His Private Nurse Read Online Free Page A

closer to the bed,“if we could just get one of the kids to testify that Pamela has repeatedly lost her temper with them…”
    Royce was shaking his head. Now he stated his position emphatically. “No. Absolutely not. I won’t have my children pressured to testify against their own mother.”
    Dale sighed. “Well, Cory’s too young to be believable, and Tammy wouldn’t, anyway.”
    â€œYou don’t understand the pressure she lives under, Dale. No one can unless they’ve lived with Pamela. Everything that displeases her, no matter how slight, is a major betrayal to her. That means one emotional, irrational scene after another until your whole life becomes nothing more than a fruitless exercise in trying to please her, to stop the tirade. Eventually you realize that it’s impossible, but you can’t get out and you don’t dare give up. I know. I’m an adult, and after two years I’m still trying to fight my way free. Imagine what it must be like for a child. I tell you the truth, Dale, if Mark and I hadn’t walked in on her and Campo in the act, I’d still be married to that vampire.”
    Dale knotted his hands into fists. “I still want to clobber that guy every time I think of him. You built his house, for pity’s sake, and not only does he try to cheat you out of your earnings, he sleeps with your wife—on the living room sofa, no less!”
    â€œAnd I keep telling you,” Royce said, aware that he was beginning to slur his words, “it was the only way out for me. I can’t be anything but grateful to the creep.”
    â€œYeah, but if he hadn’t dumped Pamela,” Dale pointed out, “she’d have left the kids with you and beat a path with him to the Mediterranean.”
    Royce closed his eyes, a smile quirking one corner of his mouth. “So Claude Campo is smarter than me. Hesure wised up faster than I did. Can’t blame the fellow for that.”
    â€œYou were a senior in college when you married Pamela,” Dale argued. “You thought you’d nabbed a hot redhead to spend the rest of your life with. How were you to know she was a basket case that was slowly unraveling?”
    Royce smiled. Trust Dale to defend him. “Anyway,” Royce said, getting the conversation back on track, “about Tammy. I don’t want anyone pressuring her, not about her mother and not about my fall. You got that?”
    Dale nodded. “Sure, sure. Her animosity toward you is nothing more than an attempt to placate and please her mother. That’s what you’ve always said, and seems to me that her recent behavior reinforces it. I mean, she saved your life. If she hadn’t found you and called an ambulance, shock would have….”
    â€œFinished what her mother started,” Royce muttered. To his chagrin, Dale pounced on that unwise statement.
    â€œI knew it!” He came up out of his chair. “You’d never fall down your own deck stairs. She pushed you. The witch pushed you!” He punctuated the air with the jab of one forefinger, then dropped his hands to his waist. “We need a private investigator.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWe’ll punch holes in her alibi, sink her for good.”
    Royce struggled up onto his left elbow to make himself understood. “No.”
    â€œBut you said—”
    â€œYou misunderstood.” Collapsing back onto his pillow, Royce massaged his temples with thumb and forefinger. “I only meant that Pam’s been punishing me for everything that has ever gone wrong in her life. No doubtshe believes that if I died it would serve me right. That’s what she’s been teaching my kids ever since the divorce.”
    Deflated, Dale turned the armless, molded plastic chair and straddled it. “And they’re too young to know that you divorced their mother because you caught her naked, humping a client in your own