Three Wishes by Janice Sims

Author:Janice Sims
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kimani Press
Published: 2008-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

On a Thursday afternoon, Sunny knocked on Tom’s door.

“Come in!”

She strode in talking. “You wanted to see me?”

Tom was instantly on his feet and walking toward her. After Sunny closed the door, he pulled her into his arms for a warm hug.

Releasing her, he smiled. “I just got off the phone with Audra. She says hello.”

Sunny laughed shortly. “She must have phoned you right after she phoned me. I know what you’re going to say. My birthday is coming up and she wants to throw me a party but I can’t go there and she says Deana Davis’s people have all the local airports staked out. If she gets on a plane, someone will follow her here. So she can’t come here. She talked you into doing it, didn’t she?”

“She didn’t have to talk me into anything,” Tom said. “Lani and I would be proud to host your birthday party at our house. Just give me a list of people you’d like to invite and it’s done.”

“No!”

Tom looked disappointed. “Why not?”

“Because!” Sunny didn’t mean to shout but Audra and her father were smothering her with gifts or the desire to bestow gifts on her. Case in point: the party. She knew they believed they were doing it to make up for lost time, but she suspected they were doing it out of guilt or the need to buy her love. Which wasn’t for sale. She wanted to get to know them gradually, to slowly be integrated into their lives. Furthermore, they didn’t seem to understand that her head was still spinning.

To go from being alone in the world to suddenly having more relatives than you could shake a stick at was overwhelming.

Plus, there was a certain six-foot-four man in the bedroom down the hall that she wanted to kick out of her apartment one minute and jump into bed with the next.

To say nothing of trying to get a childhood friend cleared of a murder charge.

She was mentally burnt out. She didn’t need a big party. She needed a vacation.

“I’m just not up to a big party,” she told her father.

She sat in the plush leather chair in front of his desk. He went to lean on the cherrywood desk while he listened to her explanation. “I’ve had a lot of excitement the past two weeks—learning about you and Audra and working on Kaya’s case. I was thinking that a small dinner would be nice. Just you and Lani and Jonas and me at your place, if you like.”

“My parents want to meet you so badly,” Tom said, his tone a touch pleading.

Sunny could not deny him when he was looking at her like that. “Okay, I want to meet them, too.”

His father, Major Thomas Chapman, Sr., was a retired judge. His mother, Valorie Evans Chapman, was a retired professor of English. Sunny felt nervous at the thought of meeting them. All her life she’d worn a hard shell of sorts that protected her from other people’s opinions of her.

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