Together With You , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Victoria Bylin

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

177 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Sometimes the most unexpected love can be exactly what a heart needs...When a Lost Child warning blares over the mall's PA system, Carly Mason finds the little girl playing with a stuffed rabbit. Something about Penny Tremaine is different. An ex-social worker, Carly recognizes that the child suffers fetal alcohol effects, and a piece of Carly's past suddenly confronts her. Never again will she become personally involved with a client. The risks are far too great. But something about Penny--and Penny's handsome father--tugs at Carly's heart.Dr. Ryan Tremaine is trying to put his life back together. With his ex-wife remarried and on a trip far away, his two teenage sons and Penny are living under his roof full time. Ryan has put his faith in his Sink-or-Swim list, a plan to reconnect with his children. The first step: recruit Carly Mason to be Penny's nanny.Ryan never anticipated being so drawn to Carly, an attraction Carly seems to fight as much as he does. Could Carly be the missing piece that helps his family stay afloat, or will their blossoming romance only complicate things further?Known for her realistic and engaging characters, Victoria Bylin delivers an emotion-packed story reminiscent of The Sound of Music, one that reminds us all to believe in the power of faith and love.

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	31 mars 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441265166
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0230€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2015 by Victoria Bylin
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www . bakerpublishinggroup . com
Ebook edition created 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-6516-6
Unless otherwise noted Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Epigraph Scripture quotation taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Paul Higdon
Author is represented by the Steele-Perkins Literary Agency
To Deborah Raad and Southland Christian Church in honor of Faith and Friendship
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
About the Author
Books by Victoria Bylin
Back Ads
Back Cover
Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
—Hebrews 4:16 NIV
1
T he clerk at McGill’s Sporting Goods, a sandy-haired college kid, pushed a button to feed the paper tape through the register, but it jammed for the third time. Scowling, he tossed the crumpled receipt in the trash. “Sorry, sir. I know you’re in a hurry.”
“Yes, I am.” Dr. Ryan Tremaine spoke through gritted teeth, but he didn’t blame the clerk for his predicament. He’d been a fool to let his two youngest children, Penny and Eric, out of his sight, but he’d lost patience with Eric for pouting and Penny for pulling the tags off rugby shirts. Expecting to be right behind them, he’d allowed them to go to the food court for ice cream while he paid for the baseball cleats for Kyle, his oldest son.
It was a bad decision, and Ryan knew it. The mall, crowded on this Saturday afternoon in June, was a dangerous place, especially for a little girl with special needs and a thirteen-year-old boy who had what a family therapist called “issues.”
Kyle slung the bag holding the shoebox over his shoulder. “This is taking forever. Maybe I should check on Eric and Penny.”
Ryan was about to agree when the register spit out the mile-long receipt. The clerk tore it off and handed it to him with a flourish. “There you go, sir. Sorry for the delay.”
Snatching it, Ryan spun on his heels. With Kyle at his side, they sped out of the store to the main mall. He’d given Eric a twenty-dollar bill and instructions to buy whatever treats he and Penny wanted, then to wait in front of the ice cream place. Striding toward it now, he scanned the counter, empty except for a trio of giggling teenage girls. His gaze zipped to the tables in front of the shop, also empty, then to the sea of half-filled wooden chairs and gray Formica tables.
“Do you see them?” he asked Kyle.
“Not yet.”
Ryan focused on one face at a time. An ophthalmologist by profession, he had better than 20/20 vision, which made his failure to spot Penny and Eric even more alarming. In spite of the icy air conditioning, droplets of perspiration beaded on his neck and dripped down his spine.
Kyle pointed to the far side of the food court. “There’s Eric.”
Ryan spotted his son coming out of a video arcade filled with shadows, flashing lights, and kids who looked as rebellious as Eric in his zombie T-shirt and baggy pants. Eric had no business in that place, especially with Penny. She was five years old and a victim of FASD, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, a condition that affected her in myriad ways, including sensitivity to noise, light, and smells. If Eric had taken her to the arcade, anything could have happened—a meltdown, her running away, maybe hiding. She had done that a couple of times at the house, and Ryan had battled panic until he found her.
