The Sweetheart Secret Read Online Free Page A

been behind the comment was gone now, replaced by that impenetrable wall that made Daisy both infuriating and mysterious. “Give me a few weeks and then I’ll be out of your life.”
    â€œWeeks? Why?”
    She turned the key in the ignition and the car roared to life. “You don’t get to ask why, Colt. You gave up that right a long time ago.”
    â€œYou can’t come into this town and tell everyone we’re married. I have a life here, Daisy. A life that doesn’t include a wife.” People had forgotten about the Colt he used to be. The town had moved on, changed. Everyone here knew him only as a respectable doctor, not the headstrong teen who had run out of town, tossing aside school and his family, for what had amounted to a fling. An unforgettable fling, but a fling nonetheless.
    â€œThat life includes a wife now.” Daisy jerked the door shut, then propped an elbow on the open window and looked up at him. “Listen, I’m not here to make your life miserable. Maybe we can work out some kind of deal. Quid pro quo. Maybe there’s something you want—”
    His mind rocketed back to that night in New Orleans. Daisy climbing on top of him, pinning his wrists to the bed—
    Okay, that wasn’t helping anything. At all.
    â€œThere’s nothing I want. Except a divorce.”
    â€œI can’t do that. I need you, Colt. Just for a few weeks. Please.” She bit her lip, and he sensed she hated having to beg. “There’s got to be something I can do for you. Something, uh, other than what happened in New Orleans.”
    Meaning no sex. Not that he’d even considered that.
    Liar.
    What was with this woman? She turned him inside out and upside down in the space of five minutes.
    â€œThink about my offer, Colt. I’m staying at the Rescue Bay Inn for a few days. Room one twelve.” She handed him a slip of paper. “My cell.”
    He stepped back and she pulled away. A moment later, her car was gone. Three months ago, they’d been tangled in soft-as-butter sheets. She’d had her legs wrapped around his waist, her nails clutching at his back, her teeth nibbling his ear, and he’d been lost, in the moment, in her. Now they were exchanging numbers and making appointments, as if none of that had ever happened. That was what he’d wanted, how he’d left things three months ago. But it didn’t make words like
quid pro quo
sting any less.
    A pair of seagulls flew overhead, squawking disapproval or agreement or the location of the nearest fish shack, Colt didn’t know. A breeze skated across the lot, making palm fronds shiver and the thick green grass yield. Daisy’s car disappeared around the corner with a red taillight flicker, and Colt stood there, empty, cold.
    He started back toward his office, then stopped when he saw Greta Winslow, standing under the overhang on the corner of the building, out of earshot but still watching the whole thing. Great. Now this was going to be on the front page of the Rescue Bay paper: LOCAL DOC HIDING SECRET MARRIAGE WITH MYSTERY WOMAN.
    â€œHere, Doc,” Greta said, marching up to him and thrusting a paper at his chest. “I think you need this more than I do.”
    He glanced down at the orange sheet he’d handed her earlier. Beneath his signature he’d written:
Doctor’s Advice: Embrace the things that scare you, from broccoli to love.
    â€œThat was just a joke, Greta. I didn’t mean—”
    â€œSometimes your subconscious is smarter than all those fancy medical degrees put together, Doc. And sometimes”—she laid a hand on his arm—“an old woman with eighty-plus years of life experience has a thing or two to teach her too-smart-for-his-own-good physician.”
    â€œI appreciate the advice, Mrs. Winslow, I really do. But Daisy and I are just friends. Acquaintances, really. This whole marriage thing is a