A Moment of Weakness by Karen Kingsbury Read Free Book Online Page B

on.
    “Let’s go somewhere. Talk, catch up.” Tanner reached for her hand, but she pulled it back and again her eyes found something on the ground. He searched her face, but her troubled expression did nothing to explain her actions. Then it dawned on him … “I’m sorry … I didn’t even ask. Are you married, Jade? Is there someone waiting for you?”
    She viewed him through cautious eyes. “No. I just … people will talk. I like to keep my distance.”
    Tanner hesitated. “Okay. Sorry about the hand thing.”
    A slight grin appeared, and some of the caution in Jade’s eyes faded. “Forgiven.” She stared at him a moment. “I’m sorry for overreacting.”
    “No problem.” Tanner was surprised at how he ached to take her in his arms and kiss her. From the time he was in high school he could have had his pick of beautiful women. They left notes on his car, messages at his dorm, and propositioned him to his face. He wasn’t interested. He trusted God’s plan for his life, and part of that plan was being sexually pure until he was married. Despite the women who sought after him, holding to that conviction had never been a struggle.
    Yet none of them had ever made him feel the way he felt now, standing on a city sidewalk, Jade Conner filling his senses.
    Tanner had a feeling that whatever wounds Jade’s mother had inflicted on her daughter’s heart, they had left her scarred. He would have to move slowly if they were going to be friends again. “Wanna get something to eat?”
    She nodded. “I know a great hamburger place.”
    He patted her car. “You driving?”
    Her eyes twinkled. “If you trust a girl who can beat you in a bike race.”
    Tanner didn’t smile. The emotions she stirred in him were too deep to make light of. “The question isn’t whether I trust you.” His voice was softer, his face less than a foot from hers. “It’s whether you trust me.”
    Jade said nothing, just considered his statement, meeting his gaze while a dozen emotions danced in her eyes. Finally she caught his neck with the crook of her arm and hugged him close. His arms circled her again, and he clung to her the way a brother might cling to a long lost sister.
    He held her that way for nearly a minute all the while praying that she wouldn’t see the truth. How the feelings that assaulted him now were far from brotherly.

S ix
    I F TRAIN TRACKS HAD RUN THROUGH THE TOWN OF K ELSO, THE house where Jade and her father lived would have been on the wrong side.
    Their two-bedroom rental was sandwiched between a cluster of miscellaneous mobile homes and a weed-infested trailer park on Stark Street. The city dump was within eyesight, and a bitter stench drifted down the roadway whenever a breeze kicked up. What with the rusted washing machines and broken-down automobiles cluttering the yards up and down Stark, it was difficult to tell where the dump ended and the neighborhood began.
    Crime had never been much of an issue in Kelso. A sleepy town that survived on industry along the Columbia and Cowlitz rivers, most of the people who lived there had done so all their lives. Still, when there was a domestic incident or a drug bust, inevitably it was on or near Stark Street.
    Jade was used to her neighborhood. That night when she pulled into her driveway and stepped around broken engine parts and a Mustang that had died five years earlier, she didn’t give a second thought to the condition of her home.
    She had found Tanner Eastman. After ten years of sorrow and struggle she had come face to face with the one who had been a single ray of light in an otherwise cavernously dark past. Somehow, someway, despite the years gone by, he had found her, and she desperately needed to talk to someone about what she was feeling.
    Jade opened the front door. “Dad?” It was Monday night, and if there’d been enough work at the garage to keep him past noon, he would have worked the whole day. In that case, he would probably still be