Father Of The Brat Read Online Free Page A

girl he’d known way back in high school, when the world was a warmer, happier place.
    A girl, he recalled now, who had always driven him nuts.
    Maddy Saunders had been the most infuriating human being Carver Venner had ever met, a Pollyanna of obscene proportions. She had been convinced that the world was full of goodness and light and that the media just made things seem bad to make more money. She had been certain that the people who ran the country had nothing but good intentions and only the welfare of the American people at heart. She had thought it was only a matter of time before inflation was whipped, violent crime was crushed, and poverty was overcome. Her self-professed role model had been Mary Poppins.
    She had, quite frankly, made Carver sick.
    As if roused by his musings, the woman in question came walking down the terminal toward him, her beige tailored skirt skimming just below her knees, her cream-colored shirt nearly obscured by her massive trench coat. She took her time approaching him, as if reluctant to get too close, her battered satchel banging against her calf all the way.
    Funny, Carver thought as he contemplated the wellturned legs below the skirt, he’d never noticed before what great gams Maddy Saunders had.
    She seemed to slow her pace when she looked up and saw him, something that convinced him even more completely that he’d been right about her identity. As soon as she was close enough for her to hear him, he dipped his head once in her direction and greeted her simply, “Maddy.”
    She blushed as if she were a four-year-old child caught in her first lie. “So, you, uh, you remember me after all.”
    He smiled wryly. “You’re not exactly someone I could easily forget.”
    His statement didn’t require a comment, and she didn’t seem any too willing to offer one. Instead she only stood there looking at him in that unnerving way she had the day before. Little by little, the silence between them stretched and became more disconcerting. And little by little, Carver began to feel the same edginess Maddy Saunders had always roused in him.
    “Boy, you sure whacked your hair,” he finally said, unable to keep himself from reaching out to tuck a short strand behind her ear. Immediately after completing the action, he dropped his hand back to his side, surprised and unsettled at how easily the gesture had come. Twenty years seemed to dissolve into nothing, and he was suddenly right back at Strickler High, sneaking up on Maddy to tug on the long, black braid that had always beckoned to him.
    “I had it cut short a long time ago,” she told him as she lifted her own hand to put the strand of hair back where it had been before he touched her. He decided he must have imagined the way her fingers seemed to shake almost imperceptibly as she did so. “It was getting to be too much trouble to take care of. I didn’t have the time.”
    He nodded, letting his gaze wander over the rest of her. “You’ve dropped a lot of weight, too.”
    She sighed, as if giving in to what would be an inevitable line of questioning. “Yes. I have.”
    “You’re too skinny.”
    “I know.”
    He frowned at her unwillingness to communicate—her unwillingness to spar with him—when that was what the two of them had excelled at in high school. Then he remembered that he’d always had a talent for saying something that would rile her into a state of agitated verbosity. He smiled. “And your name is Garrett now. Finally found some poor bastard to marry you, huh?”
    She nodded, then hesitated only a moment before adding, “And divorce me.”
    Carver’s smile fell. “Oh. Sorry. Or…or should I say congratulations?”
    She stared him square in the eye as she said, “He left me six years ago for a grad student who was his teaching assistant. I couldn’t have been more surprised than I was when I came home one night to find him packing his bag. It just seemed like such a cliché, you know? Sometimes I still have