Tainted Love: contemporary womens fiction love story and family saga (Behind Closed Doors Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

and with a daughter just two years after he lost the love of his life. Then things became serious for us, and he had to bear his in-laws’ responsibilities just six months later.
    So the perfect boss, husband, father, and big brother couldn't last. Something had to give, and I'm so sorry I didn't notice it was you who suffered first. In the privacy of our home, you were nothing to him. In the public eye, you were the son he didn't have.
    "You can't do this to him," I cried one night as we changed for bed. "You're a psychiatrist! You know the damage you'll do to him by switching your affections on and off like this. He needs you to be his father."
    "Take a seat, Faith."
    Take a seat...? He'd begun talking to me like I was an employee, not his wife, and it grated on my nerves. Enough to keep me silent about the news I'd known for weeks. News I thought he'd be thrilled about, but now I wasn’t so sure.
    "We need to talk."
    I'll never forget this day. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and we were meeting Robert, Gina, and Izzy for the parade early in the morning. So when he'd frozen like I'd thrown ice water on him, I knew something major was wrong. I perched on the edge of our bed. "What's the matter?"
    "As you know, Darryl's placement with us was only temporary," he said. I didn't like this and I didn't like where it was going one bit. "The final review is coming up and I think we should tell them —"
    "No!" I leapt to my feet. My husband was not telling me he wanted to put my little brother into someone else’s care!
    "Faith, you're not coping with him."
    "I'm coping fine."
    "Look at you." He rattled off a list of ailments. Exhaustion, headaches, nausea, depression, missed periods. "I'm seriously worried about you. The stress of losing your parents and taking on the responsibility of Darryl, it's just too much."
    "He's my brother!"
    "But he's not really, is he, Fay?" Cal said it so quietly I thought I misheard him. "He's not your real brother and you need to put your family first. What about Georgia?"
    I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "You want me to toss him back into the system?"
    "He's young enough to be placed with another family and not be harmed by it."
    But didn't he say we had to move to help you adjust to life without Mom and Dad? Didn't he say by staying in this house you would flourish and grow? Didn't he understand the family under this roof was all the family I had left in the world? All the family you had left in the world?!
    "He's not blood so he's not my family, is that it, Cal? What did my parents have to say about this? I'm sure they'd made provisions for his care in their will just in case."
    They'd tried for years and years for a brother or sister for me, but none came. Mom was heartbroken. They began fostering children but they never gave up. That’s when you came along, a miracle survivor from an icy river plunge on Christmas Eve. You were the gift they'd been waiting for. They stopped fostering and stopped trying for a baby. They adopted you instead.
    "Did they leave everything to me, Cal? He's not blood so he didn't get anything? I doubt that very much. My parents loved him every bit as much as they loved me. Don't you ever tell me he's not my brother and don't you dare tell me he can't live with us again, because he's all I have!"
    Cal looked at me. Something I didn't recognize flickered across his expression before it went cold and even angrier than before. "I don't want children, Faith! And one mistake is bad enough."
    The whole world opened up beneath my feet as I stared into raging orange eyes. But my heart... it cried, even if the rest of me was too angry to let it out. But he loved Georgia. She was everything to him. She wasn’t a mistake. She was an accident.
    "Well, you didn't learn from it then, did you?" I spat the words back at him. He just held my glare. I think he knew what I was going to say. But I said it anyway just so we were clear. "I'm not sick, or stressed, or