The Bliss Factor Read Online Free

to take in this friend of theirs, no questions asked.
    “Who is it?” she asked again. “Why do I need to take him or her in, and for how long?”
    Annie dropped the theatrics, pressing her lips together for a second before smiling slightly. “You’re determined to ruin my fun, aren’t you?”
    “Fun?”
    “I only get to mother you once a year. I was trying to fit it all in.”
    Rae had to smile over that. “I’ll consider myself mothered.”
    Annie kissed her on the forehead. “Now you can consider yourself mothered.”
    Even though Rae was savoring that moment of accord she knew there was some misdirection and manipulation involved, too. “Why can’t this friend of yours stay with you?”
    “The trailer isn’t that big, and three’s a crowd,” her father said, winking at her mother.
    Rae grimaced, as much for the heat rushing into her cheeks as the ewwwww factor. She ought to be past the my-parents-have-sex revulsion. Or maybe a child never got past it, no matter how old they were. “It’s just not a good time,” she said, getting back to the real problem. “I’m up for partner.”
    “You’re always up for partner,” Annie said, “and that putz of a boss of yours will never give it to you until you stand up for yourself.”
    “I can handle Mr. Putz—Mr. Putnam,” she amended before she started to think of him as Mr. Putz and stood a chance of slipping and actually calling him Mr. Putz to his face because she became pretty absentminded when she was deep into someone else’s finances. “You take care of your stray.”
    “It’s life or death—”
    “Mom,” she said, making it a three-syllable verbal eye roll.
    Annie toned down the drama, but she made up for it with sincerity. Very intense sincerity. She took both her daughter’s hands, squeezing them for emphasis. “He’s special, Sunny.”
    A man then, that made things a bit uncomfortable. “I’m not sure—”
    “He’s perfectly safe. We’ve known him for . . .”
    “What?” she asked when her mother stopped to calculate the time. “A few weeks? You’re probably lucky he hasn’t killed you in your sleep.”
    “Three, no four months. And he’s not the first young man we’ve taken under our wings.”
    “No, he’s not. You took in strays my whole life, and you were lucky you never got tied up with a bad one.”
    “Do you think it was just luck?” Annie demanded “That we would have let anyone near you we weren’t sure of?”
    “No,” Rae mumbled, eyes dropping to her lap.
    Her mother cupped her cheek. “If I’d had any idea you were frightened, that you didn’t feel safe . . .”
    It was worse than that, Rae thought. She’d felt she wasn’t enough for them, that she was a disappointment or they wouldn’t have needed someone else to look after.
    “We didn’t need luck,” Nelson said, his calm voice giving more weight to that reassurance than all her mother’s impassioned pleas. “Good and bad, there’s nothing more basic, Sunny, and we learned early on to tell the one from the other, even through camouflage. Life on the road teaches you that quickly or you don’t survive it.”
    Rae knew that, and looking back she could see they’d known, somehow, who to trust and who not to. Annie and Nelson Bliss had always been willing to lend a hand to someone deserving, but there’d been times when she was a child when they’d run across someone who’d asked for their help, and help wasn’t given. “I really wish I could give you a hand, but it’s such a bad time . . .”
    “It’s only for a few days,” Annie said, “maybe a week, tops.”
    A week, she thought, just any week for her parents, but the end of the quarter for her, culminating with the partnership meeting at her firm.
    “His name is Connor Larkin,” Nelson said. “He’s a perfect gentleman. Very chivalrous, as a matter of fact.”
    Her parents both laughed.
    “Care to let me in on the joke?”
    Annie opened the door. “Come in, Conn.”
    And