Five steps beyond the arcade, Eric ground to a halt. Panic glinted on his face like sunlight on a mirror, ricocheted back to Ryan, and blinded him with a terror so fierce he stopped breathing. There was only one explanation. Penny was missing.
It was Ryan’s fault, not Eric’s. The FASD was his fault, too. Penny had been conceived in the affair that wrecked his marriage—a byproduct of impulse and enough gin to drown his conscience, at least for a time. When Penny’s mother had died six months ago, he’d taken custody and made a solemn vow to never fail his daughter again. It was a promise he broke daily, it seemed. No matter how hard he tried to connect with her, she still called him Dr. Tremaine instead of Daddy.
His relationship with his sons wasn’t much better, but his ex-wife was away on a mission trip, and he had the boys under his roof for three months. Determined to rebuild their trust, he’d written out what he called the SOS list—things a family did and enjoyed together, things that made them close. Traditionally, SOS stood for Save Our Souls, but Ryan didn’t believe in God. For his purposes, SOS stood for Sink or Swim, which is what he and his kids would do this summer.
With Penny missing, they were sinking hard and fast.
Eric spotted him and broke into a run. Behind him, a uniformed security officer gave chase while speaking into a microphone clipped to his collar. It didn’t make sense, unless the man knew something about Penny.
Terror shredded through Ryan like a riff on an electric guitar, though no one would know it to see his face. Carefully blank and in control, he shoved aside the rising panic in spite of the mental picture of Penny lost in the mall. With her blond ponytail and blue eyes, she was a beautiful little girl. And vulnerable . . . more vulnerable than most children because of the way fetal alcohol affected her brain. Instead of being naturally shy, she would go to anyone, especially a nice man with candy . . . a nice man who would take her for a nice ride in his nice car.
Stay clinical, Ryan told himself. Get the facts. But he couldn’t turn off the ugly pictures or the fear, and when he swallowed, acid burned the back of his throat. Forcing down the bile, he called to Eric over the rumble and clatter in the food court, “Where’s your sister?”
Eric’s chubby face wrinkled into a knot. “I told her to stay in the arcade.”
Kyle caught up to them. “I don’t see her anywhere.”
“Where is she?” Ryan repeated to Eric.
“I don’t know.”
Frantic, he scoured the line at the candy store and the island of bubblegum machines. He looked everywhere, but there was no sign of Penny.
“Sir?” The deep voice came from over Ryan’s shoulder. Turning, he saw the security officer with his thumbs hooked on a thick black belt.
“Is this your son?” the man asked.
“Yes, it is.”
“I’m Officer Lewis, and I’m here about a shoplifting incident.” Before Ryan could react, the officer lowered his chin at Eric. “You were at the prize counter, weren’t you?”
Eric looked down at his shoes. “Yes, but—”
“The manager saw you take two candy bars. You put them in your pocket and ran for the door.”
Ryan’s mind spun with frightening implications, but Penny was in the greatest danger. “Officer, wait. My daughter is missing.”
The man’s attention snapped to Ryan. “How old is she?”
“Five.”
Chin down, he spoke into the microphone clipped to his collar. “Code Adam. Repeat. Code Adam. Roger that.”
As a choir of voices responded in the affirmative, Ryan flashed to the famous picture of seven-year-old Adam Walsh, wearing a red baseball cap. The child had been abducted at a mall much like this one, murdered, then decapitated. No. No . No. Terror screamed through his brain, drowning out logic, hope, everything except the gong-like echo of yet another failure.
Officer Lewis focused on Ryan. “Would you describe your daughter, sir?”
“Blond hair. Blue eyes.” He held out his arm to show her height, saw his shaking hand, and pulled it back. “She’s about forty inches tall.” He knew, because she’d just been to the pediatrician.
“What is she wearing?”
“Denim overalls and a pink T-shirt.” Both wrinkled because the fourth nanny had quit yesterday, leaving him to add Find a new nanny for Penny to his SOS list. He’d planned this day so differently . . . just Kyle and himself shopping for baseball cleats and grabbing burgers for lunch. Now, instead of happily crossing Buy cleats for Kyle off the SOS list, he silently berated himself for the bad judgment that put his daughter in danger and his younger son in the middle.
Officer Lewis repeated Penny’s description into the radio, then explained a Code Adam to Ryan. The outer doors of the mall were being locked as he spoke, and no one would leave without being observed by a designated mall employee. Penny’s description would go out on the PA system, and managers would walk the aisles of their stores. If Penny wasn’t found in ten minutes, law enforcement would be called, the doors would be opened, and the alert canceled.
Ryan nodded, his face carefully blank, but his heaving lungs revealed his panic. He blinked and imagined Penny in a nondescript sedan, clawing at the windows, calling for help. He blinked again and pictured her frail, broken body in a shallow grave, then in the morgue, covered in a white sheet, lost to him before