The Awakening by Lorhainne Eckhart Read Free Book Online

would bolt.
    “We’ll wait.” Laura set Gabriel down, who was still fussing, and kneeled as the pretty woman hurried back into the store. “Gabriel, please stop for Mommy. This nice woman is going to buy us breakfast. Pancakes, would you like pancakes? I know how much you love them.” Gabriel quieted down and seemed to understand. Laura couldn’t always tell, but at least he wasn’t carrying on, and she knew food would keep him occupied. He had to be as hungry as she was, although he had eaten bread with peanut butter. Pancakes were a luxury and something they hadn’t had since Jerry jacked up the rent.
    The woman appeared a minute later, dashing toward Laura. “Thank you so much for having breakfast with me. And this is my treat. By the way, my name is Diana Friessen.”
    Laura accepted her hand and felt a momentary panic. “Laura.”
    Diana must have sensed her distress, as she tilted her head and looked at Laura kindly. “I recognize that look–I had it, once. Let’s go have breakfast, Laura.”

Chapter Nine
    Afterward, Diana Friessen hurried back to the grocery store and could have kicked herself for not asking Laura for her phone number or where she lived. She’d only made arrangements to pick her and her son up in the morning outside the grocery store, which Diana did find odd, but then, she hadn’t been able to pull much personal history from the girl.
    Diana hadn’t been hungry when she’d taken Laura and her unusually quiet son to the restaurant. In fact, she’d just left the ranch and her husband, Jed, with their eight-month-old baby, Danny. They’d shared a breakfast of ham and eggs before she headed to town to get groceries early, arriving before the store opened and being let in by the clerk. When she’d pushed her shopping cart filled with groceries down the dairy aisle, she’d spotted the young mom with a little boy wearing a look of desperation she’d recognized, all because of what she’d lived through as a child, growing up dirt poor. She couldn’t help overhear the young girl pleading with Mr. Harris, the uptight older man who owned this grocery store and who’d been one of many people who’d shunned Diana when she first returned to North Lakewood, all because of who her mother was. The girl needed work, fast. She recognized the look of hunger, the look of someone who had to go without eating because there wasn’t enough money to buy food. The way the little boy had reached for the cheese, whining and carrying on, Diana knew there was something about him that wasn’t quite right.
    She’d been glad, though. The girl looked pitiful, holding the menu and glancing awkwardly, ordering toast and water only, but pancakes for her son. It took Diana urging her to order something larger before she’d do it. She was pale, blonde, and thin, with enticing blue eyes that should have belonged to someone far older than her twenty years. Her name was Laura Parnell, a single mother. That was all Diana had managed to drag out of her, along with the fact that she knew Andy Friessen and had, in fact, been fired by his mother a few days earlier.
    Diana had no idea what she’d have the girl do, and she worried what Jed would say. But she couldn’t turn her back, so she told her about the therapeutic riding she and Jed were starting for children with special needs. Diana thought that maybe her son could be part of it while she was working, since Laura would be needed at the ranch. They needed someone to help out with phones and general things to get their business off the ground.
    Simply put, there was a desperation about this girl that Diana had recognized and at one time lived through, so, until she knew more, her conscience wouldn’t let her walk away.
    Diana parked Jed’s truck beside her SUV, in front of their older home, which Jed was slowly renovating with a recent addition for all the kids he hoped they’d have.
    “What’d you do, drive to Marysville?” Jed scowled as he strode out of