The Lonely Hearts Club Read Free

said indulgently, recognizing the Candace she knew and loved coming to the surface, “she’s very cute.”
    “Still, even if she was hot…was she hot?”
    “Yes,” Liz replied, thinking that Reilly Danvers was definitely hot, if you went for the intense, darkly attractive types. Which she didn’t. She had always been drawn to the brightly burning extroverts like Candace and Julia. At the thought of Julia, her heart ached. Even as she struggled to push the sorrow aside, she wondered as she had so frequently over the last eight weeks, if the pain was from missing Julia or just from knowing she had lived six years of a lie.
    Brenda, with her usual quiet sensitivity, touched Liz’s arm. “You okay?”
    Liz clasped her friend’s hand. “Yes, I’m fine. Thanks.”
    Candace, seemingly having forgotten her interest in Reilly Danvers and whether she was a potential bedmate, reached across the table and took Liz’s other hand, joining the three of them in the old familiar circle. “So, honey, what did the doctor say?”
    Liz looked from one expectant face to the other. Brenda, who spent her days directing the rare books department in the Temple University library and her nights in some sort of scholarly pursuit that Liz had yet to completely understand. At five-foot-four, raven-haired, doe-eyed Brenda had women following her at any kind of gathering, but she rarely dated. And Candace. Candace, who had stolen Liz’s heart when Liz should have been old enough to know better, and who had casually, innocently broken it on her way to the next effortless conquest. Her two best friends. One ex-lover. So different, and yet together, forming a whole.
    For nine years they’d shared secrets, heartbreaks, the joy of new beginnings and the pain of breaking up. The three had forged something that went beyond friendship and created a family in a far more intimate way than anything Liz shared with most of her blood relatives. Her friends looked at her now, with worry and expectation.
    A few minutes earlier, as she had crossed the campus from the University Hospital to the bar where they had hung out in their carefree student days, she had considered what she would say when they asked the inevitable question. What would she tell them, when she herself wasn’t certain how she felt about the news? She wanted to give herself time, time to examine a future that was so very different than what she had anticipated just three months before. But now, sitting with her friends, the family she had made, she knew that time would not change her answer.
    With a tremulous smile that for once she could not control, Liz said, “You’re both going to be aunts.”

Chapter Two

    “What are you going to tell Julia?” Brenda asked softly.
    “Not a damn thing,” Liz said sharply. Brenda’s gentle smile never wavered, but Liz made her living, and quite a successful one, reading the subtle expressions and body language that most people missed. Her tone had stung, and her misery wasn’t Bren’s fault.
    “I’m sorry, Bren.” Liz squeezed Bren’s hand and then let go of both Bren’s and Candace’s. She settled back in the booth with a sigh. “I’m jumpy today. Sorry.”
    “That’s okay. You’re allowed,” Brenda said.
    “I’ll tell you what you should say to that miserable two-timing bitch,” Candace seethed. “You should tell her to take the next train back to Hoboken, or wherever the hell she came from, and to take her little graduate student girlfriend with her.”
    “It’s Hackensack,” Liz clarified, “and since Julia just got tenure last fall, I don’t think she’s planning on moving anytime soon.”
    “Maybe we can get her fired,” Candace said, leaning forward with a feral glint in her sky blue eyes. “Don’t they have some rules against fucking your graduate students?”
    “Uh, Candace,” Bren interjected, “maybe we should just celebrate Liz’s news right now and plan our smear campaign later.”
    Liz ordered a