Honeysuckle Summer (The Sweet Magnolias #7)(5)
“I have,” Sarah reminded her, glancing over at Travis, who gave her a wink. “So have Annie and Jeanette. And look at the men in Maddie, Dana Sue and Helen’s lives. They’re all amazing. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, that highly educated blueblooded doctor you met in Charleston wasn’t exactly a catch, now was he?”
Raylene’s lips quirked despite the reminder of just how awful Paul Hammond had been.
“You have me there,” she admitted. “Although a man is the last thing on my mind at the moment, I will call Dr. McDaniels.” Because she’d made the promise at least a dozen times before, she knew it probably sounded empty now. “I mean it. I’ll do it this time, first thing in the morning. You can stand right by the phone and listen in, if you want to. I owe you that much for sticking by me despite what happened.”
“You’re not doing it for me,” Sarah corrected. “You’re doing it for yourself. You need to concentrate on that. And I don’t need to listen to the call, Raylene. If you make a promise, you’ll keep it.”
Raylene was grateful for the trust Sarah had in her word. She just wasn’t so sure she deserved either the trust or a future. That was one more aftereffect of living with a man who’d literally and figuratively beaten her into submission for way too long before she’d wised up and left. That it had taken her years, rather than minutes, would shame her forever. That it had cost her the baby she’d been carrying had left her with the kind of gut-wrenching guilt from which she couldn’t imagine ever recovering.
Even she recognized that she’d been punishing herself by locking herself away in this house. Paul might be serving his time in prison, but she’d been serving her self-imposed sentence right here. Even now, she wasn’t a hundred percent certain she deserved to have it end, but today the stakes of doing nothing had increased to a level she could no longer ignore.
2
Carter Rollins had taken one look at the woman standing on the front stoop at Sarah Price’s house the day before and labeled her some kind of expensively clad snob who thought she was too good to get her hands dirty. The fact that she’d been standing around, rather than looking for the missing boy, had grated on him. It had cemented his first impression that she was a selfish, overindulged, irresponsible female. If it had been up to him, he’d have found some way to charge her with child neglect on the spot.
Unfortunately, he’d learned a few things since moving to Serenity. It was a tight-knit, friendly community that stuck together. Unless he had the law very firmly on his side, it was best to handle things with that in mind.
WSER might not be the most powerful radio station in the state, or even in the region, but its owner, Travis McDonald, and star personality, Sarah Price, were local celebrities. He’d heard about their very public romance when he’d first arrived in town. Everybody in Serenity, it seemed, loved a love story. If Travis and Sarah intended to back up this woman, then there was very little Carter could do about it. And their protective attitude toward her yesterday had been as unmistakable as it was unfathomable.
The next time, though—if there was one—he wouldn’t hesitate to handle things differently, local politics be damned. He’d involve the child protective authorities in a heartbeat.
It was his job to protect people, especially innocent kids. Finding Tommy Price wandering alone several blocks from home had stirred his anger, so he didn’t much care who was on that babysitter’s side. Next time, he’d haul her in.
“Why do you look so grim?” his sister Carrie asked, eyeing him warily as he set an assortment of takeout boxes from the local Chinese restaurant on the kitchen table.
“Just a bad day,” he told his fifteen-year-old sister. One of these days, one of them—he, Carrie or his other sister, Mandy—was going to have to learn to cook. Beyond throwing meat, chicken or fish on a grill, he was pretty useless in the kitchen. Carrie had once excelled at baking chocolate-chip cookies from a package, though lately she’d refused to bake them for reasons beyond him. Mandy could make popcorn in the microwave and scramble eggs. When they’d moved and his hours had become more predictable, he’d vowed to change their pitiful culinary ineptitude, but so far, they mostly existed on takeout. Sadly, the variety in Serenity was pretty slim.
“You’ve had a lot of bad days since we moved to Serenity,” Mandy noted. She was the younger of the girls for whom he’d had full responsibility since their parents’ deaths two years ago. “Wasn’t that the whole point of moving here, so you’d be in a better mood? I have to tell you, big brother, I don’t think it’s working.”
Carter frowned at her interpretation of the decision he’d made to leave his police job in Columbia for a smaller community. “We’re here because this is a better environment for the two of you.”
“In other words, because it’s totally boring,” Carrie said, disdain in her voice. “You didn’t want us to have fun ever again.”
“No, I wanted you to be safe,” Carter countered, passing the kung pao chicken.
“Then how come you had a bad day?” Carrie persisted, scooping a tiny spoonful of rice onto her plate and adding a few of the vegetables from another container. It was barely enough to feed a bird, but Carter resisted pointing that out. His comments inevitably led to an argument.