River Rats by Jennifer L Hart

Author:Jennifer L Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, romance, romantic suspense
Publisher: Jennifer L Hart
Published: 2014-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

How did he figure it out? Sam had said the words aloud. Alex stifled her automatic denial. What was the point, if he already knew? She wasn’t about to confirm it either, so she just stared at him as they drove past the hospital.

His knuckles tightened on the wheel and the ambient light spilling through the closed windows from passing streetlamps illustrated the twitching muscle in his jaw.

“Come on Alex, tell me I’m wrong; that I’ve added two plus two and made eighteen.” Sam’s voice was quiet but she didn’t miss the plea.

“You’re not wrong.” She told him and waited.

The explosion was like nothing she’d seen before. A slew of Spanish erupted and Sam pounded on the steering wheel, the dashboard, any unfortunate surface to get in his way. It was as if something had broken loose inside him, something that had been back building for a long time.

“Sam, I’m sorry. I needed—”

He pulled over into the KFC parking lot. “I need a minute here. Just be quiet.”

“No one else would—”

Sam clapped a hand over her mouth. “No noise, one minute. Got it?”

Alex nodded. She wallowed in her own guilt while Sam composed himself. More than five minutes passed and she waited for him to come back to the place of rational thought.

“The whole story, now Alex. I think I’ve earned it.” Sam made the demand in clipped tones, but there was something missing. The warmth and compassion, she realized with a start. Sam’s usually bright eyes were flat, as if all emotion had been jettisoned into the stratosphere. He’d asked her to tell him before as her friend and she couldn’t bring herself to comply. But she would tell him now. He was right, he’d earned it.

“My parents were still in town at that point. Living in a rental property up the road from Grandma Margie’s place. We’d lived with her for half of my life and I didn’t recognize at first how much she had sheltered me from their indifference. My Mom came from money and had this sense of entitlement, like she was above laboring for anything. And my dad worked odds and end jobs to get by while waiting for a windfall. I learned how to cook, and clean and stay out of their way. They didn’t drink or do drugs; they just didn’t care about anything but their own social and economic position.

“After I graduated from high school, I didn’t have a plan, other than getting out of Barryville ASAP. I wanted to go to the culinary, but I had no money and hardly any experience. I worked at the Wayward Son on the weekends and at a diner in Port Jervis during the week. Grandma Margie let me stay with her while I was in town and found me a reasonable room for rent with one of her friends in Port Jervis.”

Alex took a deep breath and glanced at Sam’s expression. Still unreadable. “I’d been at it for six years, mostly because I spent more money than I should have tooling around, hitting the bars on Friday and Saturday nights.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.