Free Forbidden by Abbie Williams Page A

that on his soul. And hers would still be condemned to hell.
    But Daniel had been kind to her. Kinder than any man she had yet known in her 19 years, and she owed him the courtesy of at least an explanation. Certainly it would hurt him to find her sprawled lifeless on the hooked rug in front of the woodstove. And you’d still be murdering the baby , she reminded herself darkly, before giving over to full-scale weeping. The house was clean enough for the moment; she could certainly allow herself a moment to sit at the table and sob.
    The worst of it was that she still loved goddamn John Ryan with every inch of her heart. Surely he had loved her, too, in those stolen moments they had found together all through the summer and fall of what had been the most exquisitely wonderful year of her life. Before this…before her birth control had failed her, a sickening discovery she had made just before Thanksgiving. John Ryan, with his marvelously strong hands, his dark eyes and black hair…the way his black mustache made him look a little like a pirate. Yes, he was married. Yes, he had his own children already – the Catholic girl inside of the woman in love had terrible pangs about that – but Lydia could not… would not…deny the way he made her feel. She had given herself over to him with no restraints whatever.
    â€œ Lydia, you are the most beautiful creature ever made ,” he told her the first time they had made love. He was a lawyer; he had a good excuse for working late, and she, free after her days of keeping Dan Sternhagen’s house, had no trouble sneaking into the office to meet him. And his wife, the stern, frigid, fanatically religious Hannah Ryan…Lydia shuddered to imagine John having to share his life with a woman who had slept in a separate bed since the birth of their youngest child seven years ago!
    Lydia was no virgin at 19, but he was hardly in the position to mind that. His body between her legs was all she could think about during her long days of scrubbing and cooking; he couldn’t meet her every evening, but often enough, and it was all she lived for that summer. He would wind her hair around his wrists as he made love to her; he loved her hair, so long and golden…hair he had not touched since the moment she had revealed her secret to him. His face had grown stone cold. She would never forget that; it eradicated entirely the memory of the way his hot, dark eyes burned into hers when he pumped into her time and again.
    â€œHow could you let this happen?” he had asked her in a stricken voice. “What the hell am I supposed to do about this, Lydia? I have a wife. I have a goddamn reputation in this town.”
    In his eyes she was now reduced to the lowest common denominator: a slut, a whore. And now a liar of the most incredible proportions. She knew Daniel wanted her; she felt the ways his eyes followed her. he was a widower, and handsome in his own fair way; she knew she could use that. Bank on it. She had felt his desire, though carefully guarded, thrumming around her since last spring when she had taken the job as a way to save for nursing school in Minneapolis. Now even that was erased, thanks to the baby…the goddamn baby she didn’t want in the first place. At the kitchen table here and now she sobbed until her throat was raw, wanting to harm herself physically, hating Daniel as much as she owed him, because he had actually believed her. She knew that he wanted her enough to accept her bastard baby as his own.
    â€œSweetheart, we’ll never tell anyone the truth, not even the kids,” he told her, two weeks ago tonight. She had been sitting in the living room, on the sofa she brushed every other day for him, her face buried in her hands, his own resting lightly on her bent knees. Before that moment he had never touched her other than to help her with her coat. Lydia tried not to think of now much John had loved to touch her legs,