Hot Secrets Read Free

Homes & Fortress Gardens —he couldn’t be there 24/7. So the only way he could keep sane was to try to drill her in self-defense.
    He was a little OCD about it, that was true. And Caroline wasn’t too motivated. That was true, too. But it was the only thing he absolutely insisted on in their marriage. Everything else was her call. The house was decorated the way she wanted it, and they ate what she cooked, they travelled where she wanted to go, they saw the movies she wanted to see. Jack was fine with it all, as long as he was indulged in this.
    “Come on, honey,” he said when she didn’t move.
    “It’s Christmas Eve, Jack.” There was a little whine in there, which made him grin.
    “Yeah? Training stops for no man.”
    “How about for women?”
    “For no woman, either.”
    As an answer she burrowed deeper into the nest of blankets.
    Stalemate.
    Nothing left to do but use the atom bomb.
    “I’ll let you throw me,” Jack said slyly.
    Both eyes opened, focused on him.
    “Yeah?” she said, interested.
    He knew enough not to smile. “Yeah.”
    It was fairly painful, throwing himself to the mat, but he did it for her from time to time so she could have the feel of it in her hands and muscles.
    “Twice.” She made it a statement.
    He frowned.
    “Twice. You’ll let me throw you twice.”
    Ouch. “Okay,” he said on a sigh. “Twice.”
    She gave a sunny smile and threw the blankets back.
    First Page Bookstore
     
    Late afternoon, Christmas Eve
     
      “And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who give gifts, these two were the wisest.”
    Caroline closed the book and smiled at her audience—twenty kids who lived in homeless shelters and foster homes in Summerville and Mona, ten miles away.
    She’d deliberately chosen The Gift of The Magi .
    An old-fashioned tale of old-fashioned feelings—love, tenderness, sacrifice.
    Feelings utterly foreign to the kids gathered in front of her. Their lives were dark and dangerous. Many of them had been betrayed by the very people who were supposed to protect them.
    At first, they’d squirmed as they started to understand that the story wouldn’t be slam-bang fast like video games and the few TV shows they watched on ancient donated sets in the shelters. There were words they clearly didn’t understand and which she carefully explained. Pier glass, fob, meretricious .
    She skirted around O. Henry’s meaning of “chorus girls,” painfully aware that several of the kids had moms who gave blow jobs in back seats for twenty five bucks apiece. The language was archaic and slow and foreign to them. The emotions, too.
    But they got there. Because, although the type of love that existed in the story wasn’t one they’d seen firsthand, it was something every human aspired to. Something everyone instinctively understood.
    They were baffled at first, looking around at each other, rolling their eyes as the story unfolded. But, as she suspected they would be, they were slowly drawn in, helplessly attracted by the kind of experiences they’d likely never encountered. Generosity and true love.
    Her husband, Jack, had grown up as they had.
    Worse, even. Some of these kids, like little Manuel sitting quietly at the outer edges of the group, had mothers who loved them. His stepfather was a drug addict who was so violent there was a restraining order against him. But Manuel’s mother cared for Manuel. Caroline sometimes did readings in his shelter and he always nestled at her side like a small brown bird. Clothes old but carefully mended and clean.
    Jack had never had a mother’s love. He had never known his mother. All he’d known was shelter after shelter in the grip of a violent drunk for a father.
    Utterly unlike her own early experience of life in the embrace of