A Price Worth Paying by Kathryn Shay

Author:Kathryn Shay
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: professional baseball, high school drama, marriage, family relationships, suspense, contemporary romance, kathryn shay emotional romance
Published: 2012-02-27T20:48:11+00:00

Chapter 13

“I know this is hard, Tiffany. But you have to speak up. We can’t hear you.”

Like a child given a gentle reprimand, Tiffany wrung her hands and lifted a wide-eyed gaze to her attorney. Her breath hitched as she stared out, almost blindly. She avoided Nick’s gaze, Callie’s stare, anyone’s direct looks. Stone-faced, Nick listened to the repulsive details of his supposed seduction. It was enough to make any decent man’s stomach turn.

Kenneth Kane, the hearing officer, nodded to her sympathetically. The stenographer, a woman of about fifty, kept her eyes on the machine. From where he sat at the prosecution’s table, the superintendent looked down at a yellow legal pad. Nobody wanted to meet anybody’s eyes during this horrific testimony.

With a haunted expression, Tiffany threw back her shoulders, sending her long blond ponytail bouncing behind her. “I said he...he...told me to get on my knees, in the athletic office. After he locked the door.” Her voice quivered. “Between his legs...I...I’d never done that before and I was scared.”

Next to Tiffany, Patricia Wren appeared stark in her black suit and beige blouse, her hair in a tight knot at her neck. “It’s okay, Tiffany. Take a minute to compose yourself.”

Again, Tiffany’s gaze dropped, as if looking for answers in the parquet floor of the school’s administration building. “He called me love,” she got out haltingly, “...and I thought everything was going to be okay.” Her huge blue eyes filled. “But then he told me to put it…to do things…I didn’t want to do.”

“I think we have the picture for this.”

While she uttered the awful accusations, Nick sat perfectly straight, staring at Tiffany, maintaining a lethal calmness he didn’t feel. Only his fingers, nervously twisting his wedding band--which he’d put back on today--betrayed his angst.

Don’t look away, David had told him. Force yourself to focus on her. Be calm, but let your reactions show--especially the disgust, and you will feel disgust, Nick. It’ll be bad.

It had passed bad an hour ago. What Nick heard was sick perversion that battered his father’s heart and his teacher’s soul. He’d seen a lot of seedy things in the amoral world of professional baseball, but this took slime to a whole new level.

“He touched me everywhere, he hurt me…”

As her testimony continued, the ugly scenarios worsened. At one particularly lurid description, Nick lowered his head and dug his thumb and forefinger into his eyes. Then he forced himself to look back up. Tears coursed down Tiffany’s cheeks, tiny rivers of pain making tracks across her youthful skin.

He thought of his wife, sitting directly behind him. Last time he glanced back, Callie had her hands clasped in her lap when Tiffany began to cry. She’d cherished Tiffany like one of her own babies, nurtured her though four years of adolescence, and it would be hard not to comfort the girl. David had told her to stay in control, warned them both about the method of presentation. She’ll say it like Nick did it. Just remember he didn’t.

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