Page 42 of Savior

I was going to take the same advice I gave my patients and just confront my fears head-on. I was twenty-seven years-old—a grown woman, capable of making her own decisions. While my husband had a tendency to shy away from drama, this was my family, and I had a right to know.

Knowing Nate, he’d prove to me that he had nothing to do with anything that happened to my father that night and we’d both move on with our lives.

Everything was fine.

The recipe disappeared from the screen, only to be replaced with my mother’s name. I tossed the empty wine bottle into the trashcan and retrieved another from the small wine fridge under the counter.

Celia Quinn

Missed Call

My phone taunted me from three feet away, reminding me that there was still one other person I was avoiding. Proving that I would’ve made an excellent candidate for therapy, the anger and resentment I’d held toward my mother as a teen had only gotten stronger since my father’s disappearance.

Have you ever asked your mother for the truth?

Comedian’s words had woken me up from a dead sleep on more than one occasion, leaving my body coated in a sheen of cold sweat.

What truth?

The woman had lied to me for most of my life, starting with the day the police told me my father had been killed. She’d known the truth while I battled intense anxiety attacks from grief but hadn’t once spoken up.

She could’ve ended my suffering but chose not to for him.

She’d always chosen him, hadn’t she?

Leaving us with Angel when being a mother interfered with her gambling…

Shipping us off to live with my grandparents so she could live like an outlaw with my father…

I didn’t know what she’d told Comedian, but the truth was that Celia Quinn was a horrible mother.

At the sound of the garage door opening, I quickly shoved the almost empty second bottle of wine behind some cookbooks and turned the heat on the stove down to low before tossing the cooked chicken breasts back in with the sauce.

Nate came around the corner, bleary-eyed from a long shift, but his mouth curving up into a sexy grin when he saw me. I returned it, before glancing down to where his scrub pants disappeared into the top of his western boots.

My redneck surgeon.

“Hey, cowboy,” I teased, tucking myself into his body as he moved closer. He let out a low growl as my lips brushed against his throat, and I belatedly realized that I was more than a little intoxicated from the wine I’d sampled while cooking.

“Katy girl,” he whispered into my hair. “You feeling alright?”

I nodded and nuzzled against him like a puppy dog. Typically, I limited myself to one glass of wine and never let myself drink more than two in a week.

Right now, though?

I needed every drop.

“May have had a teensy bit to drink,” I slurred before bunching his scrub top in my fists. I was supposed to be working up the courage to ask him about New Year’s Eve, not thinking of how good his hard body felt against mine.

I wasn’t supposed to be imagining him yanking up my skirt and tugging my panties to the side before taking me against the kitchen cabinets.

That low voice of his made it hard to think of anything else, though. We’d both been under tremendous stress with our jobs and the issues with my family. I couldn’t even remember the last time we’d had sex. It had to have been up against the lockers at the gym the night everything went wrong.

We deserved to take an evening to pretend that nothing existed outside of these four walls. It wasn’t as if there was a pressing need to have the conversation tonight.

“Shower. Now,” Nate ground out, reaching over to turn off the burner.

My body was one large erogenous zone, leaving me highly sensitive and painfully aroused just from the sound of his voice. I nodded and let him lead me down the hall and into our bedroom. We bypassed the bed, leaving a trail of clothing in our wake as we moved toward the large glass shower.

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