Heart of Stone Read Free Page A

that she was naught but a spirit hovering in the shadows. She turned away, walked to the second-story bay window with its view down Main Street.
    Indian summer had arrived. It swept across the Texas plains with a blazing show of heat before fall set in. Her window was open, but the lace sheers beneath the heavier velvet drapes hung limp and still. There wasn’t a breath of air to stir them.
    Outside all was quiet, the street deserted. Wooden structures lined both sides of the two-block thoroughfare. None of them were as well built or fancy as Foster’s Boardinghouse. Her home graced one end of Main Street. With its wide veranda and rococo trim and detail, it had taken over a year to build—something unheard of in these parts where people raised a barn in an afternoon and generations shared small split-log homes.
    Everything in the house had been her own personal choice, from the detail in the plaster medallions in the ceiling to the hand-carved chair rail in the dining room. She’d chosen every drawer pull, every doorknob, every lamp, drapery, piece of linen, each and every finely woven carpet. Expensive wall coverings lined the walls of almost every room. Ornate furnishings made of hardwoods were waxed and polished to a high shine. The finest items money could buy had come together to impress visitors and leave no doubt that the widow Foster was a lady of fine quality.
    Her grand home was just as she’d planned it: a place fine enough to disguise the woman she’d been, the life she’d led.
    In a sense she had designed her very own gilded cage. It was a lovely place of refuge. And yet never far from her mind was the truth—that this life she had so carefully planned and seen to fruition could unravel in an instant, for it was a life built upon a lie.
    Laura was proud of what she’d accomplished here, but it had come at a price. She had suffered untold indignities doing the only thing she knew how in order to amass her fortune and establish herindependence. And although she no longer lived the life she had and no one could force her to do anything against her will, not a day went by that she didn’t wonder if the truth would come out.
    That Laura Foster was nothing more than a former whore.
    When the clock in the parlor below struck four, Laura ran a hand over her eyes and sighed. Well acquainted with bouts of insomnia, she knew there was no going back to sleep. There was nothing to do but wait for dawn, when Rodrigo, the handyman, and his wife, Anna, arrived and started to prepare breakfast for her guests. Thanks to Rodrigo and Anna and their son, Richard, Foster’s was known as much for the hearty and delicious meals she planned as it was for the fine table she set.
    She walked back to her bed and lit the lamp on the bedside table, then picked up the novel she’d been reading.
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas reminded her of herself. Determined to succeed in escaping the life fate had handed her, she’d educated herself, first by begging one of the other whores, a woman named Jolie, to teach her to read. The process had been painstaking at best, for there was little time to “waste” on something as frivolous as reading. Yet she’d persevered. She’d never forgotten Jolie’s advice:
“Study hard, little one. For if you can read, you can slip into the pages of a book and escape into your mind.”
    Her efforts to better herself hadn’t gone unnoticed. She was chided by the other women in the brothel where she was forced to grow up overnight. She was accused of being aloof and arrogant because she walled off her heart and her soul in order to survive. Through it all, she had cultivated her mind—for it was the only place she could escape to.
    No one could touch her there. No man could put his hands on her mind.
    She didn’t care what any of the other women thought of her. She was too focused on fighting for survival and winning her independence in the outside world. And she’d succeeded. But at