Her Sister (Search For Love series) by Karen Rose Smith Read Free Book Online

doubt if there's going to be a happy outcome.  If that had been
possible, Lynnie would have found her way back to us.  Since she didn't, I
don't even want to think about what that monster did to her."
    His
hand was tight around his glass.  The whiteness of his knuckles made an impact,
and he released his grip.  It wasn't as if he didn't know what happened to children
who were abused.  He dealt with it all the time.  And the results weren't
pretty.  They were affected for the rest of their lives.  Cases didn't have to
be extreme for that to happen.  And in Lynnie's case...  He closed his eyes but
that didn't erase the images that had burned a place for themselves in his
nightmares.
    "I
wouldn't want to be you," Frank muttered sincerely.
    The
bartender slid his mug in front of him and the foam sloshed onto the bar. 
"If we could go back to Dickinson and do it all again—"
    It was
strange, but thinking about his law-school years at Dickinson didn't evoke
scrapbook pictures of study-groups and campus life but rather memories of
Amanda—how she'd worked beside him...waited up for him...kept a tight budget
with him...loved him.  And thinking about those years took him back further to
a place he hadn't been in a long time—her dad's farm.
    The
coiled tension inside his chest released just a little.  Those summer days on
the farm.
    He'd
been working at the Fogelsmith farm for a month, staying away from Amanda,
telling himself he had a career and a future to tend to.  Everyone knew law
school, like med school, didn't bode well for any kind of relationship.  He'd
been looking forward to college, dating lots of girls, not just one, adding
notches to his belt, which if he had to admit it, wasn't very notched at
eighteen.  With studies, sports, scholarships in his sights and working part
time, who had time for women?  Or getting laid?
    Amanda
had been different from most of the girls who usually turned his head, or at
least got his hormones revved up.  For one thing she'd been skinny, with not
many curves.  For another, he'd never particularly liked redheads.  Not that he'd
made a study of it.  But girls he'd taken to the homecoming dance, Christmas
bash, or the odd party had been brunettes.  Amanda had been in a few of his
classes and she was quite intelligent.  In class she was the one who knew all
the answers when a teacher called on her.  She obviously studied hard.  Yet he
never saw her around much before and after school.  He realized why once he'd
started working on her dad's farm.
    Amanda's
chores took up her out-of-school spare time.  She loved animals, especially the
kittens in the barn.  And she helped her mom cook, too.  That's why he never
saw her in the library in the morning comparing her homework with her other
classmates.  That's why she didn't attend sports events.  Amanda had always
been her own person.  As long as she was doing what she thought was right,
nothing else mattered.  He'd liked that about her back then.  Now it usually
annoyed him.
    No
other girl he'd known had ridden on a flatbed wagon in back of a tractor
helping her dad or walked through the three-foot high tobacco field with him
and her father, topping off the leaves, breaking off the flowers, pulling the
suckers to make the leaves larger, thicker and darker.
    There
had been something almost intimate between them while they'd walked through the
tobacco plants, their fingers reaching for the same flower now and then, their
eyes locking, the sun beating down on them.  Amanda had tied her hair back with
a blue paisley handkerchief.  It was obvious her fair skin sunburned easily,
and she'd told him her mother made her put some kind of cream on before she
went out.  He could still remember the sweet smell of it, along with the
tobacco, sunburned weeds, the scent of dried earth.
    They'd
come in from the field late that July afternoon.  While he'd gone to the barn
to help with the animals, Amanda had run toward the