Free Kisses From Heaven by Jennifer Greene Page B

that when you were fresh out of school.
     
    It was still pitch-black outside, not yet six. Loren pulled on a pair of well-worn brown cords that fit like a second skin and then an old loose fisherman’s sweater. The knee socks, she noted sleepily, had holes in them. Furthermore, one was black and one was brown. She debated momentarily whether or not she cared. She glanced with sleep-laden eyes at the distinctly solitary bed where thoughts of Buck had kept her awake far too long into the night. Wearing the mismatched socks, she tiptoed past Angela’s closed door, splashed cold water on her face in the bathroom and ran a brush through her hair. Tiptoeing downstairs in the darkness, she saw the thread of light beneath the swinging door to the kitchen.
    At the head of the table, Gramps was nursing a cup of coffee. Loren bent to kiss him good morning, and he grunted in response. They both liked their solitary six o’clocks. Loren reached above the stove for a mug, then carried the steaming cup of coffee with her to the opposite end of the table. Her grandfather automatically handed her a section of the newspaper, and she swung her legs on an adjoining chair, crackling the paper as she decided against the front page in favor of the feature section…which she didn’t seem to see.
    Gramps looked old this morning, wearing a brooding look like a second complexion, his hand shaky on his cup. Most Saturday mornings he looked very much this way, yet the hangover this morning was from life, not liquor. The laugh lines in his face were more deeply indented than the worry lines, and that told Loren a lot of what she already knew about Bill Shephard. Laughter and an easygoing, careless charm that offered more than was delivered had been his chief characteristics until the world had crashed all around him. His specialty had been making promises he couldn’t keep, and he had hurt Loren as a child, had kept on hurting her until she developed a skin so tough that she no longer had to believe him to love him.
    She sipped at the strong, bitter coffee, trying not to think of how the evening with Buck had ended. She thought instead about money.
    Her paternal great-great-grandfather, with a third-grade education, had single-handedly amassed the original Shephard fortune—railroads, real estate, insurance and farms. Making money had been an obsession with him, and he’d sold his soul in the process. Henry Shephard had been a miser, his family still living in near-poverty long after he’d bought his first bank. But Henry Shephard, Jr., the miser’s heir, had changed all that. He, too, knew how to make money, but also how to spend it, and to him the Shephards owed the once-elegant home that Loren so loved.
    Her grandfather was the only son in the family who’d survived Henry Junior. Bill had no business sense, though his dominating father had forced him into the family enterprises. By the time his father died, Bill had given up whatever other dreams he might have had. But he couldn’t force himself to acquire business acumen, so he gambled on the side, and down slid the Shephard fortunes. Loren’s Gran had died in a fall, though she would have lived with proper care—but no one found her for two days. Bill had made her promises, but those that he kept all had to do with money. Gran died alone, on a Friday.
    Loren rose, refilled Gramps’s cup and then her own, swinging back in her chair with a leg tucked under her. Her father, too, had had a preoccupation with money, as in spending it—the yacht, the Morgan, the cottage house, and tennis courts, and jewels… Loren had barely known the glittering couple whose death in a yachting accident had orphaned her. She remembered laughter and parties and swift good-night kisses…and a thousand promises given, never kept, ranging from a piggy-back ride to a trip to the Taj Mahal. Time and love were the promises broken: money always came first.
    She’d met Hal after the empire had already collapsed,