InformedConsent by Susanna Stone Read Free Book Online

said, “any prospect I’d
ever had with your father, the one man who trusted me enough to give me that
chance. It was all blown out of the water, and to top it off, this was moments
after I’d been handed the prize of a lifetime—you. You wanting me. I dared to
believe you might even love me.
    “I swear, Tara, if I hadn’t kept my head screwed on good and
hard that night, fighting my urges and your pheromones with every cell in my
body, I’d have had you down on the floor so fast, naked, your back covered with
sawdust, hard inside you, without a condom between us.”
    Tara felt her throat tighten at the lost moment that would
have destroyed them both back then.
    “I had condoms then, too.” She couldn’t help grinning as she
said it.
    “Why am I not surprised?” A smile crossed his face, as
though also regretting the moment. “But hell, like I said, I was on probation
and you were on the brink of life, heading off to university, where you’d meet
every sort and condition of man, rich, smart, ambitious, all kinds of
advantages. I knew once you got out into the big world, you’d forget about me.”
    “I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I mean, yeah, of course there were
other guys. Good men, smart, ambitious, loving. I had my pick of them. And I
took them, because I couldn’t have you.”
    “And that’s why I wrote the letter. To blow away any
enchantment you might still feel over a dead-end loser like me. It worked,
didn’t it?”
    “It worked.” She stared at the coals in the fire.
    “And yet, six years later, here you are.”
    “Here I am. And no, I never forgot you. After all the nice
guys and amazing lovers, I still dreamed about finding you. On bad nights, when
the world is old and in danger of drowning in all the evil and hatred inflicted
on it, I believe you wrote that note out of contempt and hurt. But on good
nights, when the moon’s in the right phase and I’ve had just enough good pot to
mellow out, I tell myself you wrote it to hide the love you felt for me,
forbidden fruit that I was.”
    “But you didn’t come here today to find out which it was.”
    “Leo sent me.”
    “He sent you?”
    She stared off into the darkness, just beyond the reach of
the firelight.
    “Leo had a heart attack.”
    “Shit! How bad? Is he—”
    “He’s good. Better than we ever hoped. But of course he’s
got to take it easy. Forever.”
    “And my guess is he’s nowhere near ready to retire.”
    “He’s fifty-one. And just hitting his stride. The business
is doing better than ever, and part of it is due to what he started with you.”
    “He’s still doing that? I thought after how that blew up in
his face—”
    “It didn’t. Yeah, you blew parole and were history, but it
was still a good idea. He’s been doing it ever since. He arranges with
Fermanagh, and other places, to find young people—men and women—with potential
and give them a trial and training at Calloway’s. He’s had thirteen success
stories over the years and three, well, not so successful. “
    “But what does he want with me?”
    “When he had the heart attack, he and I sat down and worked
out how he could keep on going without it killing him, and out of the blue he
said, ‘Joe Corbett would be the one to do it.’”
    “Do it?” Incredulity with a side of hope crept into his
voice. “As in, work for him?”
    “Not just work for him. Work with him. Help run it. Leo
works hard at running the workshop and training the trainees and making it all
work out right. It takes just the right kind of guy, someone the trainees will
listen to and learn from. And Leo is, well, perfect at that.”
    “Yeah. I remember.”
    “And he remembers you were just like that yourself. He
always had his eye on you, back then.”
    “Get out of here. It was never me. It was Jarmin—”
    “It was never Jarmin. Yeah, he knew his stuff all
right, and worked hard, and he had it in mind to move up in the business, but
Leo never saw him as the right fit.