LITMIR.BIZ

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she likes, if you want to fix her one. If you don’t, I packed some—”

      “I think I can probably scramble eggs for both of you,” he said as if she were making a bigger deal out of it than was necessary.

      Or was this a glimmer of hospitality or almost-congeniality that might indicate that he wasn’t going to be a bear forever?

      Hoping so, Karis softened her own attitude and said, “That would be nice. Thanks.”

      “They’ll be ready shortly. Unless you want to eat them cold.”

      So much for hospitality or congeniality.

      Still, as Karis watched him go, she realized that the idea of having breakfast with him wasn’t altogether awful, and that alarmed her slightly.

      He doesn’t like me and he’s not going to like me more when he finds out the rest, she reminded herself.

      Keeping that firmly in mind, she took Amy to the changing table to put the baby in a dry diaper.

      And to put Luke Walker in his place as nothing but an afterthought.

      Chapter Three

      “So…what do you think about Amy and I going up the hill to the Pratt house this afternoon to tell them about Dad…and Lea?” Karis ventured a short time later as she, Amy and Luke were eating the eggs, bacon, toast and juice he’d prepared for them all.

      “You know their house is up the street?” Luke asked.

      Since Karis had brought Amy downstairs, set her on the floor and pitched in to help, he hadn’t been friendly, but he’d been marginally more amicable. Now suspicion tinged his tone again in response to her question and she was sorry to hear it.

      “Lea didn’t say much, but she did tell me that Northbridge was such a small place that our half siblings’ house was just up the street from yours. And I found a couple of pictures in my father’s things that had the house in the background,” she explained. “I also know there’s no soft spot for our father with the Northbridge Pratts, but I still need to tell them that he’s passed away, don’t you think?” Among other things.

      “I suppose you do,” Luke conceded. “But I wouldn’t expect to be welcomed with open arms if I were you,” he reminded her.

      His warning didn’t ease Karis’s nervousness about meeting her half siblings for the first time or about having to say what she had to.

      “I know that my father—”

      “It isn’t only him. Yeah, you’re right—there aren’t any soft spots for him in the family he left behind. But after Lea wiggled her way in with them and then pulled what she did the day she left—”

      Oh no…

      “What did Lea do?” Karis asked with unconcealed dread.

      Luke paused in his eating to study her again as if looking for signs of a scam.

      Then he said, “She didn’t tell you?”

      “I have to figure it was something bad and, no, she didn’t tell me when she did things she knew I wouldn’t approve of. All she said about leaving here was that Abe wanted her back and so she packed up, told you Amy was Abe’s instead of yours to make a clean break, and left you to go with him.”

      Luke let out a humorless sort of laugh. “Uh-huh. Well, I don’t know how long she and Abe were planning it, but I had to go to a training session in Billings one day and while I was out of the way, she had Abe pack up her things, Amy’s things and everything of mine that had any value—televisions, my stereo, all the video equipment, an old coin collection—”

      “They cleaned you out,” Karis said, getting the picture.

      “Abe cleaned out my house and, while he did, Lea went up the hill with a story about how her poor, troubled sister Karis had been arrested for dealing drugs. Apparently Lea turned on the tears and said she was desperate for money to bail you out and retain a lawyer, and since I could only help her with part of the money, could they help, too.”

      Karis closed her eyes and shook her head, wishing she wasn’t hearing what she was hearing.

      “And they gave it to her,” she concluded.

      “By then the Pratts had begun to see her as separate from your father and what he’d done, to think of her as one of the family. I even heard them talk about arranging a way to meet you, too, to bridge the gap between the two factions of Pratts.”

      “Lea never said anything about that.”

      “I’m sure. Anyway, the Pratts here are good people. They jumped in to help when Lea went to them. Each of them—and there are seven, in case you’d lost count—put in five hundred dollars. They wrote her checks that she took straight to the bank to cash. Then, while she was there, she emptied my accounts—”

      “Oh, no…” This time the words actually came out.

      “Oh, yes. The folks at the bank were a little uneasy with it, but she gave them the same story she’d told your half brothers and sisters. And when the bank manager tried to reach me to make sure it was okay, I was conveniently in the middle of training where no cell phones were allowed. Since I’d added Lea’s name to my accounts when we got married, she had as much right as I did to access them, so the bank couldn’t stop her from draining them. Then she and Abe hightailed it out of town, leaving me a note on the kitchen table that said Amy wasn’t mine, that they’d left with the man who had fathered her. They were long gone by the time I learned how she’d spent the day. I guess she gets merits for organization and quick work.”

      “I’m sorry,” Karis said feebly.

      Luke Walker didn’t respond.

      “And I’ve never had anything to do with drugs or been arrested or—”

      “I know. When I realized what she’d done I did some checking that I regretted not doing earlier. On you both. I saw that you didn’t have any arrests or charges against you. But Lea had an extensive record—drug possession, selling drugs, petty theft, burglary—”

      “She had a lot of problems,” Karis said, glancing in Amy’s direction.

      The baby was sitting in a high chair that Luke had brought up from the basement and set at the round kitchen table. She was picking up pieces of scrambled egg with her chubby fingers and feeding herself directly from the tray.

      Of course she was oblivious to what was being said about her mother, but Karis was uncomfortable getting into too much detail about Lea with Amy in earshot. Irrational though it might have been, it just didn’t seem right.

      She tried to make sure the tiny child was distracted by breaking up a slice of toast into small bites and adding that to the eggs before looking at Luke again.

      “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I really am.”

      “Did you have something to do with it?”

      “No! I’m just sorry that Lea did what she did. To you. To them. To everyone.”

      Those blue-green eyes of his were still focused on her and Karis felt like a bug under a microscope. But she opted to ignore it and deal with the other matters at hand.

      “I can see why the real Pratts aren’t going to be happy to have me show up after that,” she said. They would likely see her having ownership of their house in an even worse light, if that were possible.

      The thought made her all the more loath to go through with her second errand in Northbridge and she realized that, at the very least, she wasn’t going to be able to rush anything to do with the house. She was going to have to find the most diplomatic way of handling it.

      But in the meantime she also knew she still had to tell them about their father’s death.

      “I really don’t want to go

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