His Wife's Diary

By Tess Allen

India Reinhart, a 33-year-old successful Kansas City graphic artist, is torn as to what is the right thing to do when she finds a diary in a box of old books she purchases at a yard sale. Things get very dicey once she steps deeper and deeper into the quagmire of the lives that have unfolded in the pages of that diary. It is a quagmire that India realizes is turning out to be almost as unsettling as the life she is already living.
To make matters worse, India finds herself attracted to, rather than repelled by, the man she has come to despise based on his wife’s written words. He's Langley Monza, a Kansas City favorite son and ex-NFL star. The unwelcome attraction is a very complicated emotion for her since she still has some unfinished business with her own ex-fiancé and feels guilt and betrayal towards the diary writer whom she knows is dead.
India discovers there is much more than just a broken heart hidden in the pages of Langley’s wife’s diary and it is that discovery that she realizes may easily drastically change the course of a number of lives, including her own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tess Allen
• Release date: May 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9780971943377

Tess Allen

Tess Allen is debuting as a Romance author. She is a playwright, poet and non-fiction writer in another life.

Book preview

His Wife’s Diary

(Love Bites)

A NOVELLA

TESS ALLEN

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 Tess Allen

Published by Write On Writers

[e-mail]

His Wife’s Diary. Copyright © 2011 by Tess Allen. All rights reserved. No part of this e-book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages to be included in a review.

All characters, names, descriptions and traits are products of the author’s imagination. Similarities to actual people – living or dead – are purely coincidental.

Cover design by: PTL Creative Plus

ISBN: 9780971943377

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is dedicated to Floyd H. Love, Jr., Shannon Dulin, Robert O. Dulin III, LaTia Allen, Jaime Clark, LaKeisha Pompey-Dulin, and Marjorie McMorris.

I also want to acknowledge the original Serious Novelist, Shelia Goss, Carla Curtis, Cherlyn Michaels, and Linda Dominique Grosvenor, along with my good friend and mentor Pete Peterson, for their support and continuous creative inspiration.

I most definitely thank those of you who read and enjoy my books. You are who make it all worth the effort. I love you!

Above all, I acknowledge and give thanks to the Creator Himself through whom all things are possible.

Dear Readers,

Love Bites are short romantic stories that will be offered as electronic books. His Wife’s Diary is one of many that will be part of Love Bites. Tess Allen is also the author of the Love Bites novella The Jewel Thief.

Love Bites are quick short reads. So sit back and enjoy this romantic appetizer.

Chapter One

Don’t they realize I can hear them? Yes, I’m sick, but I’m not dead yet. How could he be so heartless? I can hear them!

India Reinhart couldn’t stand to read anymore, at least not now. Her heart was aching and she wished she had never found the diary. Wished she had never gone to the yard sale in Mission Hills last Saturday and picked up that box of autographed books. Little did she know that it also contained the diary wrapped in a piece of burgundy silk buried underneath them, this diary that now was driving her to tears.

She threw the leather-bound book with its gilded edges across the room. It hit the wall with a thud and she cringed. She hadn’t meant to do that, but the way it was making her feel she didn’t know what else to do.

Shaking, she grabbed her phone and dialed her best friend Jewel Capri’s number. Moments later Jewel answered groggily but India barely gave her a chance to say hello.

I took your advice, Jewel. I started reading that darned thing and I really, really, really wish I hadn’t.

She could hear Jewel catch her breath on the other end. India? What are you talking about? Girl it better be good, calling me and waking me up at 2:00 in the morning!

The diary, the diary I told you I found in that box of old books. I started reading it tonight and it is breaking my heart, India said, her voice cracking. It seems to have belonged to a woman who may have been dying and it sounds like her husband was cheating on her – cheating right up under her nose.

Ooh, no wonder you are upset. That’s terrible.

Yes, I’m upset!

You know the only reason I suggested that you might want to read some of the diary India was that maybe you would find out who it belonged to, remember? To return it to them, that’s what we talked about.

I know, but, Jewel, India said calming down a little. Look, I’m sorry to wake you up like this, it’s just, well, you know.

Maybe you ought to just get rid of it. I don’t think I’d read anymore of it if I were you. Jewel said softly.

India shook her head violently even though Jewel couldn’t see her, the wild cascade of tightly coiled curls whipping her face. She was shocked by how emotional she was at the moment and sorry she had called and awakened Jewel in Dallas, but they both knew that Jewel was about the only one she could talk to who would understand why the words on the page of the diary had hit her so hard.

She was only a year out of her own relationship with a lying cheating skunk and the letters in the scrawny slanted handwriting on those diary pages had been like a scalpel re-opening her own wounds. They had cast her back to that day when she’d walked in on her fiancé Crayton and her secretary, Lillian, in the backroom of her studio in Dallas. It happened just five days before her wedding and it had nearly destroyed her. She’d called the wedding off and two months later she’d relocated her business from Dallas to Kansas City, but everyday she thought of the pain of