Carolina Moon

that flare of derision in his eyes, and it stung. “I got a right to live my life as I choose.”
    “You’ve got a right to waste your life as you choose.”
    “All right,” she said evenly. “And so do you. But I’m saying maybe for once I agree with Mama on one thing. We’d all be better off if Victoria Bodeen went back to Charleston and stayed there. You’d sure as hell be better off keeping your distance from whatever trouble she’s carrying with her.”
    “What are you afraid of, Faith?”
    Everything, she thought, as he walked away. Just everything.
    Restless now, she uncurled herself and paced to the tall front windows. Gone now was the languorous southern belle. Her movements were quick, almost jittering with nervous energy.
    Maybe she would go into town, she thought. Go somewhere. Maybe she’d just leave altogether.
    And go where?
    Nothing was what she thought it would be when she left Beaux Reves. No one was how she thought they would be. Including herself.
    Every time she left she told herself it was for good. But she always came back. Every time she left she told herself it would be different. That she would be different.
    But she never was.
    How could she expect anyone to understand that everything that had happened before, everything that had happened since, all hinged on that one night when she—when Hope—had been eight?
    Now the person who connected the night with all the others was back.
    Standing, looking out over the lawn and gardens going silver with dusk, Faith wished Tory Bodeen to hell.
    It was nearly eight when Wade finished with his last patient, an elderly mixed breed with failing kidneys and a heart murmur. His equally elderly owner couldn’t bring herself to put the poor old dog down, so Wade had once again treated the dog and gently soothed the human.
    He was too tired for the diner and thought he’d just slap together a sandwich or open a can.
    The small apartment above his office suited him. It was efficient, convenient, and cheap. He could have afforded better, and so both of his parents continually reminded him, but he preferred to live simply and shovel the profits of his practice back into it.
    He had no pets of his own at the moment, though he’d had quite a menagerie as a child. Dogs and cats, of course, and with them the prerequisite wounded birds, the frogs, the turtles, the rabbits, and once a runt pig he’d called Buster. His indulgent mother hadn’t drawn the line until he’d wanted to bring home a black snake he’d found stretched across the road.
    He’d been sure he could talk her into it, but when he’d come to the kitchen door with a plea in his eyes and four feet of wiggling snake in his hands, his mother had screamed loud enough to bring Mr. Pritchett from next door leaping over their shared fence.
    Pritchett had sprained his hamstring, Wade’s mother had dropped her beloved milk glass pitcher on the kitchen tiles, and the snake had been banished to the river outside of town.
    But bless her, Wade thought, she’d tolerated everything else he’d dragged in with hardly a word of complaint.
    Eventually he’d have a house and yard and the time to indulge himself. But until he could afford a larger staff, most of his workdays ran ten hours minimum, and that didn’t count the emergencies. People who didn’t have the time to devote to pets shouldn’t have them. He felt the same way about children.
    He headed into the kitchen first, grabbed an apple. Dinner, such as it was, would wait until he’d washed the dog off him.
    Crunching into the apple, he flipped through the mail he’d carried up with him as he walked to the bedroom.
    He smelled her before he saw her. That hot wave of woman hit his senses, scattered his thoughts. She stirred on the bed, a rustle of silky skin against the sheets.
    She wore nothing but an invitational smile.
    “Hello, lover. You worked late.”
    “You said you’d be busy tonight.”
    Faith crooked a finger. “I intend to be. Why don’t you come over here and occupy me.”
    Wade tossed the mail and the apple aside. “Why don’t I?”

5
    I t was a pitiful thing, Wade supposed, for a man to be hung up on one woman all of his life. More than pitiful when that woman insisted on flitting in and out of that life like a careless butterfly. And the man let her.
    Each time she came back, he told himself he wouldn’t play the game. And each time she hooked him in until he was too deep into the pot to fold his hand and walk