Safe at Home by Carolyn McSparren

Author:Carolyn McSparren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

“I DON’T BELIEVE that for a minute. You couldn’t kill anybody,” Tala said, but she sat down hard on the kitchen chair and pulled the tin of cookies toward her. Without taking her eyes off Pete, she picked up a cookie and began to chew it voraciously, then while she was still chewing, she reached for another.

“You keeping track of how many Cody needs to take to school?”

She glanced down at her hand. “Oh, Lord.” She snapped the lid back on and shoved the tin away from her. “I always do that when I’m upset.”

“You must have the metabolism of a gazelle.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Val died because she did something I was supposed to do. That’s enough.”

“It is not enough. I mean it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

She reached for his hands, held them across the table and said gently, “Please, Pete.”

His shoulders drooped. “All right. You won’t like it.”

“Did you love her?”

“I was too busy with my career to think about whether I was in love or not. We liked each other. We were good together. We were in the same practice—an excellent, big practice. We sort of drifted into a relationship. After a while, it seemed logical to move in together.”

“Logical?”

He leaned back and looked up at the ceiling as though he were traveling back all those years. “I was totally focused on becoming the best and most successful vet I could be.”

“To show your daddy,” Tala whispered.

Pete looked up and frowned. “Yeah. That was always part of it. I wanted to be so good he wouldn’t be able to ignore me any longer.”

“And Val? Was she that focused?”

“I thought so. We both had our priorities…”

“But she wasn’t at the top of your list.”

He sighed. “No.” He glanced up and spread his hands. “But I didn’t think I was at the top of hers either.”

“Where did you suppose you were heading?”

“I never thought about it. I guess I thought we might get married eventually, have kids. Once we could afford our own practice, had built our reputations. We were both saving as much money as we could. Setting up a practice and buying equipment takes cash.”

“Is that what Val thought too?”

“She started telling people we were engaged. That was okay with me. Then after two years together she said we should take our relationship to the next level. I didn’t know what she meant.”

“She meant marriage.”

“She never actually said the word. Half the time we were on opposite shifts and only saw each other going and coming. Half the time we were so tired we fell into bed without even a good-night kiss. What kind of a marriage would that have been? There was plenty of time for marriage. That’s what I tried to tell her, and I thought she was okay with it.”

“She wasn’t?”

“One morning after she left for work I found a letter lying on the kitchen table. It offered Val the partnership she’d been discussing with the owners of a small-animal practice in Beverly Hills.

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