Tempting Fate Read Online Free PDF

smiled, or tried to. “It can be.”
    â€œDo you ever wish you hadn’t left home?”
    â€œNo.”
    And he wanted to ask her, but didn’t, if she’d ever wished she had left. After her affair with Nick, she’d returned to the house of her birth and childhood. Her husband had refused even to speak to her again, or to divorce her. She’d nursed her ailing father until his death from cancer. Through those eleven years, Jackson Witt had paid her a wage and referred to her as his live-in housekeeper. She’d even had to eat in the kitchen while he ate in the dining room. To Zeke’s knowledge, Naomi had never complained nor given in to any temptation to try to drown the old bastard in the bathtub. She’d saved the meager salary he paid her and, after his death, bought the Witt house with her own money. Her first order of business had been to get rid of the rosewood bed in which her grandfather and father had died. She and Zeke dragged it down to the flea market and sold it to the first comer for thirty dollars. It was probably worth a hundred times that much, even then, but Naomi, determined, had told Zeke, “I won’t be the third generation of Witts to die in that bed.”
    With her warm, dark eyes fastened on him, Naomi Witt Hazen suddenly looked old and sad. “Zeke, I know I could have told you everything in my letter, but I wanted to see you. You look well. Are you happy?”
    He thought of the sunset sparkling on the blue waters of San Diego Bay. “Sure.”
    â€œYou’ve never married.”
    â€œWouldn’t work in my profession.”
    â€œI’ve always thought you’d make a fine husband and father.”
    Not with the dead dreams he carried with him, not with the life he led. But Zeke didn’t try to tell Naomi she was wrong. He liked having someone think those kinds of things about him; he could almost believe they could be true.
    She twisted her fingers, gnarled with arthritis, in her lap and lowered her eyes. “Zeke, I—” She looked at him. “I need you to go to Saratoga Springs, New York.”
    Automatically he felt himself falling back on the training and discipline that had sustained him through years of dangerous work. He had expected something difficult and painful. Yet even with the article on Dani Pembroke, he’d talked himself out of believing it was Saratoga. He’d imagined Naomi telling him she’d developed colon cancer like her daddy and wanted him to see to her funeral, to selling the Witt house and its contents. But he’d seen the keys around Dani Pembroke’s neck, and deep down he’d known what Naomi would ask.
    â€œGo on,” he said.
    Naomi’s cheeks reddened. “This is much more difficult than I’d anticipated. I—Zeke, I’m afraid there’s something I’ve never told you.”
    That didn’t surprise him. He’d always believed Naomi Witt had neglected to tell anybody—least of all him—a great number of things. He took another sip of iced tea and set the glass carefully on a coaster decorated with irises, the Tennessee state flower. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, needing to get this done.
    â€œZeke, before your brother died…”
    But she stopped, biting her lip, and in her watery eyes—Zeke didn’t know if the moistness was from tears or age—he could see not only loss and disappointment but also anger. For all she’d had done to her, for all the pain and anguish and betrayal she’d witnessed and perhaps even committed, Naomi, in Zeke’s experience, had never expressed any anger over her lot. She would say anger was an unladylike emotion. Fits of temper weren’t proper for a well-bred lady. And yet Zeke could see it bubbling to the surface, choking for air, for renewed life, even if she refused to acknowledge its presence.
    She cleared her throat and looked away for a