Almost Perfect. Сьюзен Мэллери

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СКАЧАТЬ enough, she thought. And the word family implied caring and connection. Maybe in most places, but not in the Sutton household. At least not until Liz had had Tyler. She’d done everything she could think of to break the cycle of neglect. She’d been determined to be a warm, loving mother, to offer her child a safe haven.

      “I didn’t know where Roy was,” she said. “He never got in touch with me after he left.” For six years, she’d waited, hoping he would come get her and take her away. Until he’d walked out, he’d always taken care of her. Been a buffer between her and her mother. Protected her from the worst of it.

      By the time she’d been old enough to go looking, she told herself she no longer cared.

      “Do they know we’re coming?” Tyler asked. “Do they know about me?”

      “Not yet, but they will. We’re going to stay with them for a couple of weeks.” She didn’t mention the fact that Roy was in prison. Time enough for that later. Nor did she discuss the possibility of the girls living with them permanently. Maybe other family could take care of them.

      “I grew up in a small town called Fool’s Gold,” she said. “It’s in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.”

      “Do they get snow?” he asked eagerly. Because at age eleven, seeing snow was about the best it could be.

      She laughed. “Probably not in June, but yes, they get snow. There’s lots to do there. Hiking, swimming. There’s a river and a lake.”

      “We could go camping.”

      She made a noncommittal noise in her throat, mostly because the thought of camping ranked right up there with being awake during open-heart surgery. Not even thinking about it was pleasant. But then she wasn’t an eleven-year-old boy. She hadn’t been fascinated by worms and dirt and play cars and plastic guns, either.

      More traits she knew he got from his father. Which was another problem. Not the traits, the man himself. Odds were Ethan was still in Fool’s Gold. The one place he’d asked her not to be. He’d made it clear he didn’t want her or his kid around.

      Well, he was just going to have to get over it, she told herself. This was an emergency. She wouldn’t make a big deal about Tyler being in town and she certainly wouldn’t tell her son about his father. Not when Ethan had rejected them both so completely.

      She would deal with the girls and get out as quickly as possible. If she happened to run into Ethan, she would be pleasant and distant. Nothing more. Because after all this time and all the ways he’d managed to hurt her, there was no way she would ever be vulnerable to him again. She’d learned her lesson. Fool me once and all that.

      She gripped the steering wheel tighter and glanced at her nav system screen. It showed the way to her destination and she was counting on the little device to guide her back home when she was done.

      ETHAN HENDRIX STOOD BY THE barricades between the crowd and the cyclists. The sun was hot, the spectators loud. The noise of a race was specific and not something he would ever forget. There’d been a time when he’d planned on seeing the world on the racing circuit. A long time ago, he thought, remembering the feel of the wind, the sensation of muscles burning as he dug for the will to win.

      Winning had come easily. Maybe too easily. He’d gotten careless during a race. At fifty miles an hour, balanced on skinny wheels and a lightweight frame, mistakes could be deadly. In his case, he’d been left with a few broken bones and a permanent limp. For anyone else, it would have been considered lucky. For him, the injury had kept him from ever racing again.

      Now, ten years later, he watched the cyclists speed past. He spotted his friend Josh, still making up time from his late start, and wondered What if. But he didn’t have a whole lot of energy for the subject. Everything was different now and he was good with that.

      He turned away from the race, ready to return to his office, when he spotted a woman in the crowd. For a second he thought he’d imagined her, that he was putting beautiful features he would never forget onto the face of someone else. There was no way Liz Sutton was back in Fool’s Gold.

      Instinctively he moved closer, but the road with the barricades was between them. The redhead looked up again, this time facing him. She removed her sunglasses and he saw her wide green eyes, the full mouth. From this distance he couldn’t see the freckles on her nose, but he knew they were there. He even knew how many.

      He swore softly. Liz was back. Except on the back cover of her books, he hadn’t seen her in over a decade. As of five seconds ago, he would have told anyone who asked that he’d forgotten her, had gotten over her. She was his past.

      She looked away then, as if searching for someone. Obviously not him, he thought, then grinned. Liz back in Fool’s Gold. Who would have thought?

      He eased his way through the crowd. He might not be able to find her now, but he had a feeling he knew where she would be later. He would meet her there and welcome her home. It was the least he could do.

      LIZ KEPT A TIGHT HOLD ON Tyler’s hand on their way to the local grocery store. The crowd around the bike race was big and seemed to be growing. She’d been foolish to think she could find two girls she’d never met in the throng of tourists. It wasn’t as if she even knew what they looked like.

      She pointed toward a vendor selling shaved iced and bought Tyler his favorite flavor. Blueberry.

      All around them, groups of people laughed and talked about the race. She heard something about a new bike racing school and a new hospital being built. Changes, she thought. Fool’s Gold had changed in the past ten years.

      But not enough for her to forget. Despite having to detour around blocked roads, she easily found her way down side streets, and back toward the house where she’d grown up.

      “You lived here before you went to San Francisco?” Tyler asked.

      “Uh-huh. I grew up here.”

      “With my grandma Sutton?”

      “Yes.”

      “She’s dead now.”

      He spoke the words as information, because that’s all they were to him. He’d never met Liz’s mother.

      When Liz had first left town at eighteen, running away with a broken heart, she’d found her way to the city by the bay, had struggled to find work and a place to stay in a glorified shelter. Then she’d found out she was pregnant.

      Her first instinct had been to go home, but that initial phone call had made her wary. Over the next year, she’d phoned home twice. Both times her mother had made it clear her daughter was no longer a part of her life. The rejection had hurt but hadn’t been much of a surprise. Her mother had also taken great delight in telling her that no, Ethan Hendrix never called or asked about her.

      When the woman died four years ago, Liz hadn’t cried, though she felt regret over the relationship they never had.

      Now, as she crossed a quiet street, she found herself in her old neighborhood. The houses were modest, two-and three-bedroom homes with small porches and aging paint. A few gleamed like bright flowers in an abandoned garden, as if the neighborhood was on the verge of being desirable again.

      The СКАЧАТЬ