Without a Net by Jill Blake Read Free Book Online Page B

doorbell rang, and Ben raced to see who it was. “Uncle Logan’s here!”
    Grateful for the distraction provided by her brother’s arrival, Eva abandoned her desultory attempt at straightening up the house and unlocked the door.
    Logan was actually her half-brother, born six months after their father had left his wife and daughter to live with his pregnant girlfriend. Eva hadn’t even known about Logan until her junior year of high school. That was when she decided to confront her father, who had pretty much ignored her existence from the day he’d left, other than to send the occasional child support payment.
    She still remembered looking him up in the phone book—thankfully there had been only one Dr. Frank Hamilton in the metro LA area—and lying to her mother about why she needed to borrow the car. It was the first time she’d driven on the freeway by herself, taking the 405 South through the Sepulveda Pass, then losing her way twice along the back roads of Brentwood before finally finding the right house. She’d been so afraid he would refuse to see her that she gave no advance warning. Simply rang the bell and waited.
    Turned o ut her father wasn’t home. It was Logan who answered the door.
    At thirteen, he’d been a lanky adolescent with dreamy blue eyes behind wire-frame glasses, a mop of unruly dark hair, and features so similar to hers that if not for the fact that he was already taller and clearly male, she might have been staring at a mirror.
    Looking back on that meeting so many years ago, Eva marveled at the fact that her father had been able to keep his two families apart and in the dark for so long. Granted, this was before the days of ubiquitous internet, before individual anonymity was swept away by universal social networking. And her parents had divorced soon after her father left, her mother remarrying three years later. Still, it boggled the mind that a parent could be so callous as to deprive his children of the connection they should have had by virtue of blood.
    Luckily, her mother understood Eva’s desire to reach out and embrace her newly-discovered half-brother. She graciously accepted Logan into the fold, despite the fact that he was living evidence of her former husband’s infidelity. Logan’s own mother was long dead by then, and his father indifferent, once he understood he had nothing to lose by ceding to the inevitable. And so Logan became a frequent visitor to Eva’s home in the Valley, then to her apartment near UCLA, and later still to the house she and Roger shared in Santa Monica.
    Since Roger’s death, Logan made it a point to come over at least a couple weekends a month. He’d check on Eva, play with Ben, and take care of any yard work or house maintenance jobs that had accumulated since his last visit.
    “You ready for some baseball?” Logan said, ruffling his nephew’s hair.
    Ben grinned. “Got my lucky glove right here.”
    “Good man. What about sunscreen and a hat?”
    “Oh, yeah. Give me a minute.”
    “You’ve got twenty. I still want to talk with your mom.”
    Ben darted toward the stairs. Eva listened to the clatter of his footsteps overhead and shook her head. “I wish I had so much energy.”
    Logan studied her, eyes sharp behind the wire frames. “You doing okay?”
    “Fine.” She led the way to the kitchen. “Are you hungry?”
    “Not really. We’ll grab something once we get to Anaheim. Game doesn’t start till six. I could do with some coffee, though.”
    Eva busied herself preparing a fresh pot. “Thanks for taking him.”
    She was doubly grateful to Logan for stepping in and providing Ben the opportunity to experience some of the things that Logan himself had probably missed out on as a child. They’d never talked about it, but somehow she doubted that their father had been particularly hands on. Too busy building his career as an elite orthopedic surgeon. Taking his son to a baseball game would have been a waste of his time.
    “My