Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Lucinda might lose patience along the way, but for the long haul, she was in it to win it.
Madden changed the subject.
“So, do you think Sabrina will like me?”
“Of course she will, honey. She already does. You FaceTime her all the time. Why would you ask that?”
“Because she’s going to be here…for real…for hamburgers in, like, two hours.”
Sabrina was coming up, meeting everyone in person for the first time, spending her spring break in Misted Pines. Darragh was right then heading to Seattle to pick her up and fly her back.
Sabrina was in fits of happiness at getting a ride in a personal jet, having not really cottoned on that a jet was not a prop plane.
Darragh had a small, personal jet he used for his clients who could pay for it, and his plane was nothing to sneeze at.
Still.
In a week, she’d overlap with Acre for the weekend when he came up to do the same.
Like everything with Lucinda, it all seemed to happen naturally.
Rus took two weeks of vacation after the Iverson case closed, all of it with Lucinda and Madden in Misted Pines.
He’d then worked two months’ notice for the Bureau.
When he was done with that, he’d taken two months off to pack and get his condo on the market.
In this time, he also dealt with his family, who were reeling from the Sandusky arrest, particularly his father, who was now a shell of the man they all once knew. Rus hoped he’d snap out of it, but that hope wasn’t high. And Lucas, whose fury had been renewed by all the things they learned about the man who shaped all their lives.
He’d left that mess in an uneasy détente, but that was how they’d been when they first reconciled, so the hope he had that would get better was higher.
He’d taken some time to end things with Ruth and Penny, doing so remotely.
And he’d spent time with the kids when they came home for the holidays, both of them excited he was moving, and more excited he found somebody who made him happy.
He had not been able to completely avoid Jenn during this time, but he discovered he had a new outlook on that, because her sullenness, sulks and snappishness had zero effect on him.
He frequently flew to Washington in this time period.
He moved to Misted Pines in early February, setting up temporarily in an apartment that was owned by Bonner Enterprises.
Lucinda was in his bed every morning after she dropped off Madden, and Rus was at their house nearly every night for dinner and TV and homework checking and babysitting, which was good, because Hillary transitioned out and into the chorus line to take Brittanie’s place.
He would sometimes spend the night.
But in deference to Maddy, usually, after midnight, he was driving back to his apartment.
It was Lucinda who got fed up with it first.
She wanted to sleep beside him, wake up beside him, and Rus and Madden were so tight, she wanted him to be a fixture in her daughter’s life.
Rus wanted the same things, so he didn’t argue.
Madden and her mom had a convo Rus wasn’t invited to, and Madden was gleeful about the idea. He knew this because Lucinda told him, and because Madden expressed that same thing.
When this was shared, Jaeger was not gleeful, but he didn’t cause a problem.
In mid-March, Rus moved in.
Now it was early April, and his kids were coming to have their first face-to-face time with Lucinda and Madden.
He was thrilled. He couldn’t wait to have all the people he loved together.
“You have nothing to worry about. She already loves you,” he assured Madden.
“’Kay.”
“Let’s go back to Jeremy,” Rus suggested. “Were you okay with the whole—?”
“Rus,” she began, like she was forty-five and he was ten.
He grinned at the windshield because she said his name like that a lot.
“Like I said thousands of times, I’m okay,” she stated. “That guy smelled stinky, and his cave smelled worse, and the good guy turning into the bad guy was weird. But it was just like he grabbed me, then he took me in the woods. Then he gave me a Snickers and talked on the phone with you a lot. So I knew you’d be handling it. Then the good-bad guy came, you were right there in the woods and BOOM!” She clapped her hands. “Ice cream every night for two weeks and Dad moved home.”
That was pretty much how she’d described it from the get-go.
They kept a close watch on her, because even though she remembered it like this, and the therapist Lucinda had found shared Madden had astounding recuperative emotional powers (not a surprise, she was a Bonner woman) and a very solid foundation of support, it was something they didn’t want to creep up on her.
As for Rus, he saw her shaking, her wide eyes, the perfunctory nodding.