The Secret Wife by Susan Mallery Page A

wanted? She hadn’t compared favorably with the latter when they’d first been married. She would fall even further short of that elusive goal now.
    How odd that she’d failed so completely at being his wife when all she’d wanted to do was please him. Despite the love that had burned so brightly between them, they hadn’t made it work. If love wasn’t enough, what was?
    “Are you bored living here?” he asked.
    His question was so at odds with what she was thinking, it took her a couple of minutes to process it in her brain. “Bored? Why would I be? If I’m not busy in the office, I’m helping with the children. There are a thousand things that need doing.”
    “I don’t mean the work. I was referring to the life-style. You haven’t been out since you arrived. Didn’t Millie tell you which were your nights off?”
    She shifted on the sofa, smoothing the skirt of her cotton sundress. “I’m not the disco type,” she said. “Do they even still have disco?”
    “Not really.”
    His mouth turned up slightly at the corners. Her heart skipped a beat. The man was good-looking enough to melt metal; what hope did she have of resisting him?
    “I wasn’t the one who wanted to move to New York,” she reminded him. “Once we were there, I didn’t much care for the pace of life in the city. I was always a homebody. Give me good friends or a good book and I’m happy.”
    He leaned against the back of the sofa and crossed one ankle over the opposite knee. “What about when you were on the show? You must have had a more glamorous existence then.”
    “I was a kid. Besides, it’s not really glamorous. We had public appearances at local malls and stuff.” Elissa shrugged. “It wasn’t what you think, Cole. People imagine a star’s life as perfect, but it’s just like everyone else’s.”
    “Everyone else doesn’t have a poster that’s now a collector’s item.”
    She felt herself flush again. The triplets had posed for a Sally McGuire poster the second year of the show. It had sold very well and was now difficult to find. Fallon had told her a poster in mint condition could fetch as much as three hundred dollars. Too bad she and her sisters hadn’t had a concession on that particular bit of merchandise.
    “Some of the circumstances are different,” she admitted. “But it’s not perfect. The reality is we would drive to the public appearances, spend several hours signing autographs and talking to strangers, then we’d drive home. We were ten-year-old kids and that wasn’t our favorite way to spend a weekend. Monday morning we were back on the set.”
    She shook her head, trying to banish the memories. “Kayla and Fallon get along now, but when we were younger, they were always fighting. It’s so weird that we’re only minutes apart in age, yet the three of us have very different personalities. Those two can really clash, while I’m the peacemaker. Sometimes it was a full-time job. I just wanted everyone to get along.”
    “But they didn’t,” he said.
    “No. They fought. My parents fought. Then they broke up. All I ever wanted was a relationship that worked. I never had that.”
    “Not even with me.”
    She wasn’t sure how he meant his comment. As an apology? A statement of fact? An admission of blame? Whatever his motivation, she didn’t want to ignore the opportunity to talk about their relationship. There were things they needed to resolve.
    “We both could have done better,” she said.
    “Yeah. Then this could have been ours.” He raised his arm and motioned to the room.
    She knew what he meant. Not the orphanage or the big-screen TV, but entwined lives, kids. A future.
    “We really messed up, huh?”
    He shrugged as if to say that sort of thing happened.
    She leaned toward him. No way she was going to let him skate by this time. She wanted to know what he was thinking. “Doesn’t that make you angry?” she asked. “We had so much and we blew it.”
    “Not angry.” His