Barefoot in the Rain

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Book: Read Barefoot in the Rain for Free Online
Authors: Roxanne St. Claire
Tags: Romance, Contemporary
another hiding place in another corner of the world.
    Was he willing to risk that? If he so much as spoke the name Guy Bloom, she’d be on a plane headed back to California. But, damn it, shouldn’t she
know
?
    He let go of the door and she pulled it closed. He thrust his boot in the jamb to keep the door from closing.
    “Will, I have to—”
    “Your father has Alzheimer’s.” He had enoughstrength in his foot to nudge the opening wider and see the shocked look that drained all the color from her cheeks. “I take care of him.”
    He slipped his boot out and the door slammed shut.
    Well, he was right about the winds of change. And maybe that change was simply that after half a lifetime, he could finally get over Jocelyn Bloom.
    Keep telling yourself that, buddy. Someday you might believe it.

Chapter 4

    M imosa Key curved exactly like a question mark, forming the perfect metaphor for the childhood Jocelyn Bloom had spent there. As she took the curve around Barefoot Bay in the car she’d borrowed from Lacey—with the excuse that she had to go shopping for clothes—and headed to the south end of the island, Jocelyn considered the eternal question that loomed for the seventeen and three-quarters years she’d lived on this barrier island.
    What would happen next?
    With Guy Bloom, no one was ever sure. When she was very young, nothing had been terribly out of the ordinary. But then, overnight it seemed to her childish perception, he’d changed. He’d go weeks, even months, on an even keel—hot tempered, but under control, before he’d snap. Dishes and books could sail across the room, vicious words in their wake. And then he had to hit someone.
    More specifically, he had to hit Mary Jo Bloom, who took those beatings like she’d deserved them. Of course, with maturity, perspective, and the benefit of a psychology degree, Jocelyn now knew that
no one
deserved that. No one.
    Your father has Alzheimer’s.
    Not for the first time that morning, she had to ask the obvious: Were his episodes some kind of early sign of the disease? When she’d been home for Mom’s funeral he seemed fine. But maybe the signs were there all along and she’d missed them.
    Guilt mixed with hate and anger, the whole cocktail knotting her stomach even more than it had been since she’d seen Will Palmer.
    Will
.
    She closed her eyes, not wanting to think about him. About how good he looked. How hours on the baseball field had honed him into a tanned, muscular specimen who still had see-straight-through-you Wedgwood blue eyes, a shock of unexpected color against his suntanned skin and shaggy black hair.
    God, she’d missed him all these years. All these years that she gave him up so he didn’t have to be saddled with a girl who had a monster for a father and now—
    She banged the heel of her hand on the steering wheel.
    He
took care
of the bastard? It didn’t seem possible or right or reasonable in any way she could imagine.
    Like it or not, Guy was her parent. If he had to be put in a home, she’d do it. But before she could tackle this problem with a list of possible solutions, she had to figure out exactly how bad the situation was and how far gone he was with dementia.
    The word settled hard on her heart. She knew a little about Alzheimer’s—knew the disease could make a person cranky and mean. Wow, Guy must be a joy to take care of, considering he’d already been a ten on the cranky-and-mean scale. Why would Will volunteer for the job?
    Because Will had one weakness: the softest, sweetest, most tender of hearts. And wasn’t that what she’d once loved about him?
    That and those shoulders.
    She pressed her foot against the accelerator, glancing at the ranch houses and palm trees, the bicycles in driveways, the flowers around the mailboxes. This was a lovely residential neighborhood where normal families lived normal lives.
    Right. Where dysfunctional families made a mockery of normal. Where—
    Oh, Lord. Guy was on the

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