All Shook Up Read Online Free PDF Page A

such an adult, and when she’d fallen for Tony at the end of her freshman year, she’d thought life just didn’t get any better than this: first time out of the gate, and already she’d found her one true love.
    For the end of that school year and all of her sophomore year, she and Tony had been inseparable. They’d done everything together: studied, played, talked, and laughed. And they’d made love—Lord, how they’dmade love! The only thing they hadn’t done was argue, and she would have sworn theirs was a match made in heaven. Then, on the last day of spring finals, she’d discovered she was pregnant.
    She’d also discovered that heaven wasn’t the place where this match had been made. For the next day, Tony was gone.
    She’d been left to berate herself as ten kinds of a fool. She could hardly believe she’d been so careless and that all her dreams were dust as a result. She’d been laid low with morning sickness, scared over how it was going to affect the rest of her life, and terrified to tell her aunt and uncle.
    Except for three agonizingly long weeks, however, it hadn’t occurred to her not to tell them. During those weeks, while bitterly resenting the baby she carried, she had given serious consideration to having an abortion. It had seemed like the most practical solution: one that would keep Sophie and Ben from ever knowing how irresponsible she had been, and restore her life back to its even keel. But when she’d thought about it emotionally…
    She’d girded her loins and told her aunt and uncle she was going to be a mother.
    They were wonderful. She’d dreaded seeing the disappointment in their eyes, but they’d given her their wholehearted support without a single remonstrance for the foolish risk she had taken, or for the gossip she’d created in tiny, backwoods Star Lake. And Tate was the love of her life—she’d never regretted her decision to raise him herself. But it hadn’t been a walk in the park, and she now knew better than to take careless risks. Her life was never again going to get turned upside down the way it had been eleven years ago.
    So she didn’t care how hot J.D. Carver was, or how he made her heart pound and her bones go weak. He wasn’t going to just waltz in here and screw up the nice, safe life she’d made for herself and her son.

3
    D ru’s uncle stepped out of the gift shop just as J.D. passed by. Both stopped, and J.D. braced himself when he saw Ben glance at the stack of financial ledgers that he carried. But Ben merely said, “Settling in okay?”
    J.D. nodded.
    Ben slid his hands in his pockets and studied the younger man curiously. “So, the lawyer who read Edwina’s will said you were in construction?”
    “Yeah.”
    “This is a busy time of year for that industry. Did you have any trouble getting away?”
    “No.” J.D.’s laugh was short on humor. “The company I worked for folded when its owner went to prison.”
    “Ouch. What’d he do?”
    “Substituted a whole lot of substandard material to save himself a few bucks.”
    Ben winced. “Nasty business. So how’d they catch him? Somebody blow the whistle?”
    “Yeah.” J.D. looked him in the eye. “Me.” Lankovich had subbed inferior materials on an astounding number of projects, it turned out, but J.D. hadn’t known about the others at first. It was discovering his boss had subbed materials on the job he’d headed, making his painstakingly built building unsafe, that had driven J.D. to turn him in.
    Watching Ben’s jaw drop, he said defensively, “I didn’t want to turn the guy in—Lankovich was good to me, and he gave me my first shot in construction. But it was either that, or live with the consequences if people got hurt or even killed because I kept my mouth shut.”
    “I’m not judging you, son. You did the right thing, which isn’t always the easy thing. I imagine you must have made a lot of people proud, though.”
    J.D. couldn’t prevent the rude noise that slipped