Read Online Warm Winter Love by Constance Walker - Free Book Online

nothing—no, absolutely nothing—in common. Her father was spur-of-the-moment; Jason was methodical. And sometimes that was good—he planned for everything and anything. There would never be worries about anything practical when they married.
    She took a deep breath. When she and Jason were married. Funny, but that idea seemed so remote today. She could see Sam’s fingers drumming on the table now. The fingers beat a cadence that seemed to say, Sam is here, Sam is here. Jason isn’t, Jason isn’t. What to do? What to do?
    “Katie-Katie, come back to Cedar Crest,” Sam said softly and she smiled at him. “I was asking you about your dad.”
    “Ah, my dad.” Katie put her elbows on the table and her head on her hands. “It’s very difficult for me to talk about him.”
    “Look, if I’ve upset you—don’t answer it. It’s just something I wanted to know about you, to try to fit all the pieces of the Katie Jarvis puzzle together. So that I can know you better.” He leaned back against the slats of his chair. “Oh, Katie love, we have so much to discover about each other.”
    “And so little time,” she murmured.
    “Don’t say that, Katie. We still have three more days. I told you I’m a convincing salesman. That’s my job. I sell ideas and plans and now you’re my biggest client and I’m my biggest plan. And if you say yes, then I take over the company.”
    Katie shifted in her seat and smiled. “You would have liked my father. He was a lot like you. A lot like you,” she repeated, and let her voice drop. “He was even a salesman. And he could sell anything.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “He died a few years ago. It was very complicated, Sam. You see, he and my mother divorced when I was twelve and it crushed me. He was a shining knight in armor to me, someone I could focus on when I was supposed to be studying in class and I got bored. I could always think that today was Wednesday or Thursday and I would see him soon. Fridays, when he was finished traveling for the week, were pure magic for me. I waited for that day.”
    She smiled as she remembered herself as a young girl. “And every time he came home on the weekend—that’s the only time I saw him even when we were all living together, because he was away traveling the territory during the week—well, anyway, I would wait for him because he would bring me back things. Not necessarily material things—it was more than that. He would bring me back stories about the people he met and the cities and towns he visited, and he would tell me about them and, oh, Sam, there were some nights I would go to bed thinking that his had to be the best life in the world. He surely had to be the luckiest person in the universe to have such a great job. That was when I thought traveling was the best thing you could do—the only thing. That’s because my dad made it appear that way.”
    She looked away toward the window and saw that it was snowing harder now, and she remembered that the Crest’s weather forecaster had predicted a brief storm that evening.
    “Well, anyway,” she went on, “the strain and stress of not having a husband around all the time got to my mother and she finally told me one day—I’ll never forget, it was also on a Friday and I was looking forward to seeing him—that she and Dad had decided to live apart from then on.” She touched the rim of her cup and moved her finger around it. “It hurt her, Sam. She isn’t a callous person even though I accused her of sending him away, and it hurt her to say that to me. She made the decision for both of them—I know she did—but she had her reasons and I really do understand them now. But try telling a twelve-year-old girl that her father isn’t coming home anymore. It was terrible.”
    He nodded. “It must have been,” he said quietly and she could tell that he meant the words.
    “I could see her point, Sam. She was a product of her generation. She wanted a husband and a home