A Kiss Remembered Read Free

shaking his head ruefully and laughing.
    “Shelley?”
    He routed her out of her unpleasant musing by speaking her name as though he’d had to repeat it several times. “Yes?” she asked breathlessly. Why was oxygen suddenly so scarce?
    “I asked how long you’ve been Mrs. Robins.”
    “Oh, uh, seven years. But then I
haven’t
been Mrs. Robins for two years.”
    His brows, which were a trifle shaggy and thoroughly masculine, lifted in silent query.
    “It’s a long, boring story.” She glanced down at the toe of her flat-heeled cordovan shoe. “Dr. Robins and I parted company two years ago. That’s when I decided to go back to school.”
    “But this is an undergraduate course.”
    Had any other man worn jeans and western boots with a sportcoat he would have looked as though he were imitating a film star, but Grant Chapman looked absolutely devastating. Did it have anything to do with the open throat of his plaid cotton shirt, which revealed a dark wedge of chest hair?
    She forced her eyes away from it to answer him. “That’s what I am. An undergraduate, I mean.” She had no idea how delectable her mouth looked when she smiled naturally. For the last few years smiles hadn’t come easily. But when they did, the weariness that had been etched on her face by unhappiness was relieved, and her lips tilted at the corners and were punctuated with shallow dimples.
    Grant Chapman seemed intrigued by those indentations at either side of her mouth. It took him a long time to reply. “I would have thought that since you were such a good student, you would have gone to college as soon as you graduated from Poshman Valley.”
    “I did. I went to the University of Oklahoma, but …” She glanced away as she remembered her first semester in Norman and how meeting Daryl Robins had changed the course of her life. “Things happen,” she finished lamely.
    “How are things in Poshman Valley? I haven’t been back since I left. God, that’s been …”
    “Ten years,” she supplied immediately and then wanted to bite her tongue. She sounded like a good little girl giving her teacher the correct answer. “Something like that,” she added with deliberate casualness.
    “Yes, because I went to Washington directly from there. I left before the year was up.”
    Self-defensively she averted her eyes. The next hour of afternoon classes must have begun. Only a few students drifted by on the sidewalks outside the multipaned windows.
    She couldn’t talk about his leaving. He wouldn’t remember, and she had tried for ten years to forget. “Things in Poshman Valley never change. I get back fairly often to see my folks. They still live there. My brother is teaching math and coaching football at the junior high.”
    “No kidding!” He laughed.
    “Yes. He’s married and has two children.” She adjusted her armload of heavy books into a more comfortable position against her breasts. When he saw the gesture, he leaned forward to take them from her and set them on the desk behind him. That left her without anything to do with her hands, so she folded them awkwardly across her waist, hoping he wouldn’t guess how exposed she felt.
    “Do you live here in Cedarwood?”
    “Yes. Since I’m going to school full-time, I rented a small house.”
    “An older one?”
    “How did you know?”
    “There are a lot of them here. It’s a very quaint little town. Reminds me of Georgetown. I lived there the last few years I was in Washington.”
    “Oh.” She felt terribly gauche. He had hobnobbed with the elite, the beautiful, the powerful. How provincial she must seem to him.
    She made a move to retrieve her books. “I don’t want to keep you—”
    “You’re not. I’m finished for the day. As a matter of fact, I was going to get a cup of coffee somewhere. Would you join me?”
    Her heart pounded furiously. “No, thank you, Mr. Chapman, I—”
    His laughter stymied her objection. “Really, Shelley, I think you can call me by my