Read Online Sweet Laurel Falls by RaeAnne Thayne - Free Book Online Page B

business, isn’t it?”
    She frowned and stopped to align an untidy shelf of paperback
mysteries. “I don’t believe a passion for actual books you can hold in your
hands will ever go away. We have an enormous children’s section, which is
growing in popularity as parents come to realize that children need to turn real
pages once in a while instead of merely flipping a finger across a screen. Our
travel section is also very popular, as is the young adult fiction.”
    She shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve made sure people come to the store
for more than just books, though it’s still the best place in town to find
elusive titles. We’ve become a gathering spot for anyone who loves the written
word. We have book groups and author signings, writer nights, even an evening
set aside a couple times a month for singles.”
    “You’ve really built something impressive here.”
    She paused and looked embarrassed. “Sorry. You hit a hot
button.”
    “I don’t mind. I admire passion in a woman.”
    In a person . That’s what he meant
to say. In a person . Anyone. But it was too late to
take the word back. Maura sent him a charged look and suddenly the bookstore
felt over-warm. He had a random, completely unwelcome memory of the two of them
wrapped together on a blanket up near Silver Lake, with the aspens whispering
around them and the wind sighing in the pine trees.
    She cleared her throat and he thought he saw a slight flush on
her cheeks, but he figured he must have been mistaken when she went on the
offensive. “What is this whole business about sticking around town for a few
weeks, Jack? You don’t want to be here. You hate Hope’s Crossing.”
    He didn’t want to take her on right now. He ought to just smile
politely, offer some benign answer and head over to browse the bestseller shelf,
but somehow he couldn’t do that.
    “If I want to see my daughter—the daughter you didn’t tell me
about, remember?—I’m stuck here, aren’t I?” he said quietly.
    “Not necessarily. Why can’t you just wait and visit Sage in
Boulder when she returns to school? Or have her come visit you in San Francisco.
You don’t have to be here .”
    “I’m not leaving. Not until after Christmas, anyway.”
    “You’re just doing this to ruin my holidays, aren’t you?”
    He could feel his temper fray, despite his efforts to hang on
to the tattered edges. “What else? I stayed up all night trying to come up with
ways to make you pay for keeping my daughter from me. Ruining your holidays
seemed the perfect revenge for twenty years of glaring silence. That’s the kind
of vindictive bastard I am, right?”
    “I have no idea,” she shot back. “How am I supposed to know
what kind of bastard you are now?”
    “Insinuating I was a bastard twenty years ago to knock you up
and leave town.”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “You must have thought it, though, a million times over the
years.”
    That was the core of the anger that
had simmered through him since that life-changing moment after his lecture. What
she must have thought of him, how she must have hated him to keep this from
him.
    For twenty years their time together had been a cherished
memory, something he used to take out and relive when life seemed particularly
discouraging.
    He had wondered about her many times over the years. His first
love, something good and bright and beautiful to a young man who had needed that
desperately.
    To know that she must have been cursing his name all that time
for leaving her alone with unimaginable responsibility was a bitter pill.
    “You didn’t tell me, Maura. What
the hell was I supposed to do?”
    “Not forget me, as if you couldn’t wait to walk away from
everything we shared. As if I meant nothing to you!”
    As soon as she blurted out the words, she pressed a hand to her
mouth as if horrified by them.
    “I loved you,” he murmured. “Believe whatever else you want
about me, but I loved you, Maura.”
    “Yet you hated your father