Make Me Forget by Beth Kery

Author:Beth Kery [Kery, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9781101988213
Amazon: B01AHKY3J6
Barnesnoble: B01AHKY3J6
Goodreads: 28586428
Publisher: InterMix
Published: 2016-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

A few hours later, he stood alone on the pier, watching the moonlight shimmer in the black water.

Harper McFadden was in Tahoe Shores. She’d just been in his home. Her lips had just been beneath his own, her body molded against him.

Harper.

Here.

Or she had been, anyway. Until he’d given in to an urge that had first germinated and swelled in him as a scrawny, malnourished thirteen-year-old boy. Who knew that an eighty-three-pound kid could have felt so much lust? So much longing? So much need?

Just so much. Period.

He hadn’t known much of anything when it came to feelings twenty years ago. He’d known hunger and fear. And perhaps worry: a chronic, painful anxiety for the other helpless creatures that were forced to depend on a very undependable, violent man. If it weren’t for a few of the dogs and Grandma Rose, he would have run away from his Uncle Emmitt in an instant. They were the only things that kept him tethered to that grimy, threadbare existence. In the case of Grandma Rose, Emmitt would surely have let his mother die from neglect if it weren’t for Jake’s reminders and cautious, subtle urging for visits, food, and money for medical care.

But he had left them all behind that summer of his thirteenth year. He’d abandoned the animals, a few of which had been his only friends. He’d forsaken Grandma Rose. He’d offered his life.

All of it, he’d risked for her.

It’d all come to nothing. She hadn’t kept one of her promises. She hadn’t written, even when he’d written dozens of letters and left various forwarding addresses. Of course, her solemn pledge to convince her parents to allow him to visit her in DC, her insistence that she’d find a way for them to be together again, had never played out. He hadn’t been surprised about the visits. He’d been a hell of a lot more familiar with the cruel realities of life as a kid than Harper had ever been. The suspiciousness and fear he’d witnessed in her parents’ eyes when they’d looked at him as Harper and he clung together on that cot in the tiny Barterton police station had driven that harsh truth home.

Those stupid, humiliating letters. A good majority of them he’d gotten back marked return to sender. Why hadn’t he burned the damn things a long time ago?

So she didn’t even remember him. Well, thank God for that.

But what if she did? What if her lack of recognition had been a performance?

Not a chance, he discounted abruptly. He doubted anyone could fake that blank expression in her eyes when she’d first looked up at him on the beach.

Of course that handful of days and nights hadn’t meant to her what it had to him. She had been a cherished, prized child, adored and protected by her parents. Their time in the West Virginia wilderness together, their desperate flight for their lives, had faded into a dim, distant nightmare once she’d been returned to the haven of her parents’ arms.

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