LITMIR.BIZ

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I’m your friend and I always have been and this is what friends do, they have each other’s backs. Now, unless you really want to make me strangle you, please stop apologizing, please stop telling me that you’re going to leave as soon as possible. And please stop telling me that you feel you’re putting me out. Because you’re not. It makes me feel good to help you.

      “Now, I don’t want to hear anything more about this. My home is your home for as long as you need a place to stay—and maybe for a little bit longer than that.” He paused to let his words sink in. “Understood?”

      “Understood,” she murmured. Then, a bit more loudly and with feeling, she promised, “But I will make it up to you.”

      “Good, I’m looking forward to it,” he told her crisply. “Now, moving on,” he said deliberately. “You have a choice of bedrooms. There are two to choose from, pretty much the same size,” he told her, then stopped when a thought occurred to him. “Maybe I should let you have the master bedroom. We can put the crib in that room, so you can have Wayne right there—unless you’d rather have him stay in his own room, at which point you can take one of the bedrooms and place him in the other.”

      Kasey felt as if she was still stuck in first gear, her brain fixated on something he’d said to start with. “The crib?”

      Why did she look so surprised? he wondered. “Well, Wayne’s got to sleep in something, and I thought a crib was better than that portable whatchamacallit that you had at your place. Or a dresser drawer,” he added, recalling stories his father told him about his being so small to begin with, they had tucked him into the bottom drawer of a dresser, lined with blankets and converted into a minicrib. He’d slept there for a month.

      Kasey pounced on something he’d only mentioned in passing. “You were there?” she asked eagerly. “At our ranch?” The our in this case referred to her and Hollis. When he nodded, her mind took off, fully armed to the teeth. “So that means that I can still go over there and get—”

      He shook his head. The man who had won the ranch from Hollis had made it very clear that he considered everything on the premises his. Still, if she had something of sentimental value that she wanted retrieved, he would be there in less than a heartbeat to get it for her. The new owner would just have to understand—or be made to understand.

      “The guy who won the ranch from Hollis is living there,” he told her. “I had to talk him into letting me come in and get some of your things. Actually—” never one to take any undue credit, he felt he needed to tell her “—having Rick and Alma with me kind of gave me the leverage I needed to convince the guy to release your things so I could bring them to you.”

      “Rick and Alma,” she repeated as that piece of information sank in with less than stellar results. “So they know? About Hollis leaving me?” she asked in a small, troubled voice.

      He knew that she would have rather kept the fact that Hollis had walked out on her a secret, but secrets had a way of spreading in a small town the size of Forever. And besides, the sympathy would all be on her side for reasons beyond the fact that she was a new mother with an infant to care for. Everyone in and around the town liked her.

      That couldn’t be said of Hollis.

      “They know,” Eli told her quietly. “I figured they—especially Rick, since he’s the sheriff—should hear it from me so that they’d know fact from fiction, rumors being what they are in this town,” he added.

      Kasey felt as if there was a lead weight lying across her chest. There was a very private, shy woman beneath the bravado. A woman who wanted her secrets to remain secrets.

      “How many other people know?” she asked him.

      “For now, just Rick and the deputies.”

      For now.

      “Now,” she knew, had an exceptionally short life expectancy. As Eli had said, rumors being what they were, she had a feeling that everyone in town would know that Hollis had taken off before the week was out—if not sooner.

      It was a very bitter pill for her to swallow.

      But she had no other choice.

      Chapter Three

      “I guess you’re right. No point in pretending I can hide this,” Kasey finally said with a sigh. “People’ll talk.”

      “They always do,” he agreed. “It’s just a fact of life.”

      Fact of life or not, the idea just didn’t sit well with her. She wasn’t a person who craved attention or wanted her fifteen minutes of fame in the spotlight. She was perfectly content just to quietly go about the business of living.

      “I don’t want to be the newest topic people talk about over breakfast,” she said, upset.

      “If they do talk about you, it’ll be because they’re on your side. Fact of the matter is, Hollis more or less wore out that crown of his. People don’t think of him as that golden boy he once was,” Eli assured her. Over the years, he’d become acutely aware of Hollis’s flaws, flaws that the man seemed to cultivate rather than try to conquer. “Not to mention that he owes more than one person around here money.”

      Kasey looked at him, startled. Her mouth dropped open.

      Maybe he’d said too much, Eli thought. “You didn’t know that,” he guessed.

      Kasey’s throat felt horribly dry, as if she’d been eating sand for the past half hour.

      “No,” she answered, her voice barely above a shaken whisper. “I didn’t know that.”

      If she didn’t know about that, it was a pretty safe bet that she certainly didn’t know about her husband’s dalliances with other women during the years that they were married, Eli thought.

      Hollis, you were and are a damn fool. A damn, stupid, self-centered fool.

      He could feel his anger growing, but there was no point in letting it fester like this. It wasn’t going to help Kasey and her baby, and they were the only two who really mattered in this sordid mess.

      “Are you sure?” Kasey asked. She’d turned her face toward him and placed a supplicating hand on his upper arm, silently begging him to say he was mistaken.

      It was as if someone had jabbed his heart with a hot poker. He hated that this was happening to her. She didn’t deserve this on top of what she’d already gone through. All of his life, he’d wanted nothing more than to make life better for her, to protect her. But right now, he was doing everything he could. Like taking her to his ranch.

      Dammit, Hollis, how could you do this to her? She thought you were going to be her savior, her hero.

      The house that Kasey had grown up in had been completely devoid of love. Her father worked hard, but never got anywhere and it made him bitter. Especially when he drank to ease the pain of what he viewed as his dead-end life. Carter Hale had been an abusive drunk not the least bit shy about lashing out with his tongue or the back of his hand.

      He’d seen the marks left on Kasey’s mother and had worried that Kasey might get in the way of her father’s wrath next. But Kasey had strong survival instincts and had known enough to keep well out of her father’s way when he went on one of his benders, which was often.

      Looking back, Eli realized that was the reason why she’d run off with Hollis right after high school graduation. Hollis was exciting, charming, and fairly reeked of sensuality. More than that, he had a feeling that to Kasey, Hollis represented, in an odd twist, freedom and at the same time, security. Marrying Hollis meant that she never had to go home again. Never had to worry about staying out of her father’s long reach again.

      But in Hollis’s case, “freedom” was just another way of saying no plans for the future. And if “security” meant the security of not having to worry about money, then Hollis failed to deliver on that promise, as well.

      Eli

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