Mirror Image by Danielle Steel

Author:Danielle Steel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1999-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16.

The return trip on the Aquatania seemed twice as long as the trip out, as Victoria and Charles sat side by side on deck chairs. He slept, she read, and she was intrigued to have met Andrea Hamilton on the ship, and they spent a lot of time discussing her latest theories on suffrage.

Charles only wished that hearing about it still intrigued him. As it turned out, his wife appeared to be obsessed with women's causes and issues. This was not a passing fancy for her, or a slightly eccentric topic of conversation, it was what she lived and breathe for.

And although he'd known of her interest before, he had not realized how advanced the disease was. It was all she read about, talked about, cared about, or pursued. And Charles was finding her passion for it excruciatingly boring.

"We're sitting at the captain's table tonight, " he said sleepily, opening one eye, as she lay on the deck chair beside him. "I just thought I'd warn you."

"That's nice of him, " she said without much interest. "Want to go for a swim? " Sometimes he felt the difference in their ages. He was happy Lying there, soaking up the sun, and Victoria liked to keep busy.

But he was willing to oblige her.

Half an hour later, they went down to the pool, and Charles had to force himself not to think about her body. She wore a black bathing suit, and as she swam laps the length of the pool, he couldn't help but admire her style and her long, lithe figure. He joined her then, and they swam side by side, and finally she stopped and smiled at him. She seemed to feel better.

"You're quite a girl, " he said, admiringly. She had certainly run his legs off in the last two months, and challenged him in ways that were not always pleasant. Sometimes he wished he knew her better, at others he wished he'd never met her. And looking at her that way reminded him of her twin. And he wondered if now, after living with her for two months, he would find it easier to distinguish between them, or perhaps it would be harder. In some ways, he felt as though he had lost some of his sense of her in the past months. She had been none of the things he'd expected.

"Have you missed Olivia a lot? " he asked, as they dried off, and sat in chairs around the pool, watching the other swimmers.

"Terribly, " she said honestly, with a wistful look. "I never thought I could live without her. When I was a little girl, I thought that if I were taken away from her, it would kill me." He didn't tell her that that was how he had once felt about Susan.

"And now? " he asked, genuinely curious. There was so much about them that intrigued him, the kind of communication they seemed to have, almost without words, the instinct they had for each other.

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