Read Online From Brooding Boss to Adoring Dad by Dianne Drake - Free Book Online

ripped right out of him. It had been more than two yearsand that mess of his former life still returned to tweak him in some little, inexplicable way almost every day. Still, this situation with Erin Glover wasn’t personal. She wanted to do something good here. So did he. Hence the impasse. However, the biggest difference was, his hospital was sensible, and very needed. Hers was a whim, a totally absurd expectation for the area based on factors she couldn’t have possibly thought through. A romantic notion, that’s what it was. And that’s what he had to keep telling himself when he was inclined to get soft and give in. As getting soft toward Erin Glover seemed like an easy thing to do. Too easy.
    Erin stood in the doorway of her hospital, watching Coulson walk over to Trinique’s. Watching the little boy dart out of nowhere and shadow him, trying to match him step for step, trying to imitate the swagger she’d already come to know as exclusively Coulson. Cute boy. She’d seen him before, outside Trinique’s, sitting on the step. Hadn’t paid much attention as children scampered everywhere. That’s one of the reason she loved it here. But this little boy … even from this far away, she could see that he adored Coulson. Did Coulson adore him back, though? She wanted to think that he was more than what she saw of his craggy exterior. And maybe he was. At least, the little boy seemed to think so. Kids usually had good instincts so maybe there was something more than met the eye with Adam Coulson.
    Before going back inside her hospital, she watched Coulson and the boy a few more moments. Then suddenly all her apprehensions were alleviated in a simple gesture. Coulson reached over and tousled the boy’s hair. It wasn’t much, but it spoke volumes.
    “Uncle Serek,” Erin said, falling into the man’s arms. He was a mountain of a man, large, fleshy, a grin so broad hisears wiggled when he smiled. At least, that’s what she’d thought when she’d been a child. She had been almost college age when she’d learned that wiggling his ears was a trick meant only for her. “It’s so good to see you.”
    “Erin,” he said, hugging her the way a father would.
    “You get more beautiful every time I see you.”
    Serek Harrison was one of her father’s oldest and dearest friends. A man who, over the years, had been wise in his advice on her own treatments. Her godfather, actually, not her uncle, even though that’s what she’d always called him. Also an oncologist and head of the Port Wallace Public Hospital, he was semiretired now, and Erin believed with all her heart she owed part of her life to this dear man. “And the ocean breeze isn’t taming my hair at all,” she said, laughing. Prior to all her various times through chemotherapy, her hair had been more on the brownish side and definitely as straight as a board. Over the course of time, it had turned into a wild mane not completely out of control but close to it if she wasn’t careful.
    “It’s beautiful hair,” he said, in his smooth Jamaican lilt. “So, tell me, child. How is my old friend doing? I don’t get very good feelings when I talk to him, and I haven’t had time in the past few months to go to Chicago to visit him.”
    Pulling out of his arms, she sighed. “It’s hard to tell. He doesn’t talk about it. But he doesn’t do much of anything nowadays either. He’s totally quit his practice, as well as his position at the hospital. And while getting the children’s hospital up and running has him interested, even that wasn’t enough to motivate him to come here with me. And you know he’s never passed up a chance to come home. But now he’d rather sit in his study, making phone calls, than be here.” She drew in a shaky breath. “I’m worried about him,Uncle Serek. I’ve never seen him like this and it scares me. It’s like he doesn’t have anything to live for any more.”
    “Well, Algernon is a stubborn man. Not prideful, but