Invisible Love by Schmitt Éric-Emmanuel

Author:Schmitt, Éric-Emmanuel [Schmitt, Éric-Emmanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Historical, Romance
ISBN: 9781609452148
Goodreads: 23089226
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2012-10-01T07:00:00+00:00

*

Was it possible she was still attractive?

She stared at herself in the mirror, trying not to linger over her faults. If you omitted the roll of fat on her belly—a legacy of her pregnancies—if you didn’t mind broad hips and small breasts, if you were susceptible to tiny, oblong faces, if you called bulging brown eyes “big dark lakes,” if you disregarded the fine lines on her eyelids, she wasn’t too bad-looking.

That was a lot of ifs, wasn’t it?

And yet this man, who was no different than any other man—quite the contrary, in fact—was ecstatic over her.

She looked again at her reflection in the mirror. Since he thought of her as a beauty, she tried to see herself through his eyes.

This was so unhoped for! A young widow was already an old woman, but on top of that, a penniless widow with two children to support—well, nobody wanted any part of that! And yet this afternoon he was going to ask her to marry him. She was sure of it.

Maybe she’d soon be able to stop living from hand to mouth. She’d leave this grim one-bedroom apartment she was renting for almost nothing—although it was still too expensive—and move somewhere more suitable.

There was a knock at the door. Was it he? He hadn’t been able to wait . . . He had come to pick her up! Luckily, the boys were having lunch at their grandmother’s today . . .

She opened the door, but before she had had time to react, the bailiff had stuck his foot between the wall and the door. She held tight to the door handle.

“You’re making a mistake, sir!”

“I’m not making any mistake. I recognized you. You can move as much as you like, but I’m on your trail. Pay me.”

“You’re harassing a woman who can’t even feed her own children!”

“You owe me mortgage installments.”

“My husband owed you, not me.”

“You agreed to the inheritance.”

“I never agreed to starve my children to make rich men fat.”

“Money! Not words! Money!”

Unruffled, sure of his own strength, the bailiff kept pushing. He was going to get in . . . Seizing the wrought-iron hat stand just within her reach, she brought it down on his leather shoe.

The man screamed and instinctively pulled his foot away. She slammed and bolted the door.

“You’re not getting out of this so easily!” came his indignant voice. “I’ll be back.”

She sighed, relieved that he preferred to come back rather than wait. Otherwise how would she have been able to keep her appointment?

Annoyed at having been reminded of her precarious situation at the very moment she had been dreaming of better prospects, she sat down at her dressing table and untangled and smoothed her long black hair, an activity that always alleviated her worst anxieties.

An hour later, she joined her admirer in his bachelor apartment on Singerstrasse, which was in a very respectable neighborhood. A table laden with tea things and dozens of cakes welcomed her.

He wasn’t rich, but neither was he short of money. He might not have been handsome, but he wasn’t repulsive.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.