Clean Slate Read Free

gesture. “Regardless, we’ll have to be very careful about
keeping a bumper between those two women, or Moeder is going to bolt. She hates feeling like the whore.”
    Jerry stopped tearing paper. “Is that what she’s calling
herself?” His low tenor voice held a bit of an edge.
    “Not that word, precisely, but the meaning was implied.”
    “But she didn’t know about Kate,” Trinity said.
    Ben shrugged again. “She blames herself for a lot of
things. Wouldn’t you, even if it wasn’t deserved? She had a boy. She signed
some papers without having them looked over, then the boy was gone and she
couldn’t get him back.”
    “Then she ended up having another who looked exactly like
the first,” Trinity added. “I can’t imagine what her emotional state would have
been like.”
    “That’s easy, and it hasn’t changed. She generally feels
like she’s too stupid to live,” Ben said with a scoff. “She doesn’t think she’s
worthy of forgiveness. Thinks she deserved to have her son taken.”
    Trinity nudged her fiancé. “Jerry, you’ve got to talk to
her. You need to make her understand it’s not her fault.”
    “I know, pix. I will. I’ll try .”
    Ben believed he would. Of all the things he knew about his
brother from a year of acquaintance, at the top of that list was that Jerry was
very protective of the people he cared about. Jerry cared about his mother,
even though hardly knew the woman. He was generous with his love. Ben could see
it in the way he interacted with Trinity—small gestures like how he’d
pull her onto his lap in the N-by-N barn to look at things on his computer, or
how he’d always let Trinity have the last little bit of coffee in the carafe
because she needed it more than him.
    Ben wanted to love someone like that. He just hadn’t understood
the cause of that void in his heart until a quiet, beautiful woman he’d never
really had a conversation with offered to be his wife.
     

CHAPTER TWO
    Daisy forced the vile swill down her throat, and wheezed
as a burn spread through her torso. Even her skin prickled, and suddenly she
understood where the idiom “that’ll put hair on your chest” sprang from. Stuff
had both a snap and a kick.
    She flicked the little tester cup into the garbage, and
wiped her sweaty palms dry on her shorts. “Blech.”
    She’d walked the entire tasting route in the brewery and
had tried samples of approximately ten different beers, based solely on their
labels. She didn’t know a damned thing about beer, so she just looked for
whichever ones had pretty pictures of maidens frolicking in fields or stalks of
wheat. The worst one, dark like cola, had a picture of a hibernating bear on
the tap. Her body’s reaction after taking a gulp of the bitter stuff was the
far opposite from relaxing slumber. She’d actually shouted “Whew!” when she’d
tossed the two ounces back, that’s how potent it was.
    Her usual alcohol tolerance was in the wine cooler range,
and beer? Well, beer reminded her too much of her ex-husband. The smell of it.
The taste of it, always on his tongue.
    “Blech,” she said again with a shudder as she unscrewed
the cap of the bottle of water she’d been nursing for the past hour. She drank
the remnants, and still had that taste in her mouth, but at least she felt a
little less like a bumbling idiot. What had she been thinking, practically
throwing herself at a man she hardly knew?
    But, who could blame her?
    Working with Jerry during Natural by Nicolette’s first
year in business had been bad enough for a woman fresh out of a divorce. The
ex-model had a smile that could melt a woman’s panties off, and that was just
his standard expression. When he tried to be charming, he could render a woman to babbling idiocy. Before she could
even manage to work up something interesting to say to the guy, he and Trinity
had hooked up.
    “Oh, well,” she’d thought at the time. Just her luck.
    Then Ben showed up as if by magic—like