"Holly Lisle - Minerva Wakes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

'When did all of that change?

There wasn't any sharp line where she could say, 'This is
when I quit loving Darryl." She stared at the ceiling some
more, and thought about it. and decided instead that not

MINERVA WAKES 21




loving him had been the result of a series of disappointments,
a series of little betrayals and failures. TTiere were all the
nights he'd wanted to watch football instead of making love;

all the days when he'd stayed over at work because he was in
the middle of some exciting project or other rather than
doing something with her and the Idds; all the times he'd told
her he'd help her with something, and had then forgotten.
There were the times when he'd said he didn't want to do a
load of laundry because he always had trouble with the
clothes tanglingтАФas if she didn'tтАФor that he didn't want to
scrub down the shower because she did it better. There was
the way he let her work to put him through college, then said
that they couldn't afford for her to finish her educationтАФnut
with a house and three lads and bills.

Not loving Darryl wasn't the result of some huge disaster
in their relationship, she realized. It was the fact that they
really didn't have much of a relationshipтАФthree children
and eleven years of marriage notwithstanding.

She held her left hand out in front of her and stared at
the wedding band on her ring-finger. Even in the dark she
could make out the intricate interweavings of the pattern.
The old man at the Renaissance Faire all those years ago
had insisted those rings would bind the young lovers
soul-to-soul, "across the worlds and through all
time"тАФand Minerva and Darryi, charmed by the fairy
tale, had bought them.

And like all fairy tales, that one was just so much bullshit,
Minerva thought.

She crawled out from beneath the covers, and her bare
skin prickled with the chill. She grabbed the bathrobe that
was draped over the bedpost and wrapped the thick, warm
terrycioth around her. Then she tiptoed to the window.