Dead People Read Free Page A

check cashes, that’s okay with me.” But despite her words, the glow inside her flickered out, leaving a hollow coldness.
    The truck slowed and she eased her foot from the gas pedal to avoid a backsplash of filthy water. The car’s headlights caught a sign on the side of the road, “Welcome to Bliss.” She made a face. More like “Welcome to Misery.”
    “Thata girl,” Joe said. “You’ve got pluck.”
    She passed a McDonald’s and pulled into the Home Away From Home motel. Chickens had pluck, she thought. And look how they ended up.
    Chicken McNuggets.
    “I’ll tell him tomorrow.” Then she’d sit back and watch the feathers fly.
    ***
    Tall bookshelves lined the walls of the library, but Luke focused his attention on the lost looking girl curled in a brown leather reading chair, pretending he was invisible. He pulled a matching chair closer to Erin. She hunched her shoulders, not peering up from her book.
    Luke put his hands on his knees, leaning forward, searching his mind for something to say to her. He wondered when he’d feel comfortable with her, or she with him. She was tall for her age—she got that from her mother. But she had his blue eyes instead of Vanessa’s brown eyes. And Erin’s long, slim fingers were his too.
    “I can teach you how to play guitar.”
    “I want to sing like my mom,” she said, still looking down.
    “Your mother has a voice like velvet.”
    Erin lifted her sapphire gaze, her brows slashing down over them. “Mom used to sing with me sometimes.”
    “I’ll get you singing lessons.”
    “Put me back with my mom, and she’ll teach me.”
    Luke’s fingers tightened on his knees. He wanted to sock someone, but had no place to go with the raw emotion burning in his gut.
    “I can’t do that. The judge gave me custody because your mother wasn’t taking care of you.”
    “She was too!” Erin glared at him. “Don’t talk bad about my mother.”
    Luke sucked in a breath that filled his lungs. The therapist had been dead on about Erin still seeing Vanessa as her primary caregiver, even after finding Vanessa nude and comatose on the kitchen floor ten weeks ago, inches from death.
    Just another sunny Southern California morning.
    “How was school today?” he asked, his voice stiff. The most boring question in the world. He, who’d been the cool guy as long as he could remember, was officially a parent.
    She gazed down at the book again, curling her feet under her, her posture closing him out. “Okay.”
    He looked at her while the clock on the library desk ticked away a moment of his life. The ticking turned into a snatch of song. “The happiest moments of my life were when you said you wouldn’t be my wife.”
    His fingertips itched for his guitar strings, the music calling to him. He stood. It wasn’t as if Erin wanted to talk to him. She’d be happy when he left.
    Two steps from the door, he stopped and turned around. Though Erin didn’t look up, he felt her stillness. She knew he was standing there, watching her.
    “When I found out you were my daughter—” A rush of rage shook his body, squeezing his vocal chords, sucking the breath out of his lungs.
    Damn Vanessa and Danny for their lies, for keeping him from Erin, for the theft of ten years together.
    Anger tore at the insides of his chest, cold and ugly. He’d never have those years back, never see her first steps, never hear her first words.
    Erin lifted her gaze, her eyes wide and apprehensive, as if sensing his anger, wondering what he was going to do.
    Fuck. He was scaring her. Fuck, fuck, fuck. “I swore I’d make you happy.” His voice scratched, sounding like he’d chugged a mug filled with shards of glass. “Just tell me what to do.”
    She raised her chin, her stubborn mouth the same one he saw in the mirror every day. “Let me go home to my mom.”
    “Anything but that.”
    “Then let me go to Danny. If he hadn’t been in stupid Africa, he would’ve taken care of me.”
    Fury at his