Never Again Good-Bye by Terri Blackstock Read Free Book Online Page B

grin as he sat down. “I think she has prison mixed up with spring training.”
    Laney found herself laughing with overwhelming relief, the first time she’d laughed since … she couldn’t remember. “I didn’t go to jail, Amy,” she said. “And it’s a good thing, because I’m hopeless when it comes to push-ups.”
    Wes pulled Amy onto his lap. “Honey, I told you they just asked her some questions. It was all a mistake. Laney and I are …” He hesitated on the word friends . “We know each other now, and she wanted to meet you.”
    Amy’s tongue tested the hole where her front tooth had been as she pondered Laney. “Can you cook spaghetti?” she asked intently, as if that were an important clue to the woman’s character. “Spaghetti that isn’t runny?”
    Laney’s eyes sparkled as she smiled at the beautiful child. “Well, yes. I make very good spaghetti.”
    “Can you make it tonight? My daddy said he was feeding me oatmeal tonight.”
    “Oh, I don’t know.” Laney looked at Wes with uncertain eyes, suddenly embarrassed at the unexpected turn in the conversation. “He wouldn’t really feed you oatmeal, would he?”
    “Trust me,” Amy assured her. “It’s either that or canned soup. And he doesn’t even warm it up right.” A child across the park called her name, and her attention was diverted. “I have to go,” she said quickly. “Sarah only has fifteen more minutes to play.” With that she slipped out of her father’s lap and barreled across the lawn toward her friend.
    “Well,” Laney said on a frustrated chuckle. “That didn’t go exactly as I’d planned it.”
    “I think she liked you,” Wes admitted. The words held a note of dread.
    “For now,” she said, casting him an uneasy glance, though relief danced in her black eyes. “I was intriguing to her. She thought I was an ex-con.”
    Wes almost smiled. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”
    “It’s OK. It was a good icebreaker.” Her big eyes sparkled, warming something inside him that had been cold a long time, and he told himself it was just because her eyes looked so much like Amy’s.
    “You’re a good father. I can’t imagine mine ever throwing me over his shoulder.” A tendril of envy uncurled inside her … not just envy of Amy for having a father who cared but envy of the woman he had loved and married and made a family with. What was he like as a husband? she wondered fleetingly.
    Wes’s smile faded a degree, and he looked back at Amy. “If only playing and laughing were all it took to be a good father.”
    Laney followed his gaze and slipped the strap of her purse to her shoulder, leaning forward but not getting up, as if she didn’t know whether to leave now or hang around until Amy’s friend had gone.
    Wes felt for her, in spite of himself, for she had suffered such emotional anguish to meet so little reward. And yet he didn’t know if he was strong enough to offer her more.
    Laney looked at him the same moment he looked at her.
    “It was really—”
    “You know, you don’t—”
    The sentences were begun simultaneously, then died off together. “Go ahead,” they said together.
    Black eyes locked mirthlessly with green ones, and finally Wes spoke. “She’s expecting spaghetti,” he said with a sober expression that told her the words were difficult. “And she wants you to cook it.”
    Laney felt warm blood coloring her cheeks, and she shook her head. “I … I couldn’t impose that way.”
    Wes’s eyes remained as serious as she’d ever seen them. “Cooking us dinner is no imposition,” he said. “I’m not wild about my cooking, either.”
    Laney bit her lip and tried not to fantasize about the possibilities whirling through her mind. Making friends with her daughter, earning her love through a big dish of spaghetti, getting to know Amy’s father … She cut her thoughts off with the last fantasy and searched for her voice. “I’d like that.” She paused. “Could we tell her