Cunningham, Pat - Legacy [Sequel to Belonging] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Read Online Free Page A

nuts, and Colleen knew she wasn’t nuts. The therapist had said so.
    “I didn’t hear anything,” she said firmly. “There was nobody at the school.” She looked her reflection squarely in the eye. Common sense wins again.
    Just for just a second her eyes flashed red.
    Colleen’s heart leaped into her throat. It passed in a blink. Her eyes snapped back to their normal light violet. Eyes just like her mother’s, right down to the crazy.
    “Nobody was there,” Colleen repeated fiercely. Her eyes stayed the color they were supposed to. She hauled in another long breath.
    After a quick, bracing wash and face repair with the skimpy cosmetics in her purse, Colleen judged herself fit for company. She opened the bathroom door. Jeremy stood outside it like a sentry.
    “Gus just got home,” he said and offered her his arm. “Don’t let him scare you. He’s loud, but he’s harmless.”
    As if anything could scare her with Jeremy near. She smiled and took his arm and allowed him to escort her to the dining room.
    Everything she’d heard about Annie’s husband, Gus, turned out to be no exaggeration. He was a booming, likeable, bear of a man for whom she suspected the word “overwhelming” had been coined. Also the word “Yeti,” even though there was nothing cold about either him or the wife he towered over. She was pleased to see little Shayla held her own against both their forceful personalities, and both her adoptive parents clearly doted on her. With a home environment like this, Colleen had no doubt Shayla would grow up to conquer the world.
    Annie and Shayla had already set the table. Jeremy brought the last couple of dishes over. “Let’s eat,” Gus said. “Bet you must be famished, Colleen, chasing after little kids all day. How do you do it?”
    “Quickly,” she said and won a chuckle from both Gus and Annie. Annie seated Shayla, and Gus seated Annie. Jeremy held out a chair for Colleen and took the one beside her.
    There followed one of the weirdest dinner conversations Colleen had ever listened in on. Actually, it was more like two, with an undercurrent of a third. The primary talk, the one that happened out loud, stemmed mainly from Shayla, who chattered nonstop about her day to the delight of her beaming parents. Underneath this, Colleen’s psychic prickle picked up a second dialogue, spoken in exchanged glances, body language, and carefully-masked expressions. No one looked directly at her, except to say something polite. No one mentioned lurkers at the preschool. She wondered what Jeremy had told them while she was in the bathroom and who it was he’d called.
    At least they weren’t looking at her like she was a nutcase, which was a major plus. More importantly, that menacing spied-on sensation hadn’t returned. She felt safe here, protected. Jeremy seated beside her had a lot to do with that. Lulled by all this camaraderie, she finally let herself relax.
    Shayla wound down eventually and fixated on her potatoes, which allowed Gus to get a word in. He directed the word at Jeremy. “Is Wally coming over?”
    “He’s not up yet. I left him a message.” That explained the phone call. Maybe.
    “I’ll make him a care package,” Annie said. Her bright gaze pierced Colleen. “Has Jeremy told you about Wally?”
    And there it was, that other unspoken conversation, finally out in the open. The man at her side had a man at home. Of course his friends would be concerned about his interest in her.
    Colleen smiled up at Jeremy. Her expression held just the hint of an edge. “Oh yes. The first day we met, in fact. Did you tell him about me?”
    He raised a brow. “Of course I did. I tell him everything.”
    Are you going to tell him how you’ve been inching your chair closer to me all through dinner? Or that you’ve got your thigh practically glued to my leg?
    To be fair, she hadn’t tried to move her leg, and maybe she’d done a bit of inching herself. The Stantons had to have noticed. They