Read Online The Winter Man by Diana Palmer - Free Book Online

She’d heard his foster mother talk about it. “You said once that your mother died when you were young.”
    He looked up. His eyes were flat, lifeless. “That’s not quite true. I haven’t really talked about her in years. About him, either. My stepfather, I mean.” His broad shouldersrose and fell. “I tell different stories about them to anybody who asks. I guess I’ve been running away from the truth all my life.”
    She didn’t speak. She just listened. Waited. Hoped.
    He noticed and smiled. “My real father was my mother’s second cousin. He lived on the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina where she grew up. But he was married. She got pregnant and she didn’t have any money for a termination. So there was this big, loud Italian construction worker doing a project near the res. She started going out with him and by the time she told him she was pregnant, he thought it was his. Then she gave birth to a full-term baby in what he thought was her sixth month, and the jig was up. He hated her. But they stayed together for three more years, until my sister was born. He took a powder and left her with the kids.”
    â€œThat must have been rough. Was she young?”
    â€œShe was nineteen when she had me,” he said. “Not terribly young. But my sister was half Cherokee and half white, and my mother couldn’t take the constant criticism from her family. When I was seven, she left the reservation and took us on a bus to Atlanta. We didn’t know it, but her husband was working there. He found out from her kin where she was. He moved back in with us. She might have tried to run, but he told her that he had legal rights to take the kids if she ran away. So she stayed. And I ended up with an Italian name that has nothing to do with my ancestry.”He laughed. “The only good thing about it is that it saved a few soldiers’ lives when I got teased. They didn’t make Indian jokes around me, because they thought I was Italian.” His eyes glimmered. “I’m proud of my ancestry. Cherokees are still a proud people, even after all the hell the government put us through when they marched us out to Oklahoma in the dead of winter, walking, in 1838.”
    â€œI know about that,” she said. “It was a tragic episode.”
    â€œOne of many,” he agreed.
    She saw the pain on his face. He was talking around his childhood, trying not to remember. She wanted him to deal with it. She might be the only person alive that he’d ever really talked to about it. It would help him. “Your parents didn’t have a happy marriage,” she prompted.
    He shook his head. He traced the back of a big fingernail absently. “My so-called father drank. A lot. And when he drank, he remembered that I wasn’t his kid and made me pay for it. I was in the emergency room every few months with bruises and cuts. Once, with a broken bone.”
    She winced, thinking how hard it must have been for him, at that age, to be so badly treated by a man he considered to be his father. “Didn’t your mother do anything to protect you?” she asked, aghast.
    â€œShe couldn’t. She was a little woman. He knocked her around all the time. He was a big man. She was scared to death of him. She had no place to go. He knew it. He liked that.” His face tautened. “But then he started doingthings to my little sister, when she was about eight.” His whole body seemed to contract. “My mother caught him at it, late one night. She was very calm. She went into the kitchen, got the biggest butcher knife she could find and hid it behind her. She went back into the living room, smiling. She said it was all right, she wouldn’t make a fuss. He smirked. He knew she wouldn’t do anything. He said so. I can still see her, smiling at him. She went to him like somebody sleepwalking. She stabbed that knife up to the hilt in his