Nights Under the Tennessee Stars. Joanne RockЧитать онлайн книгу.
since Diana saw the world differently through the lens, where her perceptions weren’t quite as frenetic. Erin fired up the computer and turned on some music. “I’m surprised you’re here. I thought for sure I’d seen the last of you yesterday after you sprinted out the door.”
“About that—” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his sleek dark trousers. His white silk T-shirt probably meant it was a casual day for him, but since he wore it with a gray jacket, he still looked extraordinarily well put together. “I wanted to apologize. I’ve had a lot on my mind lately and—” He shook his head as if he wasn’t sure where to go with that next.
“It’s no big deal,” she said, leaping into the conversational void to save him, or possibly herself. She didn’t need to hear anything overly personal about Remy. “I can imagine it must be difficult traveling away from home so often.”
Her eyes went surreptitiously to his left hand, bare of a wedding ring. Was it her imagination, or could she see a hint of a tan line there?
“That’s no excuse for bad business.” He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a sheaf of papers. “I figured I’d deliver this personally so I could apologize. This is the contract and some information about how we film and what to expect.”
“Nice.” She reached for the papers, grateful for the counter between them. “I will look it over tonight.”
There was something incredibly appealing about his jaw, which sported a few days’ growth of beard, scruffy enough to keep him from being movie-star handsome. She wondered how many women threw themselves at him in his line of work.
“Erin.” He didn’t let go of the papers, his eyes locked on hers. Confusing the hell out of her.
What was this push-pull game he was playing and not just with the contract?
The bell on the shop door rang, the entrance banging open as a crying teen stepped inside the store. Erin and Remy jumped apart. Erin was about to ask the girl what was wrong, but the young woman’s green eyes landed on Remy.
“Daddy!” she wailed, rushing toward him. “Where have you been?”
REMY COULDN’T PROCESS what he was seeing. His daughter, Sarah, inside Last Chance Vintage. Three states away from where he’d left her. She had held herself together better than he had after Liv’s death, so seeing her in tears stopped him cold, making every protective urge fire to life.
“Sarah? What’s wrong?” He opened his arms to her and she flew into them in a swirl of hair ribbons and high drama. “How did you get here?”
He met Erin’s shocked eyes briefly over his daughter’s head.
“I drove!” Sarah’s voice was high and impatient. She got angry more easily now than she had...before. “What matters is that Ms. Fairly will kill me for leaving the field trip unless you call her now and tell her that I’m with you.”
Sarah thrust her cell phone at his face.
Erin’s lips pursed in a disapproving frown. Who was she to judge his daughter? Or him, for that matter?
“Why did you leave the field trip?” He withdrew the phone from his daughter’s shaking fingertips while the store’s welcome bell chimed again. He glanced over. An older couple was entering Last Chance Vintage.
“Feel free to use my office if you want to talk more privately,” Erin offered, gesturing to the area where they’d met the day before. Excusing herself, she walked over to greet her customers.
Leaving Remy with his crying teen and completely out of his depth. Damn it. He’d struggled to force himself back into a routine after Liv had died, convinced something would happen to Sarah if he left town again. But Sarah’s counselor had been adamant that he wasn’t doing the teen any favors by coddling her. Yet, look what happened when he left?
“Sarah, come sit.” He drew her toward the back room. It wasn’t totally private, but he didn’t want to go to the car and be on display on the town’s main street. Plus, driving anywhere right now was out of the question. He couldn’t believe his just-turned-eighteen-year-old daughter had traveled well over five hundred miles by herself. Without telling him, let alone asking his permission. Hard to believe the girl who had once texted him eight times from cheerleading tryouts with updates on the final cuts would not even bother to discuss this trip with him.
He’d asked Sarah’s grief counselor about her risk-taking behavior a year ago, but at the time, the woman’s professional opinion had been that sporadically cutting class, lower grades and one nightmarish episode of underage drinking were “normal” teenage incidents. As a parent, how was he supposed to tell the difference?
“Can you just call Ms. Fairly?” Sarah blurted, twisting the end of her long, brown braid where it rested on one shoulder. “I thought you’d be at the bed-and-breakfast, so I went there first, hoping you could contact her before she found out I was gone. But now it’s getting late. I’m going to be in so much trouble unless you tell her I’m with you.”
Frustrated and trying his damnedest to keep a lid on it, he placed his hands on Sarah’s thin shoulders. Was it his imagination, or did Erin’s eyes track the drama in the back room while she helped her customer?
“In a minute. I’m not calling your teacher until I have the answers to the questions I know she’s going to ask me.” He set Sarah’s phone on the wooden counter that Erin used for a workspace. “Like why did you leave the field trip without my permission?”
She could have broken down on the way to Heartache. A pervert could have stopped under the guise of helping...
Remy’s chest constricted.
“That’s the thing.” Sarah swiped her eyes, which were a different shade of green than her mother’s had been. Her biological father was a high school classmate of Liv’s and he’d wanted nothing to do with Liv or Sarah after he’d found out Liv was pregnant. Later, the guy had used his computer skills to hack a system that should have been secured by the Department of Defense, and had been in jail for as long as Remy had known Liv. “Just tell her I had your permission. Like it was a family emergency or something and you left a message that she must have just missed.”
Remy heard Erin making small talk with her customers and greeting a few more who walked into the store. He watched her stride off toward the back to retrieve something off a nearby shelf. He kept his voice low as he spoke to his daughter.
“If you’re going to ask me to lie, I think I have the right to know why.” He’d really thought Sarah was on track with school after the bumps in the road at the end of her junior year.
Mouth falling open, she gave him a look that suggested he needed a brain transplant for asking the question.
“To see you!” She jabbed one finger onto the wooden workstation as if making a point. “How many times have you said you wished you could stay closer to home for your work?”
Guilt pummeled him even as he felt Erin’s gaze on him again. “It’s not easy, Sarah—”
“I get that.” She shrugged at him. “So I made it easy for you. I don’t need to be on that field trip since I don’t care about college. I want field experience in television and who better to shadow for a week than my own dad?”
Remy had spent enough years on the winning side of a conference table to recognize when he’d been beaten. Either his daughter had a great point or she’d just played him extremely well. But at this moment, it truly didn’t matter. She was here—five hundred miles from where she was supposed to be—and he didn’t have time to leave the job and personally escort her home. Just thinking about all the things that could have happened to her on the road alone threatened to send him back into another panic attack. His forehead broke out in a cold sweat.
“Remy?”