Hummingbird Lake by Emily March Read Free Book Online Page A

you’d like to know.”
    “Okay,” Sage warily replied. She waited, but the line remained silent. “Rose?”
    Her voice tight, Rose finally said, “I need to tell you …”
    “Yes?”
    Her sister blew out a sigh. “I keep up with the newspapers in places where we used to live. I saw that Mrs. Ayer passed away.”
    It took Sage a moment to make the connection. Mrs. Ayer had lived across the street from them when the Colonel was stationed at Fort Bragg. She’d babysit Sage in the afternoons after school until Rose got home from tennis practice. She was nice. She’d made outstanding chocolate chip cookies. “I’m sorry to hear that. She must have been in her eighties by now.”
    “Ninety-one. The obit said she died of natural causes.”
    “I see. Well, she enjoyed a long life.” And why was Rose using this as an excuse to call?
    “Yes, well, I thought you should know.”
    But that’s not why you’re calling . Sage’s hand tightened around the phone as her thoughts spun. Rose might have called to question her, to argue with her, or to scold her, but not to pass along old neighborhood news. That wasn’t Rose.
    Sage’s relationship with her sister was complicated, to say the least. Rose Anderson, M.D., was six years older than Sage and in some ways more mother than sister, having stepped into the role at the age of eleven when their mother died. Even after Rose followed their father’s footsteps into the army, she’d kept in relatively close contact with Sage. She’d been disappointed when Sage chose not to enter the armed services, but she’d been thrilled the day Sage had been admitted to med school.
    The break between them occurred when their father suffered a stroke after Sage had returned from Africa and events spiraled out of both sisters’ control. Sage couldn’t tell Rose about her exchange with their dad, and Rose had said and done some things that Sage found unforgivable. Contact between them since had been short, sparse, and fraught with tension. Each time it happened, Sage wanted to get roaring drunk.
    “Okay,” Sage said finally. “Thanks for telling me.”
    “You’re welcome. Sage, I, um, need …”
    Sage waited a long minute, and when Rose didn’t continue, she prodded, “You need what?”
    “I, um … nothing. Never mind. I have to go. Goodbye.”
    The dial tone sounded in Sage’s ear.
    She counted to five, then exhaled a heavy breath and threw the phone down against the pillows. What was that all about? She blinked away the tears she wasn’t aware had pooled in her eyes. “Excuse me, but she’s the one who cut me off at the knees. She’s the one who turned her back on me, not the other way around.”
    She shoved a foot into one leg of her pantyhose and almost tore a hole. Since it was the only pair she had with her, she was more careful with the other. She finished dressing, slipping into her favorite emerald green cocktail dress and a sparkly pair of heels that she acknowledged did wonders for her legs. Picking up her lipstick, she stood before the mirror and stared at her reflection. “Forget it. Forget her. This is your night.”
    She smoothed the bronze shade over her upper lip, then her lower. She rubbed her lips together, smoothed the color with a fingertip, then repeated, “It’s your night and no one is going to spoil it.”
    At the downtown Fort Worth steak house following a mouthwatering rib eye and an excellent Napa Valley cab, Colt Rafferty surreptitiously checked his watch as his dinner companion asked, “Shall we order dessert?”
    “Whatever you’d like, Melody.”
    Melody Slaughter was a lovely woman about his age, a happily married mother of three and a marketing director with a local defense industry contractor. As the senior planner for the safety seminar he’d attended today, she’d secured the speakers for the event and hadinvited Colt and his two fellow presenters to join her for dinner. He’d been the only one to accept.
    “I