Secrets Read Free

aware of the war between his daughter’s nanny and his girlfriend, he didn’t give it away. But when he turned to look at his daughter, his face nearly melted with love. Whatever other problems he had, Jeff’s love for his daughter was obvious to all. “She looks sleepy, and she’s probably hungry. You know how she is. She’d stay in the water all day if she weren’t dragged out.”
    Cassie looked out at Elsbeth in the kiddie pool. In her opinion, the five-year-old girl was the most beautiful child on the planet. She was sitting in the water wearing a suit of white eyelet, a matching hat, and most of a bottle of sunscreen. “Sure,” Cassie said, throwing back one of the three towels covering her. “Will you be home for dinner tonight?”
    She stood up and stretched. Cassie was several inches shorter than Skylar, but there was nothing on Cassie that wasn’t real. Her mother spent many hours in a gym fighting against her natural curves, but Cassie loved hers. She’d once heard Jeff’s father call her “a 1950s blonde bombshell with dark hair.” It was all Cassie could do not to giggle and let them know she’d heard.
    Skylar clutched Jeff’s arm to her artificially enhanced breasts. “No, we’re going out tonight. Just the two of us.” She paused. “He’ll have some real food for a change.”
    â€œAh, right,” Cassie said. “Home cooking isn’t real food. I’ll have to tell that to Thomas.”
    Jeff coughed to cover his laugh. Jeff’s father, Thomas, lived with him, and just weeks after Cassie took the job of being Elsbeth’s nanny, he’d asked to have some of what Cassie was cooking for herself and the child. From there it had gone to Cassie preparing dinner for the three of them. At first she’d left Thomas a plate in the warming oven while she and Elsbeth went upstairs to the playroom to eat, but he’d asked them to eat with him in the breakfast nook. From there it had gone to Thomas moving them into the dining room and setting the big mahogany table with candles and silver. “No use letting these dishes sit in the cabinet,” he’d said as he put out the best china for them to use. If Cassie could use any term to describe Thomas, it would be “Old World gentleman.”
    Jeff spent the weekends with his daughter. Even if he had to work, he took her with him. Elsbeth was a quiet child who had no interest in rowdy group activities. Cassie would fill a backpack full of art supplies and Elsbeth would hold her father’s hand and go with him wherever he led. There were times when Cassie could hardly hold back the tears at the sight of the widower and the motherless child together, clinging to each other.
    The weekdays were different though because Jeff worked long, hard hours. But one night he’d come home from work to get a file he’d left behind and seen the three of them sitting at the dining table eating by candlelight and he’d joined them. By the end of the week it had become a regular event that they’d eat together. Because of Elsbeth’s age, and Thomas’s weak heart, they ate at six thirty, but Jeff didn’t seem to mind. He said it beat calling the Chinese place and eating at the drawing board in his office. Sometimes he’d go back to his office afterward, and sometimes Cassie would hear him in the big library off his bedroom. But even if he had to work, it was nice that he got to spend more time with his daughter and father.
    As for Cassie, when it had started that she was cooking three meals a day for four people, part of her wanted to protest. It wasn’t her job to be a nanny and a cook, but she’d said nothing. Instead, she began to study cookbooks as though she were taking a graduate degree in the subject.
    The best part was that cooking and eating meals together changed the household. Thomas put his name in for one of the