The Hiding Place. Karen Harper
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Название: The Hiding Place
Автор: Karen Harper
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Вестерны
isbn: 9781408954560
isbn:
What Dr. Holbrook had told her today hit hard again. He was mistaken, of course. If the birth of her own child were a fact, the only possibility was that it had occurred while she was comatose. But that was impossible. Insane. Yet, just to ease her mind, she was going to use her online skills to check it out, phone Jen in L.A., too, and perhaps even get a second opinion beyond Jen’s. But even comatose women didn’t have babies they never knew about, especially not while they were on birth control, for heaven’s sake. The man was wrong, and she’d told him so.
Now, she just had to prove it to herself.
However strange things seemed without his mother here, the old house seemed to welcome Nick. He’d held the door for Tara, and his words—After you—echoed in his head. Yeah, he could really see himself going after a woman like this. Yet she seemed more than wary, as if she had an invisible fence around her that she—or he—dare not cross. Hell, he couldn’t blame her, since she probably figured he could take Claire away from her. Maybe she was scarred from her sudden divorce, too, even if that was a while ago.
After his excited niece dragged him from room to room, as if he’d never seen the place he’d grown up in, he sat at the kitchen table with a Coors beer, taco chips and Claire while Tara fixed a salad and spaghetti. He filled them in on his flights home, then told them how he’d left the ten dogs he’d helped train with their new partners in the mountains of Afghanistan and how they wanted him to train even more here in the States. Beamer, tight to his leg under the table, seemed to listen to each word, too.
“Aunt Tara showed me where you were on the map and I can spell Afghanistan, too,” Claire piped up. “And I think that’s where afghans like that one on the sofa Grandma knitted first came from. Beamer missed you. Aunt Tara, too. We all did, ’specially after Mommy went to heaven and Daddy went to prison.”
That incredible last sentence, delivered in the child’s light voice, reminded Nick of some sappy Western music lyrics. Hard to believe it was all true and had happened to his family. Tears filled his eyes. Crying in his beer already. Man, he must be exhausted as well as jetlagged. Everything was getting to him today. His eyes met Tara’s green gaze again over the steam from the boiling pasta. What was this woman really like? Was she that lovely inside, too? She had tried to save Alex at the risk of her own life and had taken such good care of Claire. In the coma Clay’s attack had caused, she’d lost almost a year of her life and had lost her husband, the life she’d known. He knew she ran a P.I. firm that searched for lost kids. She must have a heart of gold.
He could tell she forced a smile before she looked away from him. She was tall but shapely. Any moron who’d been living with men and looking only at the occasional woman swathed in black burkas for the past two years would appreciate that. Her grace and femininity made him weak in the knees, yet she seemed to have an edge to her. Her sunny looks often crashed to frowns or near tears. Damn, they had a lot to say to each other. He could only hope she’d understand his dilemma about taking Claire and leaving.
Tara intended to let Nick read Claire her bedtime story and tuck her in tonight, but both Claire and Nick had insisted she come into the child’s bedroom, too. Ironically, Claire had chosen Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day—she liked any book title with a resemblance to her mother’s name in it. Nick shot Tara a what’s-with-this-book look, since the child seemed so happy. He’d soon learn, Tara thought, that Claire had lots of problems that came out in lots of ways. As Nick read the familiar book to his niece, Tara’s mind drifted. She could have written Tara’s Horrendous, Impossible, Ridiculous, Gut-wrenching Day. She felt both emotionally exhausted and keyed up; for once, the glass of red wine she and Nick had drunk with dinner was not making her sleepy. She was as revved up as if she’d downed a whole pot of coffee and she was dying to get online to search comatose woman + childbirth and to phone Jen. But she needed to talk to Nick in private first.
After they tucked Claire in bed, they sat out on the deck overlooking the darkening mountains. For the first time in the thirteen months since she’d moved in with Claire, Tara felt like a guest. It was an amazingly peaceful scene and yet she felt so uptight.
“You’re probably very tired,” she said, feeling she should give him a way out of further conversation if he wanted to be alone—with man’s best friend, that is. Beamer trailed him everywhere and now lay two feet from the rungs of Nick’s rocker.
“I’m kind of jazzed, tell you the truth.”
They shared small talk, things about Claire’s daily schedule. He with another beer, she with herbal tea, they rocked and watched the setting sun stain the western sky bloodred. To the northeast, down the mountain and over the darkening silhouettes of spiky pines and leaf-rattling aspens, they could see the distant lights of Denver coming on in twinkling pinpoints. Behind them, up the mountain, the thick, black tree line loomed.
“Lots of memories here,” he said softly, then cleared his throat. “I guess it’s pretty tough to have lost some memories, when you were…hurt.”
“Besides losing Alex, I lost my husband. That was just as well though. No woman wants someone who isn’t in for the hard times as well as the good. We had a lot of differences.” She switched to a news-reporter-style voice: “Independent, self-supporting, middle-class woman weds big money and becomes property of the lord of the manor, along with the loyal-only-unto-themselves Lohan family.” She dropped the elevated tone and went on. “Laird Lohan gave me a shock when he left me—and left town—but also saved me some heartache. I’m slowly getting my real self back, becoming just working girl Tara Kinsale again. And Claire’s been such a big part of my life and recovery.”
“Alex had a tough marriage, too. Things were bad with Clay, obviously, even before he took Claire from her.” He shook his head. “I guess I was in my own little freewheeling-bachelor and dog-training world during most of that. Thank God, the cops found Clay, and he’s locked up for life.”
“Yes, but you should know that his family, especially his younger brother Rick, really took Clay’s conviction personally, as if it was Alex’s, or even my fault. She wasn’t around to blame, so Rick berated me. Told me off in person and later sent me a threatening letter, which I saved.”
He frowned and shifted in his chair so hard it creaked. “Yeah, that sounds like Rick. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he’s more of a blowhard than someone with the guts to do something. He doesn’t have a family and never quite made a go of things professionally—keeps changing jobs, even careers. He hasn’t bothered you since his initial eruption, has he?”
“Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him.”
“Beamer would growl if he came around here.”
“You’ll have to have a chat with Beamer,” she said, glad to change the subject. “He doesn’t growl, but he barks anytime a fox or elk or bear is around.”
“He just needs a bit of reeducation on manners. So…” He drew the word out as if he hesitated to embark on whatever he was going to say. “I take it that happy, smiling Claire still has her dark moments—that book she chose tonight, stuff like that.”
“Yes. I think hearing about another kid’s difficult day comforts her. It teaches her she’s not the only one with problems and losses, although few suffer what she’d been through. The two of us are open about her losses, and she knows about mine—”
Her voice caught. But did she have a loss Claire didn’t know about—one that she herself didn’t know about? No, she could not have had СКАЧАТЬ