Before That Night: Unfinished Love Series: Caine & Addison, Book 1 Read Online Free Page A

answered his silent questions anyway.
    “I got the job, kids. And, my new boss agreed to let me park the van in his secured lot out back.”
    Even little Kylie, who Addison knew wasn’t grasping the entire situation fully, looked immensely relieved over that.
    “We’re going to be just fine.”
    Addison wasn’t completely delusional; she knew living in a van wasn’t ideal. The kids’ safety and well-being was the most important thing in the world to her. But with the big age gap between Tanner and Kylie, she knew that if social services stepped in and put the kids in foster care, the likelihood of them being able to stay together was pretty low. She knew the foster system was at its core a good program—she even knew a couple of friends whose amazing parents were equally wonderful foster parents. And yes, she’d researched enough to know that there were happy stories as well as horror stories about kids in the foster system.
    But that very research was what led her to stumble across the huge national study done on children trapped in the foster care system that was published in USA Today under the article title: Troubled Homes Better than Foster Care . The findings of the study, which had tracked 15,000 children over twelve years was overwhelmingly definitive. With exception to the children who’d been physically abused and severely neglected, the children in the foster care system were far more likely to have problems with delinquency, drugs, difficulty adjusting as adults, and a host of other hardships.
    That was the day Addison had decided that no one was going to break her family apart. “From now on, it’s just the three of us. I’ll take care of you guys, I promise. No matter what. You hear?”
    Both Kylie and Tanner nodded gravely.
    “Okay then. Tomorrow’s the last day of the month. So let’s go do one more check to make sure everything important we’re keeping is out of the apartment.” She wanted to be sure to be long gone before tomorrow. “Then you guys get to test out the new air mattress in the back tonight. We’re going to go to a secured overnight parking lot in Scottsdale tonight because we can’t park at Joe’s until tomorrow so we’ll stop by the rec center first so you can pee and brush your teeth before bed.”
    She looked in the rearview mirror at Kylie. “That means no milk before bed tonight, okay sweetie? Just to be on the safe side.” They’d rehearsed what their nightly routine would be like from now one, and Addison just smiled like this was all perfectly normal.
    This is going to work.
    It has to work.
    “Don’t worry, this’ll be fun. Like camping.” Seeing their pensive, but wholly trusting faces, she added firmly, “It’ll be temporary. Just until I can save up enough to make sure we won’t ever have to go through this again.”

 
     
     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    Present Day
     
     
    CHRIST, SHE JUST KEPT GETTING sweeter every day.
    Caine Spencer sat in his usual spot at the counter of the diner he’d been eating at almost nightly for the past several weeks, and watched the tired, but determined waitress behind the counter draw a big egg-shaped oval on a piece of printer paper before proceeding to zig zag and polka dot patterns all over it with a mix of pastel and neon crayons—and tiny-ass glitter stickers galore—to make yet another colorfully-designed Easter egg to decorate the walls with.
    The fact that the woman was taking the entire task so darn seriously because her little sister Kylie had insisted the other night that they simply needed to decorate the diner for Easter, just made her all the more sweeter in Caine’s eyes.
    Sweetness like that was his biggest weakness when it came to women. Bar none. And this woman, who was now rocking the tiny glittery Easter egg sticker extravaganza by using one to dot the ‘i’ in ‘Addison’ on her nametag, was quickly starting to become his kryptonite.
    Though he hadn’t known Addison Milan long, the one thing he