Read Online The Truth About Tara by Darlene Gardner - Free Book Online Page B

top-notch. Camp Daybreak had rented space at a privately owned community center that boasted an oversize air-conditioned room. On rainy days, tables could be pushed aside to create an empty space in the center of the room. Campers also had access to a playground and a community pool. The staff was impressive, too. The director was not only the father of one of the campers but a special education teacher, his assistant was a developmental disability nurse and one of the four volunteer camp counselors was a physiotherapist. Another staff member was a speech therapist.
    Carrie walked across the all-purpose room, the heels of her sandals making clicking sounds on the linoleum floor, the skirt of her sleeveless cotton dress swishing about her legs. Gustavo Miller was in the cramped office, his head bent over paperwork, one hand poised over a calculator. He didn’t look up.
    Here goes, Carrie thought.
    “Hey there, Gustavo,” she said.
    His head jerked up, his green eyes fastening on her. The color was quite remarkable, considering his dark hair and swarthy complexion. After a few brief meetings, she’d already noticed he was a man of contradictions. Take his name. Miller was as common as names in the United States came. Gustavo was not.
    The intent expression on his face morphed into a smile. “Call me Gus. Most people do.”
    “I don’t believe I will,” Carrie said. “Gustavo suits the tall, dark and Latin thing you’ve got going on.”
    If he’d been seven or eight years older—in other words, her age—she wouldn’t have worded the compliment quite that way. With men as old as she was and older, she was very careful not to flirt.
    He laughed, a nice rumbling sound. “My mother’s from Argentina, but I’m only half Latin. My father grew up near here in Exeter.”
    “How interesting. How did your parents meet?” she asked.
    “Dad was a month into what was supposed to be a trip around the world when he saw her on a beach in Mar del Plata,” he said. “He stayed in Argentina to romance her and six months later they were married. I spent the first ten years of my life in Buenos Aires.”
    “Now I understand why you have an accent.”
    “You can hear it, then?” He shook his head, as though he didn’t realize how attractive his slightly different pronunciations were. “I learned to speak Spanish first. I’ve lived in the States so long, though, I keep expecting to lose it. You’ve got an accent, too. Southern?”
    “That’s right,” she said. “Nothing exotic. I’m just an American girl from Charlotte.”
    “Nothing wrong with that,” Gustavo said. “I quite like Southern girls.”
    Was he flirting with her? No, that was highly unlikely given their age difference.
    She nodded to the empty chair at the table. “Mind if I sit down?”
    “Not at all.” He folded his hands on top of the papers while she settled into the chair. “Is there something I can help you with, Carrie?”
    She shouldn’t be flattered that he remembered her name. She’d been at orientation last week and they were more than halfway through the first day of camp. She’d never heard Carrie pronounced quite that way, though, with the slight rolling of the r’ s.
    Strangely reluctant to bring up the reason she’d sought him out, she asked, “Aren’t you going to have lunch?”
    “A little later,” he said. “But that’s not what you came to see me about, is it?”
    Still not ready to talk money, Carrie smiled at him. It wasn’t difficult. Gustavo had a face that made her want to smile. She got a whiff of something. Not cologne. Something clean and fresh like soap or shampoo. Whatever it was, it made him smell good. “I’m wondering how you got to be director of a camp like this?”
    “It’s important to me that Susie have the camp experience,” he said. “There wasn’t a special-needs camp close enough, so I decided to start one. First I had to set up as a nonprofit agency. Then I was lucky enough to get a grant