Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

eyes up at me and did something she’d never done before. She smiled at me, then covered her mouth to hide it.
    I glanced up at Nick. He hadn’t moved, nor did it appear as if he had seen my friend. He just stood staring into the distance. I looked back at the pool, but I already knew she would be gone.
    “What do you think?” I asked Nick.
    He came over and sank down beside me. “Wow. Just wow.” He reached for my hand and squeezed it. “You’ve got the train back on the tracks, for sure.” He brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. “I was worried about you.”
    “You mean when I had my complete and utter booze-fueled meltdown in court in front of the whole city of Dallas and tucked my tail between my legs and ran to hide in the islands?”
    He kissed my hand again, then two more times in quick succession. “Yes, then.”
    I sighed. “I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in two hundred and nine days.” I pursed my lips, thinking about all of Bart’s parties and how hard it was to abstain in that environment.
    “Good for you.” Nick was playing with my fingers, bending them, straightening them, kissing each one. It was pleasantly distracting.
    “Thank you.”
    “I quit the firm,” he said. “Opened my own investigations business.”
    “So I heard. Congratulations.”
    “My divorce is final.” He kissed the inside of my wrist.
    “I heard that, too. So it sounds like you have all those messy details in your life straightened out.”
    He leaned his head back against the wall and I admired his profile. Nick is not small of nose, but it works for him. He sighed. “Not exactly.”
    I curled my toes in hard, then released them. “Meaning what?”
    “Meaning—well, wait a second. I don’t want to get this in the wrong order. I need to tell you something else first.”
    “Ohhhhh kayyyyyy . . .” I said. Prickles ran up my neck.
    “When I heard what happened to you, how you were nearly killed by the same guy that killed your parents, it knocked some sense into me. I was letting my pride get in the way before. So I got here as fast I could.”
    Not very damn fast, I thought. “That was more than six months ago.”
    “Yes. Unfortunately, I have challenging personal circumstances,” he said.
    “Get to the point, Nick,” I said. Which sounds harsher than it came out. I swear.
    “I couldn’t come because of Taylor,” he said.
    My heart sank.

Chapter Six
    My mind conjured up a young blonde with an acoustic guitar. No, I knew he didn’t mean Taylor Swift. But who the hell was Nick’s Taylor? I spoke through my clenched jaw. “Taylor,” I repeated.
    “Yes. Taylor. He’s fifteen months old.” Nick squeezed my hand.
    Not a woman. A baby. Only a slight improvement. I had an instant headache.
    “A baby.”
    “Teresa is with me, too.”
    Teresa. This just got better and better.
    “Really.”
    What the hell was he doing here with me, then? I tried to pull my hand away, but he wouldn’t release it.
    “Katie, let me finish.”
    He had divorced recently, and I thought I knew it was because he and his wife didn’t like each other, but I had always wondered if there was more. A baby would definitely be more. “Go on.”
    “He’s my nephew. His mom, Teresa, is my little sister. Didn’t I ever tell you about her?”
    “No.” The relief made me lightheaded. Taylor was neither a woman nor his baby. “That’s great!”
    “The father, Derek, is a loser, a spoiled rich kid who went from rehab to dealing to prison right after he knocked my sister up, and now he’s on parole. Teresa was living with my parents in Port Aransas, but the loser was too close to them, less than an hour away in Corpus Christi, and he kept showing up, so she and Taylor came to stay with me when he was about three months old.”
    I pondered Nick as a big brother with a troubled little sister. I got the loyalty part. My older brother exemplifies apple pie and baseball. If anything, I’m the cross he bears, especially after