A Widow's Guilty Secret by Marie Ferrarella Read Free Book Online Page B

in on her—and he’d been the cause of her pain.
    “Look, I meant no disrespect, but you are dealing with an emotional situation and taking care of a newborn isn’t exactly a walk in the park, especially not when it’s your first baby and you find yourself questioning every move you make, every thought you have.” At this point, there was nothing but sympathetic understanding in Nick’s voice. “I just asked if there is a friend or a relative I could call for you. Somebody for you to lean on if you needed to.”
    And this way, he thought, I won’t have to volunteer for the position.
    Suzy flushed. The man was trying to be nice to her, and she had all but bitten his head off. Maybe she really was going to pieces over this and didn’t even realize it.
    “Yes, there’s someone,” she admitted quietly. “My sister, Lori.”
    He waited a moment, thinking she would give him her sister’s phone number. When she didn’t, Nick prodded, “Can I have her number?”
    “That’s okay, I can call her,” Suzy told him.
    Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea, getting Lori to come, she thought. She could always count on Lori, just as Lori could always count on her. They were each other’s support system. They always had been, going all the way back to the days when they had thought that all children had parents who fell asleep, fully clothed, on any flat surface that was handy, clutching a bottle of whiskey.
    A little more than a year apart in age—with her being the older one—she and Lori were in tune to each other’s feelings. It was Lori who had first sensed that she wasn’t as happy in her marriage as she’d hoped to be. And it was Lori who’d made her promise that she would come to her if there was ever a problem.
    This certainly qualified as a problem.
    Since the woman wasn’t making an attempt to walk over to the phone and pick it up, Nick made another offer. “I can hold the baby for you while you make your call.”
    She hadn’t made a move yet because she was trying to find the right words to apologize to him. She supposed that saying “I’m sorry” was a one-size-fits-all catchall. It felt insufficient, but she used it anyway.
    “I’m sorry.” When she saw him raise a quizzical eyebrow, she added, “I know you were just trying to be nice and I just about bit your head off. I really didn’t mean to—”
    He smiled at her for the first time since she’d opened the door to him and his partner. Really smiled. Suzy caught herself thinking that he had a nice smile, one of those terrific boyish ones that utterly captivated the beholder and transformed his face.
    Rather than an austere representative of the law, Nick Jeffries suddenly became human, someone she could relate to and even talk to.
    “Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “My skin’s a lot tougher than you think, Mrs. Burris.”
    “Suzy,” she corrected. “Call me Suzy. Being called Mrs. Burris makes me feel like a gray-haired grandmother in sensible shoes.”
    He glanced down at her feet, noticing for the first time that she wasn’t barefoot, the way his own wife used to be the minute she walked in through the front door. And rather than wearing something like comfortable slippers, Suzy had on high heels. Three-and-a-half or four-inch heels if he didn’t miss his guess. She moved around so effortlessly in them, he’d just naturally assumed that the woman was barefoot.
    But now that he’d looked—and, he had to admit, admired—he could see how very wrong he’d been. The shoes made her legs look sexy.
    “Nothing sensible about those shoes,” Nick commented with an appreciative grin. “Don’t they bother your feet?” he asked.
    She shook her head. “I don’t even know I have them on.”
    The shoes had been one of her ways of coping with her situation. She gravitated toward pretty things, toward things that made her feel pretty and took her attention away—for however short a time—from whatever was bothering her.
    When