Cavanaugh Pride by Marie Ferrarella

Author:Marie Ferrarella [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2009-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

“Wait, wait.” Julianne grabbed his hand, as if that would stop him from going any further. Suddenly realizing what she was doing, that her hand was covering his, she pulled it back. “What do you mean, he ‘came back from the dead’?”

He was so used to the people around him being aware of the details, he forgot that she wouldn’t be. “We all thought he was dead. There’d been a gun battle and my father’s mutilated body wound up washing up on the shore. At least, we thought it was his body. We held a closed-casket funeral service for him and buried him in the family plot.” The ironic smile on his lips had no humor in it. “Turns out it wasn’t him. It was his drug contact who was killed in the shoot-out. My father was probably the one who pulled the trigger,” he added grimly. “He dressed the other man in his clothes, then bashed his face in. We made a natural mistake.”

She knew what it felt like wanting to be proud of your father and knowing that you couldn’t be. That he was nothing more than a huge disappointment, a weak man who thought only of himself.

Her sympathy aroused, she looked at him for a long moment. “How did you stand it?”

Frank shrugged. He hadn’t intended for his “confession” to go this far. He’d brought her here to find out more about her, not talk about his own past. “You get through it. And it helps to have someone like Brian Cavanaugh on your side,” he told her. “Not to mention siblings to turn to.”

She thought of the people Riley had introduced her to the other night. She vaguely recalled that a couple of them, a man and a woman, had been named McIntyre. That made him far better off than her.

“Yeah, well, things are different when there’s nobody to turn to.”

Nobody. That had to be one of the loneliest words he’d ever heard. “Nobody?”

She shook her head. From what she’d heard, her mother, already convinced that she’d made a huge mistake marrying her father, hadn’t wanted any children. After she was born, her parents stopped sleeping in the same bed.

“I’m—I was,” she amended with a great deal of difficulty, “five years older than Mary. When the bottle finally did my father in, I was a couple of weeks shy of turning eighteen. My uncle volunteered to take me in.” Her mouth hardened. “According to him, it was my father’s dying wish that I move in with him and my cousin. It didn’t sound like my father, but I just wanted to be part of something so much, I believed him. Turned out that it was my uncle’s wish, not my father’s.”

It wasn’t hard to pick up on her tone. “What did your uncle do to you?”

“Nothing,” she answered firmly, and then she relented, adding, “Not for lack of trying. Every time I walked by, he tried to pull me onto his lap, grab me…” Julianne shrugged, letting the momentary silence take the place of any further explanations.

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