Adapting Desires (Endangered Heart Series Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

lower back did hurt from the hastened drive. “Okay,” she sighed. “We’ll put it off until the morning.”
     
    ***
     
    The next morning however, came and went, bleeding quickly into the afternoon where Kasper avoided the subject brilliantly, excusing himself with work and talk of important phone calls. Emilia would have been annoyed, mad even, if it wasn’t a long weekend and she wasn’t busy with a great deal of her own to do. It must have been because of this, with her own worries and her concerns for Kasper that she was still willing to answer her cell phone when it rang with a number she didn’t recognize—her first instinct being that it might be a professor or classmate with a question or change in assignment.
    “Hello?”
    For an instant there was only silence.
    “Hello?”
    “Baby?”
    Emilia almost dropped the phone. It had been nearly two years since she had heard from her mother—two years that had gone by quickly, and mostly happily. And while there were things Emilia had regretted, not having her mother in her life was not one of them.
    “Mom.” She said it, yet could still hardly believe it.
    “Hi, Honey!” Her voice suggested she was near tears. “I can’t tell you how good it is to hear your voice.”
    “What do you want, Mom?” Emilia began to wish she had changed her number and asked herself why she hadn’t after reuniting with Kasper.
    “D-Don’t be that way, baby.” Susan’s voice was syrupy sweet in an unnatural way. Vaguely, it reminded Emilia of a dessert made with artificial sweetener. Right away, it had her reaching for her glass of water to rinse her mouth out with. “I just wanted to talk to you. I miss you so much! It’s been so long.”
    “I don’t have time for this, Mom.” She sipped at her water gingerly. “I have to study.” Emilia had thought about what she would do when she would do when her mother got in contact with her again, how she would react. After envisioning the scenario more than once, Emilia told herself she would be calm and controlled, cool, collected. Now that it had come, however, she was far too submerged in her worry for Kasper, his subsequent breathing troubles, and her schoolwork to keep her temper under her thumb. Perhaps, she reasoned, she would never again have the tolerance required to deal with her mother.
    “You’re still in school? God, honey, that’s great! I’m so proud of you.”
    Emilia slammed her glass down and watched small droplets spit out from the force of it. “You don’t have any right to be proud of me.”
    Susan’s response was quiet. “I-I deserve that, I know. I j-just wanted to apologize for, well, for everything. I was hoping you’d agree to see me,” she said enthusiastically and in a hurry that suggested she knew Emilia was thinking of hanging up on her. “I’m in the program—have been for a while—and one of the steps is making amends—do you think we could get together?”
    “Mom.” Emilia pinched her brow and closed her eyes tight. “I don’t even live in the area anymore, and frankly—” She searched her mind for a simple enough explanation. “I don’t think I’d be comfortable with that.”
    Emilia could practically see her mother dabbing at her eyes with a tissue with the long pause, and she almost hung up on her right then and there. “I’m not with him anymore,” she sniffed. “I know that doesn’t fix anything…that I can’t make up for how I let you down—”
    “I have to go, Mom.”
    Emilia hung up the phone without saying goodbye.
     
    ***
     
    Perhaps because she had envisioned reuniting with her mother so many times, rejecting her as she had and the brief conversation within itself did not weigh as heavily on Emilia as she would have thought. Even as evening descended, and she and Kasper traveled to attend a private consultation at the surgeon’s clinic, she thought of her mother so little, Emilia hadn’t even bothered to mention the conversation to her