Not This Time by Vicki Hinze Read Free Book Online Page A

inside. “I’m grabbing my purse.”
    “I’m scared.”
    And likely reliving her parents’ deaths again. “It’ll be okay. He’s resourceful, Sara.”
    “Just hurry over, okay?”
    “I’m on my way.” Beth hung up, grabbed her purse, and locked the door behind her.
    Twenty minutes later at Sara’s kitchen table, Beth focused on Sara’s crisis—because to have a friend you have to be one. “You haven’t eaten?”
    “First the attack, now Robert. Who can think about food?”
    Beth made them a salad and pulled out the crackers. “Eat.”
    Sara frowned but picked up her fork.
    On the phone, Sara had sounded frantic. Now she shoved lettuce around on her plate in silence. Beth debated. She should keep her mouth shut but didn’t. “You took your meds, right?” When Sara nodded, Beth added, “Then you better eat so you don’t get sick.”
    “My stomach’s going to have to fend for itself.” Parking her elbow on the table’s polished edge, Sara wiped her face with her hand and covered her eyes. “I can’t swallow.” She looked over at Beth from between her fingers. “How can I eat when I can’t swallow?”
    “Sounding really stressed there.” Tension had been building in Sara since she spotted the cake-topper bride with the groom ripped away. It didn’t takemuch imagination to link that groom and Sara’s both being missing. “Stress kills” wasn’t an overstatement for Sara. She’d landed in the ER three times in the last year alone—and that was during a time she was supposedly well and happy. Asthma was a merciless wretch. Add anxiety attacks and being high-strung to it, and then toss in other medical complications Sara never discussed, and it made one wicked recipe for disaster.
    Rocking her head back, Sara sought solace at some point beyond the ceiling and clearly didn’t find it. “Where is he?”
    Robert. A smooth talker who had shown up at an electronics conference in Atlanta last year and swept Sara off her feet. He was handsome and suave. She was naive and sheltered—a vulnerable recluse whose first love was her work.
    Sara and Beth’s differences made them perfect partners. Beth loved illogical and messy people, Sara loved creative computing, and they both had vision, drive, and more ambition than sense. They knew enough to risk anything and not so much that they feared failing. It was a recipe for success, and that they trusted each other implicitly gave them a little extra kick that impacted everything they touched in thousands of ways that couldn’t be measured or charted.
    Stealing Sara’s heart had been disgustingly easy for Robert Tayton. He’d caught her up in a whirlwind relationship and a scant month later, he’d whisked Sara off to Las Vegas and married her.
    You should have taken her to a remote cabin and nailed her feet to the floor until she got her head out of the clouds and her sense back. You knew Sara lacked experience — she had never been that close to a man in her life. She might have listened. Okay, maybe she would have listened. All right, all right. Odds were she wouldn’t have heard a word, but at least you would have tried. You should have tried .
    Oh, if only she could go back. Warn Sara away from him right off the bat. In the hotel lobby that night, before he sank his grubby manicured claws into her heart. Why hadn’t Beth done that? Why? Why? Why …?
    Remorse turned her salad bitter, and Beth pushed her plate away. In Atlanta, she had been sure he was out for a diversion. But when he followed them back to Seagrove Village, claiming he lived in Destin and had fallen in lovewith Sara at first sight, Beth had seen right through him, and she assumed Sara would know the truth at gut level—in that way women do, especially when they wished they didn’t.
    Unfortunately, Sara hadn’t seen or known spit.
    Logic had floated right out of her body and she’d bought into his bait—hook, line, and sinker. Robert Tayton III had fallen in love, all