Coming Home by Shirlee Busbee

Author:Shirlee Busbee [Shirlee Busbee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780446611909
Google: Ea6m9pDIqkEC
Amazon: 0446611905
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2003-09-01T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter

11

There was a second of silence and then the room erupted into a babble of gasps, exclamations, and questions. Sloan raised a quieting hand.

“OK, OK, everybody, pipe down.” When the noise subsided, he said, “I told Shelly and Nick and Maria that there were going to be a ton of questions.” He smiled crookedly. “You can't just toss out that sort of information and not have a lot of questions. But we decided early on that there was no reason for the public” he flashed a hard look around the room…“and that includes you, to know all the details. What you need to know right now is that Nick is Shelly's brother…we have proof of it. Shelly is publicly acknowledging that Nick Rios is her brother. And before you ask, no, Nick isn't going to change his name to Granger.” He grinned at Nick. “As he said from the beginning, he's been a Rios too long to change. What he was always after was simply the truth. That it turned out to be more than any of us expected is just one of life's little surprises. And yes, Shelly is splitting the Granger estate with him. And no, he didn't ask for it and has been arguing with his sister not to do just that. But stubbornness runs in the family and Shelly is determined that he should have what is morally his.” His gaze swept the room again. “As for the secrecy all these years, I think that's self-explanatory. Now as for what you tell anyone else, that's your business…and we want you to tell everybody. That's the point of this. We wanted to get the truth out, but we didn't”… Sloan's mouth twisted slightly…“want to take out a full page ad in the newspaper. We figured if people we trusted knew the truth and they treated it as if it were nothing out of the ordinary, that we might brush through this with little more than a few weeks of rampant curiosity on the part of the valley inhabitants.”

Sitting on the arm of the couch, Jeb scratched his chin. “So just how do you expect us to handle this? Are we all just supposed to march into town tomorrow and start shooting our mouths off?”

“Not exactly,” Sloan replied with a glimmer of a smile. “I figured you'd probably tell Mingo, your sister and your dad first. Then they'll mention it to someone else and so on. Shelly and I will tell my folks—and Cleo. They were supposed to be here tonight, but for various reasons they couldn't make it. They'll be told tomorrow, or just as soon as we can arrange it.”

A chuckle rippled through the group. “Once itreaches Cleo,” murmured Roxanne, “it'll be all over town.”

My point exactly,” Sloan drawled. “We want it all over town, but the truth, not gossip and innuendo, even though there will be a lot of that anyway, no matter what we do.”

There was a collective nodding of heads. “Sounds like a

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.