Cherub's Play by Katie Grant

Author:Katie Grant [Grant, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, fantasy
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Published: 2018-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

When Sandra blinked her eyes open she found herself in her warm sleeping bag, with sunshine lighting up the inside of her pup tent. It was morning. She mentally clutched at the fleeting fragments of her dream before they got away. It was no use. All she remembered was her father comforting her, and the annoying sound of her mother’s voice. That and the familiar loneliness of growing up without a father. Then she remembered she was on the way to rescue her mother, and that she had almost let Little Jeffrey drown. And that she had been half naked in front of Austin. She groaned out loud and unzipped the sleeping bag. She dreaded what the day might bring.

Austin was already dressed and set a pot of coffee on the fire to boil. She had slept much later than she usually did, and Austin had let her.

Sandra insisted that they break camp as quickly as possible, and she got them back on the trail with the same efficiency as she had the day before. That left little time for conversation. She didn’t want any more dime-store analysis from Austin, even though his opinions from the night before seemed to strike a chord inside her. She wasn’t ready to believe what he’d said, but it had caused her to think.

As she had on the first day, Sandra rode in front with the baby, finding their way up the trail with a map, and with her pack horse and Austin trailing behind her.

In addition to Austin’s impromptu psychology, nearly losing Little Jeffrey in the creek still weighed heavily on her mind. She blamed Austin, of course, but in hindsight she knew she shouldn’t have put Little Jeffrey’s crib so close to the water. It seemed perfectly safe at the time, and how was she to know that Austin would slip into the hot springs pool without her permission? She tried to hold on to that thought but she knew she was as much to blame as he.

On that score, she feared she might not be any more qualified to be a parent than her mother, or Austin. Sandra was supposed to be the responsible one in the outfit. Even Austin seemed to understand that. And, since she was a woman, taking care of an infant was supposed to be second nature. Wasn’t it? So what she had done at the hot springs was inexcusable, even if Austin had triggered the near disaster.

It didn’t help much that Austin was the one who saved Little Jeffrey, not her. She was beginning to feel her moral superiority slipping away, and that meant Austin was gaining ground in their subtle contest for custody of the baby.

On top of everything else, Sandra was mortified about running half-naked through the woods. She didn’t know much about Austin, but she figured sexual attraction is what prompted him to confess, in his own awkward way, that he had feelings for her. He was simply a man at the mercy of his testosterone.

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