Hometown Sweetheart. Victoria Pade

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       Chapter Two

      Wyatt was sitting in bed early Monday morning when he flipped his cell phone closed to end the conference call he’d just had with his brother, Ry, and his sister, Marti. They were both in transit—Ry from Canada and Marti from Mexico—but they’d been eager to know that their grandmother was okay. They’d also wanted to touch base with Wyatt about where things stood in the investigation of the family by the Department of Public Health and Human Services now that Theresa had been formally tagged as a person unable to care for herself.

      After filling them in and answering their questions in regards to the caseworker they’d be dealing with in Missoula and the one he would now be working with in Northbridge, he was having some trouble getting that Northbridge caseworker out of his head.

      And not only because Neily Pratt would be taking her turn at scrutinizing him.

      The fact that his grandmother had mistaken the social worker for his late wife, Mikayla, was not a coincidence. There was a resemblance. Not a strong one, but if Mikayla had had a cousin, Neily Pratt could have been it.

      The hair color was the biggest similarity—thick, lustrous russet-brown hair so deep and rich a hue it demanded attention. And there was something about the nose—thin and pert. And cute. It was just a first-glance sort of resemblance, but it was still there.

      But unlike Mikayla’s sun-kissed skin, Neily Pratt was all peaches-and-cream. And she was shorter than Mikayla—even if Mikayla had ever worn the kind of tennis shoes the caseworker had had on.

      Neily Pratt wasn’t as voluptuous as Mikayla had been either, although she did have curves enough for him to take notice of. And there was a big difference in their eyes, too. Mikayla’s had been hazel. Neily Pratt’s were a deep metallic blue that glimmered so beautifully he’d had trouble not staring into them.

      Which he didn’t want to still be thinking about this morning.

      Yet he couldn’t help himself.

      And that shook him up a little.

      But then his entire encounter with the social worker had shaken him up a little. And not because he was alarmed to be under the investigation of Human Services—he knew there was no abuse or neglect of his grandmother to be found because there was no abuse or neglect. But something had stirred in him the night before in response to Neily Pratt. Something that had him looking forward to seeing her again, to seeing her all cleaned up, to talking to her.

      And that did alarm him. Because those stirrings could be the beginning of things he didn’t want to have anything to do with.

      He shook his head and dropped it back to the headboard, disgusted with himself.

      Why was this happening? He didn’t even know this woman. And he sure as hell didn’t want it to be happening. Not after what he’d gone through over Mikayla. Not after the last two years since her death.

      Those two years had been beyond rough. They’d been so bad he’d worried that he wouldn’t ever see emotional daylight again. So bad that he’d worried that he might end up in the grip of the kind of depression that had a hold of his grandmother.

      But somehow—he wasn’t sure exactly how or why—things had begun to smooth out. Slowly he’d realized that he was seeing emotional daylight. Only glimmers of it, yet even that had been such a relief, such a godsend, that he’d come to the conclusion that while life on his own might not be the way he’d thought things would be, the way he’d planned it, he didn’t ever—ever—want to risk falling into that darkness again. The darkness that came with the loss of someone he was devoted to.

      The surest way to avoid it, he’d decided, was to stay on his own. Not to let anyone else get so close that losing her—either in death or just through things not working out—could put him anywhere near that darkness again. He’d decided that for the sake of his own mental health, it was better to accept things as they were.

      So that was what he’d done—he’d accepted it. Then he’d found some small pleasures, some enjoyment to go with it. Just not with another woman.

      Which СКАЧАТЬ