she worked hard to keep all bad news from her father. There were times when she’d been so down she’d wanted to see no one, but she’d always done her best to put on a happy face around