The Parent Plan. Paula Riggs Detmer

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СКАЧАТЬ let out a long breath. “If there is any new information. It seems to me things like this go on forever, and sometimes they’re never really satisfactorily solved. That disturbs me almost as much as losing Olivia did.” She shrugged a slender shoulder. “What a pathetic tribute to someone’s life.” She crooked her elegant fingers to indicate quotations marks. “‘Case pending.’ No sense of closure. No sense of justice being done. It makes a person wonder what it’s all about. You know?”

      Karen understood, perhaps better than her mother realized. What was it all about? She’d been asking herself that question a lot lately. She had no answers.

      As if Sylvia sensed how gloomy her daughter was feeling, she declared firmly, “Enough depressing stuff. Tell me about your new dress. You never did tell me what you bought.”

      “Probably because there’s nothing to tell. I don’t have anything new.”

      Sylvia arched an eyebrow. “But I thought that’s the reason you and Vicki made a special trip to the mall last month.”

      Karen grinned and rolled her eyes. “That was the plan, yes, but remember me, the mother of a precocious soon-to-be nine-year-old? I’d swear she was thirteen going on twenty-five, listening to her talk. Barbie dolls are definitely behind us, I’m afraid. Now she’s lusting after makeup and heels with a gleam in her eye that will probably throw Cassidy into cardiac arrest when he realizes what’s on her mind.”

      Sylvia chuckled. “She is shooting up fast, isn’t she?”

      “Yes, scary, isn’t it? Anyway, by the time we settled on the absolutely perfect party dress, we’d run out of time to look for something for me.”

      This time Sylvia’s cup clattered impatiently when she returned it to its saucer. “For heaven’s sake, Karen, why didn’t you tell me you were short on time? You know I leap at any opportunity to shop. I’m sure I could have found you something appropriate.”

      “And expensive, no doubt,” Karen returned with a rueful shake of her head.

      Sylvia arched a graceful brow again as she said airily, “Of course. After all, you’re the wife of one of our area’s most successful ranchers. You deserve the best, my sweet. Something with enough sizzle to make that tall, dark and handsome husband of yours want to rip it right off you when he sees you wearing it.”

      Karen nearly choked on her coffee. “Mother!”

      “Don’t ‘Mother’ me, Karen McCormick Moore Sloane. As you just said, Vicki is going to be nine at the end of April. It’s time she had a baby brother or sister to spoil. Otherwise, she might end up as set in her ways as you are.”

      “If only it were that easy,” Karen muttered, dropping her gaze. She would not cry. She simply would NOT.

      There was a weighty silence before her mother said softly, “Darling, I was just joking. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

      “I’m not offended.” Karen closed her eyes against the sudden sting of hot tears.

      “Karen? What’s wrong?”

      Her mother’s soft cry shredded Karen’s brave front “Oh, Mom, I’m so scared. I think my marriage is in terrible trouble, and I don’t have a clue what to do to fix it.”

      Sylvia uttered a soft sound of dismay. “Oh, dear.”

      Karen lifted a hand to dash away the tears trembling on her lashes, then steeled herself to meet her mother’s gaze.

      “Cassidy blames me for Vicky’s accident. He’s been punishing me for it ever since.”

      Sylvia’s disbelief was almost palpable. “You must be mistaken.”

      “I wish I were,” Karen declared with weary vehemence before repeating Cassidy’s words to her on that awful night in June. “I thought it was just a form of shock, that he’d lashed out because he was hurting.”

      “Your father was like that,” her mother stated firmly. “So was my father. I’ve often thought it must be some kind of a defense against feeling things too deeply.”

      “Oh, Cassidy feels things, all right. Resentment, anger, contempt.” Karen wiped the tears from her cheeks with quick angry strokes of her cold fingertips. “These days he scowls more than he smiles, and the hands are threatening to force-feed him patience. As for me, I can’t seem to do anything right anymore.” She drew a breath. “And the only time he smiles is when he’s talking to Vicki.”

      “Karen, Cassidy’s never been a man to smile easily, which isn’t surprising, given the fact that he’s virtually been on his own since his father killed himself.”

      That was certainly true enough, Karen reflected with a frown. Cassidy had been barely seventeen and living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when he’d come home from football practice to find his father dead by his own hand. Since his parents had been divorced for many years by then, the grim details of his father’s burial had been left to him. As soon as he’d graduated, he’d sold the house and the few other possessions his father had left him, put the money and a small insurance settlement into a savings account, and enlisted in the army.

      She knew very little of Cassidy’s family history—only the names of his parents and a few sketchy details of his growing-up years. He’d had a brother who died before the age of five and a mother who’d left ten-year-old Cassidy and his father shortly thereafter. All of which had given him a deep-seated need to be in control of his own destiny. Very early in their relationship, she’d realized that she was wasting her time trying to pry open a door to his past that for reasons of his own, he’d locked and bolted tight.

      “There are other changes, too. More…intimate ones.”

      Karen felt her face growing hot. Though she and her mother had always been close, they had only discussed sex in impersonal terms. To her credit, Sylvia had always been quite open about what she called bedroom romps, the hotter the better. Karen had been the one to shy away from the explicit details.

      “In other words, you’re not sleeping together?”

      Karen hated the wave of weary bitterness that passed over her. It was becoming as much a part of her as the indecision about her marriage.

      “Oh, yes, we’re sleeping together,” she admitted, watching a cloud drift across the frame formed by the living room’s large bay window. “On our own separate sides of the bed.”

      Karen mentally cringed at the memory of the last time she’d tried to snuggle up to Cassidy while he’d been sleeping. He’d jerked away from her violently, as though she’d attacked him.

      “Forgive me for asking, darling, but have you considered that the problem might be…physical?”

      “If you’re asking me if he’s impotent, he’s not.” The idea was laughable. Cassidy was an intensely virile man with a strong sex drive. “We still have sex now and then, but it’s mechanical. A quick, impersonal screw when he’s horny. Nothing more than physical relief.”

      “And you believe Cassidy is to blame for that?”

      “He resents my career and I resent him for resenting it.” She gave a short, bitter СКАЧАТЬ