The Hiding Place Read Free Page B

Irish lass though, not someone on the society pages of the paper. She was a natural, windblown-looking beauty with red hair to her shoulders. He only really knew her through a couple of phone calls and their sporadic e-mails, all dealing with Claire. He’d been stationed so far out in the boonies with the Delta boys that he hadn’t even known Clay had murdered Alexis until she’d been buried for over a week. Anyway, if he’d been here, he probably would have tracked Clay down and then strangled his former brother-in-law with his bare hands.
    This homecoming was also tough because Nick had been incommunicado with a Delta chalk squad when the stroke killed his mother. Tara and some distant relatives had taken care of the arrangements, as well as of little Claire. He owed Tara Kinsale big-time.
    He checked for the house key under the flower crock where his parents had always kept it. Negative. With walls still between them, he and Beamer raced for the front of the house again. He’d just bivouac on the front deck, waiting for Claire and Tara to show. But if he didn’t calm Beamer down, the high-ceilinged great room was going to look like a bomb blew up in it. He shuddered at that image—that memory.
    “Good dog,” he shouted through the window. Time to see if Beamer still knew who the senior partner was, the alpha pack dog, after their time apart. If Beamer obeyed him, he’d take that as a sign that Claire would happily do whatever he decided was best. After all, how hard could it be to take care of a young girl when he’d trained dogs and given orders to the Delta boys, no less.
    “Sit,” Nick commanded solemnly. “Beamer, sit. Beamer, quiet.”
    Tears blurred Nick’s vision of the big, wide-eyed, panting dog as he immediately sat silent with his tail thumping the floor like a pendulum.
    Tara wished she’d been able to find a female doctor who was taking new patients. She really did miss Jen. They had met at a social event years ago and had been friends before they’d been patient and physician. But Jen could never understand why Tara didn’t gladly toe Laird’s line. Jen hadn’t brought it up, but Tara suspected she probably blamed Tara for their divorce, despite the fact that Laird had left her. Though Tara was grateful to be out of a bad marriage, it did hurt that Laird had deserted her in her hour of need. It was so strange to be married to him, and then, when she awoke from the coma—which felt like the very next day to her, though it was almost an entire year—to be divorced and not to have any contact with him. A blessing, in one way, but a curse to her psyche, too, one that counseling had not quite erased.
    “A dream catch,” Jen had called Laird with a sigh the first time she’d laid eyes on him. “Wish I’d been the one doing some social work with patients at the Lohan Mountain Manor Clinic. You sure were lucky, running into the eligible fair-haired son there.”
    Jen and Tara had talked via cell phone several times while Tara was rebuilding her life, but she knew Jen was busy starting over, too. Lately, they spoke less and less. It seemed, at least on Jen’s part, they had little in common now.
    Dr. Gordon Holbrook, Tara’s new G.P., came into the examining room and said cheerily, “Good afternoon, Tara.” He was fifty-something, with gray etching his temples and prominent crow’s-feet and worry lines on his pleasant face. He sat down to chat about how she’d been feeling since waking from the coma and to go over the extensive medical records he’d received from Jen and from the Lohan Clinic, where she’d spent the last nine and a half months of her coma, then two months of rehab and counseling.
    In short, Dr. Holbrook seemed to have a good bedside—or examination tableside—manner. He was thoughtful enough to call Pamela back into the room when he began the cervical exam and pap test, so Tara would feel more at ease.
    Tara was still tense, but responded to his small talk about how