Читать книгу Guarding The Soldier's Secret - Kathleen Creighton - Страница 10

Introduction

From the Memoirs of Sierra Sam Malone:

The day the railroad bulls beat me to a pulp and threw me off the train in the middle of a California desert, I wouldn’t have bet a wooden nickel on my chances of living to see another sunrise. Who would have thought I’d live to become one of the richest men in the country and make movies and hobnob with the biggest and brightest stars in Hollywood. Hobnob, hell, I bought and sold ’em.

Married one, too.

Barbara Chase wasn’t the first beautiful woman fool enough to marry me, but after she left her baby girl with a sitter and her clothes on a Malibu beach and walked into the sunset, I swore she’d be the last. The way I’d treated my first wife, Elizabeth, causing her to want no part of me in her life or our son’s, and now Barbara taking the way out she did, made it pretty clear to me I was not fit husband material. Or father material, either, for that matter. Which is why I sent my baby daughter off to be raised by Barbara’s folks in Nebraska.

Which turned out to be another mistake, but that’s another story.

So, I had sworn off love, after Barbara, though not off women. No...never off women. Of those there was always a plentiful supply, easily available and more than willing to please me. Mine for the taking. And I took without conscience or regrets.

When Katherine came to me with a sensible business proposition, I thought it seemed like a good idea at the time. Power and prestige, in exchange for the thing that mattered the least to me—money. The funny thing was, we were a good match, Kate and I, and we lasted longer than either of us expected.

But when tragedy struck, we lacked the one thing that might have seen us through the storm. And that was love.