His Partner's Wife by Janice Kay Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

me a favor. Accept my help
without baby-sitting my kids, bringing me cookies or knitting me a sweater.
Okay?"
    "I don't—"
    "Yeah. You do." He reached out, touched her cheek,
the most fleeting of contacts but enough like a caress to steal her breath.
"Friends don't have to be repaid."
    She found herself nodding dumbly. "Yes. Okay."
    "Do something self-indulgent today. Get a massage. Go
to a movie. Hey, go back to bed."
    "I'm going horseback riding." She hadn't known
she'd decided.
    His quick, warm smile erased the harshness on a face made
more angular by lack of sleep. "Good girl. Sounds like the right medicine.
You probably don't get enough chances."
    "I go two or three times a week."
    The one gift from Stuart that she truly loved was Foxfire,
the bloodred Arabian stallion she kept stabled at a ranch just outside of town.
He was probably too much of a handful for her. He wasn't mean, but he danced
and twisted and fussed over the smallest leaf blowing across the path. Despite
his value, she'd considered having him gelded, but everyone who saw him thought
she should put him up for stud. She'd pried out of Stuart the fact that he'd
paid an outrageous twenty-five thousand dollars for the horse, and she was told
she could maybe charge five hundred for each live birth. But to do that, she'd
have to move him to a different farm where workers knew how to handle breeding,
and she guessed if he was being regularly bred, with his blood fired up he
might be even harder to handle. Since she did so love riding her elegant
Arabian, it seemed more bother than it would be worth. She didn't really need
the money. Except that it made sense, of course, to geld him if she wasn't going
to breed him.
    "You should come with me someday," she suggested
impulsively. "Have you ever ridden?"
    "I seem to remember a pony ride at the Woodland Park
Zoo when I was five." He shook his head. "No, thanks."
    "Coward."
    A smile in his blue eyes, John said, "Haven't you heard
that discretion is the better part of valor?"
    "That from a man who risks his life day in and day
out."
    "We all choose our poison."
    "I'm sure we could rent a placid horse that wouldn't
break out of a walk," Natalie coaxed. "Maddie and Evan could go,
too."
    He groaned. "Maybe. And don't you dare go behind my
back and prime them."
    "Wouldn't dream of it," she promised, crossing her
fingers in her pocket.
    "I've got to get out of here." In passing her, he
gripped her shoulder briefly. "Go ride. Then take a nap. I'll try to be
home for dinner."
    By the time she followed him out of the office, he had
already disappeared toward the front of the house. She heard his voice, then
the slam of the front door.
    "Drive carefully," she murmured.
    The woman with soft ,
flyaway gray hair gazed at him with bewilderment and the beginnings of
horrified understanding. "Ronnie is dead?"
    This was the moment John hated most. There was no kind way
to tell parents that they would have to bury the son or daughter who was
supposed to long outlive them. Ronald Floyd might have been a scumbag, but he
was still their son, a baby born in hope.
    "I'm afraid so," he said gently.
    He stood on the front porch of the small frame house in
south Tacoma, his vision of Marvella Floyd obscured by a screen door. She had
briefly opened it, but when he told her why he had come, it had slipped out of
her nerveless hand and snapped shut between them.
    Now she clutched at the door frame, bewilderment still
predominating. "But … what happened? Was it a car accident?" Hope
made her sound eager. She wanted it to have been a tragic accident, the kind
that could have happened to anyone. "He'd gone straight, you know. He said
so. And even in his bad days, he never hurt anybody, not Ronnie."
    No, he just helped hook the youth of America on a relentlessly addictive white powder that replaced jobs, family, loved ones as
the very reason for existence. And, oh, yeah, damaged hearts, destroyed nasal
passages, and was generally a fun party