Harlequin Romantic Suspense March 2019 Box Set by Jennifer Morey

Author:Jennifer Morey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

Two months later

“I’m sorry, Jake. Run that by me again?” She set the stapler down on her desk for fear the heavy object might become a weapon if her vision hazed any redder. Reese had learned a long time ago to never tell herself things couldn’t get worse. It was one of the harshest lessons an addict had taught their family, and she’d had a crash course by the time she was a freshman at Midnight Pass High School.

Jamie had been the best of big brothers, but by the time she’d turned fourteen, their three-year age gap had made all the difference. What had been a bit of bad behavior—smoking marijuana at the end of the day or drinking too much out at the edge of town—had quickly become an addiction when his urges took a hard turn. Cocaine was plentiful in the Pass, brought up from South America by the drug runners who controlled the border, and her brother had been an easy mark.

But it was the heroin a year later that had sealed his fate.

By the time she’d started freshman year, her parents had already placed Jamie into two addiction programs and a solid amount of familial house arrest. Reese hadn’t fully understood it at the time, but she’d done the only thing she had understood: acting the exact opposite of her brother.

Straight A’s. A steady diet of after-school activities. And her role as the good girl of Midnight Pass. She never smoked, drank and hadn’t even kissed a boy. They were traits that formed her and built the foundation of her life, and up until her late night foray with Hoyt Reynolds back in June, she hadn’t deviated from that plan.

Oh, she’d been kissed since high school. And she certainly enjoyed liquor from time to time. Four years at the University of Texas had helped see her through both rites of passage. But the core of who she was—the good daughter of Serena and Russ Grantham—had stuck.

Which made the warning shots fired across her classroom that much harder to accept.

“Aww, come on, Reese. Don’t make me say it again.”

“No.” She shook her head, even as her fingers itched to pick up the stapler once more. “I need to hear you say it. I want to make sure I got it right the first time.”

Jacob Walters was a friend. He was about five years older than her, but they’d both taught in the English department until he was promoted to assistant principal two years before. It was that steady core of friendship—and the knowledge that Jake was an unfailingly kind human—that kept her in check.

And her hand off the stapler.

“The PTA is concerned,” Jake said.

“Define concerned.”

Jake sighed but kept his gaze level, his words simple and straightforward. “They’re concerned your father’s passing a few months back was too big a trauma not to take some time off.”

“I took time when it happened. Mourned the passing of a parent good and proper, just as dictated in the union bylaws.

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