“Give me a kiss goodnight—a real one,” I said, tilting my face up to his and speaking long-forgotten words that I had a feeling I had used often in the past.
He groaned softly in the darkness.
“I shouldn’t. That’s how everything started the last time, darlin’.”
I knew I shouldn’t press it but something made me do it anyway.
“Just a kiss goodnight, Nick,” I said softly. “What’s the big deal? We’re adults not—not scared kids. We can handle ourselves.”
“I don’t know if we can,” he murmured. But he leaned down and captured my mouth with his own. It was a soft, gentle kiss with his lips lingering on mine but it started my heart pounding. I reached for him, wanting to deepen the kiss but he pulled away abruptly.
“Good night, Kira,” he murmured and settled himself more comfortably on the bed with one arm draped loosely around my shoulders.
I bit my lip. What was wrong with me, wanting to kiss him, wanting to be close to him? Why did I feel such a strong attraction to the man who had hurt me so badly by abandoning me ten years ago?
Forget it, I told myself sternly, closing my eyes and trying to settle down for sleep. Forget Nick. Tomorrow the two of you are going your separate ways and you’ll probably never see him again. There’s no use bringing up the past. Just go to sleep and try not to think about him.
Which was damn hard to do, considering I was sleeping in his arms. However, at last my heart rate slowed and I was able to drift off.
But when sleep finally came to me, dreams of the past followed me downward…
PART 4
TEN YEARS EARLIER…
SEVEN
“This is your bed and I don’t want to hear any shit about it,” Nancy Spaulding stated flatly. She was gesturing to a narrow pallet on the dirty floor of the barn out behind the main house. It wasn’t even really a mattress—just some foam padding with a sheet and a few blankets and all of it was located inside an abandoned horse stall.
I looked at it in disbelief.
“This is where I’m supposed to sleep?”
“You’re damn right,” she snapped. “You don’t sleep in the main house unless you earn it. You might have had a cushy foster home before you came here but in this house we all pay our own way—no exceptions.”
It had been two years since my mom had died in a car wreck, only a year after my dad had been killed as well. I’d just come from a foster home where I had my own room and a writing desk and a shelf of all my favorite books. My last foster mother had told me to call her “Auntie Amelia.” She was a retired nurse who specialized in fostering kids with disabilities.
I had been in the wreck with my mom—though I didn’t remember any of it. My only memory was waking up in the hospital with a horrible pain in my leg and being told that my femur had been shattered. I had cried and cried during that long hospital stay but Auntie Amelia had taken me in and helped me with my physical therapy. She was an older black woman with graying hair and wise, kind eyes. She also had one of the best hearts of anyone I had ever known.
“You cry if you need to, child,” she would murmur when she heard my muffled sobs and came to sit on the side of my bed and stroke my hot forehead at night. “You’ve lost a lot but there are still people who will love you and you’ll find them someday, I promise you that.”
There was only one other foster child in the house in the years I spent with Auntie Amelia—a little girl with blonde hair and Downs Syndrome called Becky. But Auntie Amelia called her “Daisy girl” because she loved the daisies that grew rampant in the big, overgrown front yard. She would sit in the sunshine and pick them and play with them for hours, happy and content with the simple pastime. She had a sweet, sunny personality and a smile for everyone who looked her way.
Becky and Auntie Amelia and I formed a kind of family in the years I lived with them. Auntie Amelia home schooled us both since it was too hard for me to get to school with my leg the way it was and I needed to do physical therapy exercise throughout the day. Little by little I grew stronger and started to feel not so empty inside.
But it couldn’t last. Who was it that said the good always die too soon? Auntie Amelia developed a cough around the end of my second year with her. The cough got worse and worse until she had to go to the doctor.