"TXT - Nora Roberts - Dream 02 - Holding The Dream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberts Nora)

heredity, her upbringing, and her own stringent standards for herself.

When a child was orphaned at an early age, when she lived with the loss,
when she had, essentially, watched her parents die, there seemed little
else that could be so wrenching.

But there was, Kate realized as she sat, still in shock, behind her tidy
desk in her tidy office at Bittle and Associates.

Out of that early tragedy had come enormous blessings. Her parents had
been taken away, and she'd been given others.

The distant kinship hadn't mattered to Thomas and Susan Templeton. They
had taken her in, raised her, given her a home and love. Given her
everything, without question.

And they must have known, she realized. They must have always known.

They had known when they took her from the hospital after the accident.
When they comforted her and gave her the gift of belonging, they had
known.

They took her across the continent to California. To the sweeping cliffs
and beauty of Big Sur. To Templeton House. There, in that grand home, as
gracious and welcoming as any of the glamorous Templeton hotels, they
made her part of their family.

They gave her Laura and Josh, their children, as siblings. They gave her
Margo Sullivan, the housekeeper's daughter, who had been accepted as
part of the family even before Kate.

They gave her clothes and food, education, advantages. They gave her
rules and discipline and the encouragement to pursue dreams.

And most of all, they gave her love and family and pride.

Yet they had known from the beginning what she, twenty years later, had
just discovered.

Her father had been a thief, a man under indictment for embezzlement.
Caught skimming from his own clients' accounts, he had died facing
shame, ruin, prison.

She might never have found out but for the capricious twist of fate that
had brought an old friend of Lincoln Powell's into her office that
morning.

He was so delighted to see her, remembered her as a child. It warmed her
to be remembered, to realize that he had come to her with his business
because of the old tie with her parents. She'd taken the time, though