Tara Quinn - Sophie's Secret

“Ah, Soph, I thought things were great. These past two weeks, working on the show, you’ve seemed so happy. Why didn’t you say something? We could have taken time away, really talked.”

Why hadn’t she said something? Why hadn’t she told her friend the whole truth? Why hadn’t she told Annie—someone who’d known her before, who would understand—that she was struggling? Why hadn’t she admitted, even silently, that she’d allowed herself to return to a place she’d vowed never to revisit?

Bulimia-ville.

“I didn’t know.” Sophie answered her own last question first. “I swear, Annie, this is the first time. And it really wasn’t a conscious choice. I just…I guess old habits really do die hard. Or don’t ever die. They just lie there, waiting to attack you when you’re at a weak point.”

“You know the signs, Soph. The symptoms.”

Nodding, Sophie thought over the past few months. The past two years. When her sexual being had come back to life.

She thought of Duane. And quickly shut that mental door.

“I didn’t see it coming,” she said. “I’m older. Successful. I have many reasons to feel good about myself. I really thought I wasn’t susceptible anymore.”

Another dancer, a guest performer in the evening’s closing performance, pushed through the door from the dressing room, said, “Sorry, I gotta pee,” then, with a smile in their direction, dashed into a stall.

“Let’s go find a place to get something to eat,” Annie said, pulling Sophie in the direction of the door.

“You’ve got a cast party to get to.” She’d been here two weeks and had managed to avoid any one-on-one personal conversation with the woman who’d once been such a close confidant. “And I really should hang around while they tear things down.”

“The local techies are going to get all of that.” Annie pointed out what they both knew. “And you’ve got time to finish up paperwork in the morning before your flight back to Phoenix.”

Sophie allowed herself to be pulled into the bustle of a quickly emptying dressing room. “But your party—”

“Is nothing compared to you,” Annie said softly. She approached her seat at the long, lighted dressing table, throwing things in her bag with an unusual disregard to orderliness. “It’s not like I haven’t performed with these people before, or like I won’t again.”

Sophie went to collect her things.

LIFTING HIS GLASS, Duane peered at the small, select group of men and women gathered in the living room of his Phoenix high-rise condo. The party was unofficial. A Saturday-night get-together of friends.

The friends just happened to be the most powerful political movers and shakers in the state of Arizona.

“You’re the one, buddy,” Robert Anvil said, touching his glass to Duane’s as the rest of the small group nodded.

Looking to Will Parsons, the one man in the room he truly trusted, one of the few people in the world he considered a friend, Duane waited. And only drank when he received Will’s quiet nod.

Any other evening he and Will got together it was at Will’s home in Shelter Valley, a small town an hour’s drive from Phoenix. Shelter Valley had been home to Will Parsons all his life, and a regular stopping place for Duane the past two years.

The two men had met in college—at Montford University, the Harvard of the West. Will was now president of the renowned educational institution. His wife, Becca, standing next to him tonight, was mayor of Shelter Valley.

Neither of those facts was the reason Duane considered them friends.

Toast completed, talk broke out among the twenty people who’d come together to informally offer Duane their party’s nomination for the senate seat in Arizona’s state election the following fall.

Relief seemed to suffuse the room, as though blown from the heating duct. Relief and anticipation, judging by the buzz of conversations Duane was catching. They’d made a good choice. Or seemed to think they had.

Duane wasn’t so sure.

“You don’t look like a man who’s in the process of realizing his greatest lifetime goal.”

Turning, Duane grimaced at Will, who’d maneuvered them into a corner of the room where they could speak without being overheard.

“I can do this job.” Hands in his pockets, Duane looked his friend straight in the eye. “After twenty years of applying the laws in this state, I know where we need changes, and how to go about getting them. I know our weak points and our strengths—”

“Yeah.” Will might be a fifty-something university president, but he was also a very involved father—one child five and another one eight—and more and more his vocabulary was relaxing.

“I just…”

“You’re worried about Sophie.”

Duane’s eighteen-years-younger-than-him girlfriend was no secret between the two men. She was the reason for his frequent visits to Shelter Valley.

She’d been a student at Will’s school not all that many years ago.

“You know as well as I do that half the people in this room would change their minds about backing me if they knew about her,” Duane said.

His relationship with Sophie didn’t come to Phoenix.

“When’s the last time you asked her to marry you?”

“Before she left for Chicago.” Two weeks ago.

“And she turned you down?”

“Of course.”

Will, the only man in the room wearing a suit jacket, sipped from his glass of soda water. He rarely drank these days—one of the many changes that had accompanied Bethany’s advent into his and Becca’s lives when, after twenty-plus years of trying, they found out Becca was finally going to have a baby.

“Better be careful, man,” Will said. “She might surprise you one of these times and accept.”

Now there was a thought. One that brought more reservations than the party decision to back him.

Will’s eyes narrowed. “What would you do if she did?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Maybe you’d better figure that out before you pose the question again.”

It sounded so easy.

With a quick glance over his shoulder at the men and women milling behind them, Will asked, “Do you love her?”

“You know I do.”

“I know you’re attracted to her. That’s a far cry from loving her.”

“Give me a break, man. I’m forty-six, not fourteen. And it’s been two years. It’s more than just lust.”

“So could you picture yourself spending the rest of your life with her?”

Who knew answers to such questions?

“I can picture myself at sixty, when she’s forty-two. In my mind, Sophie is full of energy and beauty and bored with me.”

“You don’t trust her.”

“It’s more than that, Will. I love my time with her, crave more time with her. But when we’re together we’re alone. The rest of the world, and things like generations, don’t matter. Can you honestly picture her here tonight? Hell, these guys would think she’s my daughter. Or they’d look at her like she’s on the hunt for a sugar daddy.”

Will seemed to commiserate with his chuckle.

“You don’t hold too high an opinion of the moral composition of our peers.”

Duane took in the room, the casually dressed men and women, and saw them for what they were. Intelligent, confident, successful. Many of them would do whatever it took to get where they were going. Use who they could. Stab who they had to. Some were quick to judge each other, while justifying, at least to themselves, their own sometimes questionable actions—and would blame others if someone got hurt.

He didn’t want to join the crowd. He simply wanted to change the world.

“I don’t want to make Sophie look like a whore.” He and Will talked straight. Which was one of the reasons Duane valued the friendship so much.