Dad's E-mail Order Bride. Candy Halliday

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СКАЧАТЬ “You have to give Rachel props for masterminding such a perfect plan. The hearing impaired excuse for why we couldn’t talk on the phone was brilliant.”

      “Yeah, Rachel’s a real mastermind, all right,” Graham grumbled. “We’ll see if she can mastermind her way out of being banned from the Internet for the rest of her life.”

      She laughed and said, “Well, she definitely used the Internet to her advantage. Your Web site for the lodge, for instance. Rachel backed up her hearing loss story by pointing out your phone number isn’t listed on your site.”

      Graham shook his head in amazement. “The phone number isn’t listed any longer because I spent the first six months after I launched the Web site answering calls from people who were only shopping around for rates. I only contact people who are serious enough to e-mail me.”

      He thought for a minute and said, “Rachel used the Internet to her advantage another way, too. I pay a flat fee for phone and Internet service, so she had no long-distance charges to worry about. And Rachel living with the phone glued to her ear is normal. I had no reason to suspect she wasn’t talking to her best friend instead of you.”

      “Only one thing still bothers me,” she said. “Some of the e-mails Rachel sent were…” She paused. “Well, to put it bluntly, they were too mature for a girl her age.”

      Mature?

      Graham gulped.

      Did she mean things of a sexual nature?

      And how advanced was Rachel in that regard? They’d had the sex talk when she was twelve. To his relief, the subject had never come up again.

      Graham was still trying to summon the courage to ask what she meant by mature, when Courtney placed her coffee cup on the end table between their two chairs, bent and picked up her purse from the floor. After pulling out a handful of papers, she unfastened the clip and handed them over.

      “Rachel said you could read lips, but I was still worried we would have trouble communicating,” she said. “I printed out my favorite e-mails. I wanted to show them to you and tell you how much they touched me. Read them yourself. And then you tell me if those sound like the words of a teenage girl to you.”

      Graham looked down at the first e-mail.

      How would I describe myself?

      He winced when familiar words began jumping off the page.

      When I look back over my life, I see a man content to let life happen to him, instead of charting his own path. A man who believed by making everyone else happy, he would eventually find happiness himself. But I’ve come to the realization that life is too precious to leave to chance and life decisions are too important to hand over to someone else. My mistakes have taught me this: choose what you want out of life or life will choose it for you.

      “Why, that little thief!” Graham shouted, refusing to bring his now-red face up to meet hers. “Rachel took that straight from my journal.”

      He shifted the papers to the next e-mail:

      There are times when such a solitary life leaves me lonelier than I care to admit. Especially on endless, sleepless nights when I gaze at the ceiling, trying to remember how it feels to have the warmth of another body pressed close to mine. Those are the times when I long for a head on my shoulder, another heart beating close to mine, simply enjoying the still of the night.

      And the next:

      Troubles melt away here in Alaska. Living in such an unspoiled environment renews my spirit, gives me strength, and reminds me of how truly remarkable God’s gifts to man really are. The only thing missing is someone to share such an amazing experience.

      “Unbelievable,” Graham said, shaking his head as he thumbed through the remainder of the pages. He was still too embarrassed to look at her.

      Maybe Courtney had been honest enough to admit how embarrassed and how gullible she felt. She’d even explained that if her demanding job had left any time for a personal life, she never would have been curious about the online membership her best friend had given her for her birthday. Still, Graham’s embarrassment reached a much deeper level.

      A complete stranger had seen right into his soul.

      Graham felt as gutted as a fresh fish fillet.

      “Let me guess,” she said. “Everything I saved came from your journal. Didn’t it?”

      She’d guessed right.

      She reached out and touched his arm, an innocent gesture—unless you hadn’t felt a woman’s touch in years.

      “I don’t blame you for being upset about your journal, Graham. Just don’t be too hard on Rachel, okay? Be angry with me. I should have paid more attention to other red flags that kept popping up.”

      Graham finally looked over at her. “What other red flags?”

      “Well, mainly the fact that Rachel only e-mailed me pretending to be you about twice a week. And she covered her bases by telling me how busy you were once fishing season started.”

      “I am busy once fishing season starts,” Graham said. “But I’m still more at fault here than you are. I shouldn’t have been too busy to keep up with what my daughter was doing.”

      “Thanks for trying to make me feel better,” she said. “But I insist on paying you for staying at the lodge this weekend. And I’ll certainly reimburse you for the plane ticket.”

      “Absolutely not,” Graham said, shaking his head in protest. “If anything, I’m the one who should pay you for your inconvenience in flying all the way across the country. And for your mental anguish over all of this.”

      “Mental anguish?” she repeated.

      He’d obviously said the wrong thing. Her tone had changed from apologetic to terse. And the insulted expression on her face confirmed it.

      “Look,” she said. “I don’t blame you for thinking I’m some desperate love-starved female because Rachel met me through an online dating site. But let’s not make this into some big catastrophe that it isn’t, okay?”

      Graham started to say something, but she didn’t give him the chance.

      “The way I see it, you and I are the adults here. And I’m pretty sure we’ll both survive the weekend without either of us having to go into therapy.”

      Okay, she’d put him in his place.

      Graham began backpedaling as fast as possible. “I don’t think you’re desperate, or love-starved, or anything else. All I meant by mental anguish was that no one enjoys being the brunt of a joke. I know I don’t. Rachel has embarrassed both of us. And I intend to teach her a lesson for being so thoughtless.”

      She was making him extremely uncomfortable. First, saying how much the words he’d written had touched her. Then, her hand on his arm. Even her plea now to be easy on his daughter.

      She was…dammit!

      She was СКАЧАТЬ