Read Online Wounded Earth by Mary Anna Evans - Free Book Online Page A

thing.
    “You haven't aged a day, Larabeth. You could be Cynthia's age. You always did look more like her sister than her mother.”
    Larabeth had a lot of control. She gave no visible response to his thoughtless comment. At least, there was no response that a casual acquaintance would notice. J.D. knew he was the only person in the world aware of the pain she hid, and he regretted his part in making that pain worse.
    She didn't tremble or cry or flush. She just acquired a sort of glacial stillness as she sat there and stared at him. He opened his mouth to apologize, but she had returned to herself, thrown her napkin on the table, and signed the check.
    “We've been tiptoeing around each other long enough,” she said briskly. “Why don't we go outside and deal with our unfinished business?”
    He followed her out and looked around. The hotel wasn't that cheap. The pool was attractive, if small, and the surrounding landscaping was quite nice, with a number of benches nestled beside tall shrubbery. There was no one else around, and J.D. was grateful for the privacy of the quiet courtyard.
    “I'm sorry I mentioned Cynthia,” J.D. began.
    “It's understandable,” she responded quickly. “For seven years, we talked of nothing else.”
    “I suppose you haven't contacted her. I guess you would have said something about it by now, if you had.”
    “I've probably started hundreds of letters to her in the years since I saw you, trying to explain why I gave her up. I'm beginning to accept that there will never be a right way to intrude on her life. Maybe it's for the best.” She flashed him a rueful smile. “But you did a damn fine job of keeping up with her for me. Too bad I don't have any way of keeping up with her any more.”
    J.D.’s eyes squinted for just a second. Why did he feel that Larabeth wasn't being completely straight with him? She cocked her head, obviously waiting for him to respond, and the moment passed. It just felt good, being together again.
    “Well, finding her was no big trick,” he said. “Not when your father left you the adoptive parents' address in his will. The rest of the assignment wasn't hard, but it was strange.”
    J.D. paused as a woman passed on the sidewalk near them, and they both fell silent. He had never, before or since, been asked to tail someone indefinitely, especially when that someone didn't owe his client money and wasn't sleeping around behind his client's back. All Larabeth had wanted at first was to find out whether Cynthia's parents were good ones. They were.
    As the assignment wore on, she asked him to keep her posted on the little ups and downs in the girl's teen-age life. He'd made black-and-white glossies of Cynthia with braces on her teeth and Cynthia after the braces came off. He'd compiled dossiers on her boyfriends. He'd gotten newspaper clippings of her athletic exploits and academic awards, even her adoptive father's obituary.
    Larabeth's thoughts were evidently running along the same lines. She fumbled in her purse, drew out her wallet, and opened it to a photograph. “Look, I'm still carrying her senior portrait around. I didn't even have to give you instructions. You just seemed to find out the things a mother would want to know.”
    J.D.'s laugh was sudden and inappropriate. She raised an eyebrow. “What?”
    “Oh, I was just thinking about those years. Do you know how hard it is to snag an illicit copy of a high school yearbook? I should write an article for P.I. Magazine. I'd call it ‘I Staked Out the Junior-Senior Prom.’”
    As Larabeth laughed, the frozen look left her. On her face, even the little smile lines looked youthful.
    “It was an odd assignment,” she said, “but it gave you something to do between normal clients. I knew you weren't happy. You didn't really have to give me an impassioned speech about how wrong it was to tail an innocent girl. I was just surprised old Mr. Sanders let you throw away the easy money his firm was making