From This Moment Read Online Free Page B

Romulus White learned she was in Boston? This wasn’t good. She’d never even met the man, but he’d been pursuing her for years, and he was relentless.
    Once again he was offering to hire her at Scientific World . There had been a time when she’d been amused by his impassioned letters to her, so full of enthusiasm it had been hard to turn him down. She admired people who had a passion for their work, and his letters sparkled with intelligence and the sheer love of sharing the wonders of science and technology with the wider world.
    His letters were untethered by reason or restraint, and she always found them amusing. Their correspondence brimmed with delightful barbs and a professional rivalry that sizzled despite the three thousand miles separating them. She enjoyed his letters but was never tempted to move, for the great publishing houses of London beckoned. She dared not tempt fate by leaving her idyllic life in England to work for a man whose unbridled passion rivaled her own. They would either get along smashingly well or be tempted to kill each other on sight.
    All that was over now. She no longer had a career in art; she was merely a clerk at City Hall. Even doodling in the margins of her papers made Stella feel guilty. It would be best to not even respond to this latest missive from Romulus, for it would only confirm that she had relocated to Boston, and the fewer people who knew she was here, the better.
    Her heart sank a little deeper as she folded his note and returned it to the envelope. Romulus White and his dazzling offers belonged to her past, and there was no room for him in her new, darker world.
    She dropped his note into the trashcan. She would not think of him again.

    By the next morning, Stella’s hand hurt even worse. It was awkward to type with her right hand swollen from the stings,and she hoped no one in the office watched as she painfully pecked out keys on the typewriter. Stella shared the office with six other stenographers, and their desks were only a few feet apart, meaning she had no privacy.
    “How did you hurt your hand?” Nellie Carlyle asked from the neighboring desk.
    “Bee sting,” Stella replied but did not look up from her work or offer more information. She had no desire to make friends with her fellow stenographers. She didn’t trust anyone in City Hall, and the more anonymous she was, the easier it would be to gather information as she sneaked around the building. All the stenographers here had known her sister, and Stella could not afford to let anything slip that might reveal her connection to Gwendolyn Westergaard.
    Poor tragically murdered Gwendolyn. Of course, no one in Boston believed Gwendolyn had been murdered. Everyone from the police department to the medical examiner’s office insisted it was a simple accident, but Stella suspected otherwise.
    And she was here to find proof.
    When she applied for this job, she used her professional name, Stella West. She was grateful for the name, for it meant no one would suspect an association between Stella West and the tragic Gwendolyn Westergaard.
    “That must have been a lot of bees,” Nellie said. “I imagine you’ll be even slower than normal in typing up your notes.”
    “I can handle it,” Stella said, although it was no secret that she was the worst stenographer here, barely able to keep up with the rapid-fire discussions at the meetings. While in college, she and Gwendolyn both had studied stenography, the art of typing shorthand notes during important meetings, but that was eight years ago, and her skills were rusty. As soon as she’d arrived in Boston, she’d bought her own stenotype machine and practicedfor two solid weeks in the privacy of her room. Summoning up her old training from college, Stella worked hard to resurrect her dormant stenotype and typewriting skills. She bought training books, exercise manuals, and studied by lamplight into the early hours of the morning. She used a blindfold to force