Temporary Family by Hayes Sally Tyler

Author:Hayes, Sally Tyler [Hayes, Sally Tyler]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Suspense
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2011-09-25T15:09:49+00:00

Chapter 9

Nick didn’t have a prayer of sleeping that night. Around midnight, he was sitting on the couch, thinking and trying not to look at the newspaper clippings that remained on the table where Laura had dropped them earlier.

Rationally, he knew he couldn’t blame her for being curious. He’d never tried to hide anything from her; he simply wasn’t willing to explain it to her himself.

Maybe he should have, though. He could think of it as a test—could he talk about it to someone after all this time?

After years of counseling his patients, getting them to voice the things that most bothered them and assuring them that it was the first step to dealing with those problems, could he take his own medicine?

Or would he choke on it?

He had let this thing fester inside him for nearly a year. He was a coward. Maybe he should just come right out and tell Laura Sandoval that and see what she thought of him then.

Trouble was, he now found himself in the unfortunate position of caring what she thought of him. If she didn’t want to have anything to do with him once she knew, he wasn’t sure how he would handle that.

Maybe he’d barricade himself inside this apartment for another year. Maybe he would see how much deeper he could sink into this hole of his, and when he crawled out next time, there might not be anything left of the man he once was. After all, the bottle of booze in back of the cabinet was growing more attractive with each passing minute.

Yet Nick couldn’t take another year of living like this. He couldn’t sink much lower and still dig himself out.

He stared down at the folded sheets of plain white paper, thinking of the story of his life, as seen through the eyes of Carter Barnes’s parents, printed on the inside of those sheets of paper.

Laura wasn’t the kind of person to believe everything she read. He searched for comfort in that belief, searched his heart for the reason she’d hurt him so much by simply finding those newspaper articles.

He wanted her to believe him, to take his word for everything that had happened and accept it, without a doubt. He wanted her to have faith in him.

And she did, he argued with himself. She’d shown tremendous faith in him, certainly more than he had in himself right now.

Nick couldn’t help but remind himself that he had goaded her into talking to the pediatrician, all in the hope of scaring Laura away from him before she came to mean something to him.

If only she hadn’t kissed him. If she hadn’t stood up to him, challenged him, believed in him when there was no logical reason for her to do so. Then it wouldn’t hurt to know she was finding out all the sordid details of his life from back issues of the newspapers.

Nick let it go. He had to. It was done; he couldn’t change it. Surely the last year had taught him that.

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