Cold Case, Hot Accomplice by Carla Cassidy

Author:Carla Cassidy [Cassidy, Carla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780373278497
Google: zb09AQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0373278497
Barnesnoble: 0373278497
Goodreads: 18050544
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The steaks were on the grill, and Steve stood next to Roxy as they worked on making a salad together. She was still stunned by the news that he’d had a son.

“Why doesn’t anyone else in town know about Tommy?” she asked. “I mean, I’ve never heard any gossip at all about you having a son.”

He hesitated a moment, obviously reluctant to talk about it. “There aren’t very many people who knew about Tommy. His mother, Stacy, lived in Hershey. We met and dated mostly there. We’d been dating about six months when she told me she was pregnant,” he said as he tore up the lettuce. “I was surprised, but I immediately asked her to marry me. I was willing to make a go of it, of building a family unit together, but she turned me down.”

“That must have been a shock.” Roxy paused with her paring knife in the air and the green pepper she’d been slicing on a cutting board in front of her. “I mean, most women want to marry the father of their child.”

“Stacy wasn’t most women.” He tore up the last of the lettuce with more force than necessary. “We continued to see each other through the pregnancy and for about a year after Tommy was born. Then she told me that while she wanted me to continue to be a presence in Tommy’s life, she didn’t want me to be a presence in hers.”

“And you were okay with that?” Roxy finished slicing the peppers and dumped them in the bowl of lettuce. She knew she was pushing him, but it was easier to focus on his trauma than her own, and besides, she couldn’t help the fact that she was curious, that she cared about what had gone into making him the man he was now.

“I had to be okay with it. Things had gotten strained between us, and I realized we weren’t meant to be a couple. I was never really in love with her, but I did love her as the mother of my child.” He shrugged and picked up a tomato. “I figured lots of people have children and share custody, and I loved Tommy more than anything else on the face of the earth. I was determined to make it work.”

She saw it there, shining from his eyes—pure, unadulterated love—and for a moment she wished she saw that in somebody’s eyes, she wished somebody felt that kind of love for her. She grabbed the tomato from him, irritated by her own thoughts.

“And so the two of you shared custody?” she asked, wanting to focus only on the topic at hand and not her growing feelings for Steve.

He nodded and grabbed one of the bottles of beer he’d pulled out of the fridge for them before they’d started making the salad. “And for the first couple of years it worked out just fine. Stacy kept him during the week, and he spent his weekends here with me. Tommy was about four when I started noticing troubling changes.

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