A Family For Christmas. Tara Quinn Taylor

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       CHAPTER EIGHT

      THE FIRST THING Simon noticed when Cara came out of the bedroom was that she’d foregone his clean shirts for her washed but bloodstained one.

      She wasn’t settling in.

      He took her message in stride.

      Other than the one cheek, her face looked better. So much so that he could begin to make out natural features. Her expression remained bland, giving the same nothing away he’d been getting since he brought her inside, but he figured the pain of facial movement alone would explain some of that.

      In his usual jeans and flannel shirt, Simon handed her two pills—an antibiotic and a pain reducer. She took the antibiotic.

      “In exchange for putting drops in your eye,” she told him, waiting, apparently, for his acquiescence.

      “I’ve already done them this morning.” Six tries. Not good, but not bad, either.

      Her nod didn’t give away anything of what she was really thinking. Now that she was up and about, her reticence bothered him.

      Made him curious.

      Probably because he’d made his life so damned small she was consuming it. That would explain why he’d lain awake the night before trying to figure out how to keep her from leaving and either returning to the bastard who’d hurt her and left her for dead or being found by him.

      “I made oatmeal and toast,” he said, taking two bowls from the counter and bringing them to the table, then going back to retrieve the plate of buttered toast.

      She’d used neither milk—probably because it was reconstituted from powder and pretty crappy—nor brown sugar the last time he’d served the dish, so he didn’t bother with either.

      Mouth open, as though she was going to argue, Cara looked away, pulled out the seat by the kitchen and sat. Ahead of her now, he’d set the opposite side for himself. Because everything about the morning was planned.

      “I know you’re anxious to be on your way,” he started, more nervous than the conversation warranted. He was a grown man with a mission—one that he’d been neglecting for the five days she’d been there—not a schoolboy lacking confidence.

      Her nod was directed more toward her bowl than him.

      “I’d advise against you doing anything as strenuous as hiking out of here,” he told her. “With that facial fracture, slight though it is, something as little as a branch to your face could cause serious, permanent and possibly life-threatening damage.”

      He wasn’t her jailer. She was a free adult.

      And so was he. An adult with a troubled conscience with which it was already hard to live.