Suddenly Married Read Free Page B

and in an equally matter-of-fact voice announced, “Don’t pay any attention to her. She says things like that all the time.” He raised one blond brow, looking amazingly like his father when he did. “Father says she does it to shock people.”
    Father says? Dara forced a laugh and ruffledBobby’s honey-blond hair. “Well,” she whispered, “it works. I’m shocked!”
    One corner of his mouth lifted in a wry grin. “Pete’s right.”
    “About what?”
    The smile that lit his face was contagious, and for a moment, she almost forgot there were a dozen other children around her.
    “You’re very pretty.”
    Angie, who had been hunched over Mrs. King’s card, sat up straight and gave Dara a once-over. “Yes, yes,” she agreed. “You are rather pretty.” Furrowing her brow, she added, “Are you married?”
    The enrollment forms clearly stated that Bobby Lucas was six years old and Angie was seven. Because they’d been born in the same calendar year—Angie in January, Bobby in December—the children had been in the same grade since preschool. But surely there had been a clerical error, Dara thought, a typo on their registration forms, because neither child behaved even remotely like first graders.
    “Father says ladies can sometimes be sensitive to that question. Since you didn’t answer, it must mean you aren’t married.” Angie tilted her head slightly, as if considering all the possibilities. “Have you ever been married? I mean, you’re not divorced or anything, are you, because Father says divorce is a sin.”
    Why would his children even be asking such a thing, let alone asking it frequently enough to require adult discussion on the subject? Dara could answer Angie’s questions—questions that would not have seemed overly personal or inappropriate if they hadn’t been asked in that eerily controlled voice—or she could divert the child’s attention. Her father may choose tospeak to her like a miniature adult, Dara thought, frowning slightly, but here in my classroom, she’ll be treated like a seven-year-old!
    “The card you’re making for Mrs. King is lovely,” she said in an upbeat, friendly voice. “I especially like the pretty house you’ve drawn there.”
    “It’s like the one we lived in up in Pennsylvania, when my mother was alive.” She tucked in one comer of her mouth. “It was a very nice house.”
    Angie took a deep breath, then said, “It happened when I was four.” She put the red crayon she’d been using back into the box, and withdrew a blue one. “It was cancer, you know, the kind that eats your blood.”
    “Leukemia,” Bobby said. But unlike his sister’s nonchalant tone, the boy’s voice trembled slightly.
    “Yes. Leukemia,” Angie agreed. “Father says we should try not to think about it, but when we do, we should never be sad because Mother is with Jesus in heaven, where she’ll never hurt ever again.”
    It had been nearly a decade since Dara had taken the psychology courses that helped round out her education major, but Dara recognized repression when she saw—and heard—it. And though she’d been a full-grown adult when her own mother died two years earlier and lost her father just months ago, she understood the importance of mourning openly and honestly. Dara didn’t know how or why a loving father would talk his children out of grieving for their mother.
    And she understood it on a completely different level: hadn’t she repressed her fears that her father might have stolen Pinnacle’s money?
    She wouldn’t even suspect it, if it hadn’t been for Noah Lucas! It wasn’t hard to believe he could do such a coldhearted thing. Dara’s eyes and lips narrowed withanger toward the man who, without ever having met her father, had chosen to believe the row of numbers that said Jake was a thief rather than the daughter who believed in his innocence. That same harsh and judgmental behavior had his own flesh and blood moving through life like windup