TO DIE FOR (Eva Rae Thomas Mystery Book 8) - Willow Rose Page 0,3
felt that Joanna demanded a lot from Jeff.
“We’ve been dating less than a year,” Jeff said. He had a little smirk on his lip that always made Lynn smile. His blue eyes lingered on her a lot during their conversations, and they had come to learn during their sessions that it was a pattern in his life—flirting with women to feel superior to them. It was one of the reasons his girlfriend had wanted them to seek counseling. They were planning on marrying within the next year, but she wanted to make sure they were suitable and hopefully have him stop looking at other women. That’s how she had put it during their first session. She wanted them to be close, but Jeff wasn’t doing enough.
“I’m trying my best here,” he added and leaned back on the couch, stretching out his arms behind his girlfriend, struggling to kill the smirk.
“Trying your best?” she squealed. “It sure doesn’t feel like it. Last weekend at the bar, you were flirting with that woman, remember? The blonde one?”
“I was just talking to her. Her boyfriend was right there next to her. I wasn’t flirting at all.”
Joanna’s shoulders slumped, and she turned away from him. “You see what I have to put up with here? I don’t want to end up like some suburban housewife who doesn’t know where her husband is or who he is doing.”
“At some point, you’ll just have to trust him, Joanna,” Lynn said. “We all have to trust the ones we choose to marry.”
“Yeah, you totally have trust issues,” Jeff said, leaning forward.
Lynn didn’t know much about him except that he was an investment banker and made a lot of money. She couldn’t blame Joanna for being nervous since he was a very handsome guy, tall and blond with the bluest eyes Lynn had ever seen.
Lynn looked at the clock on the wall next to her. She had let them go over time without noticing it.
“I’m afraid our time is up for today. Let’s continue where we left off next time, okay?”
They got up, and Joanna rushed toward the door, while Jeff didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get out. He smiled at Lynn as he passed her, then winked.
“See you next week, Doc.”
She closed the door before he could notice that she blushed.
Chapter 2
“You mean to tell me that Amy has been here the entire time?”
I knelt next to the girl on the floor in the bathroom. The house Christine had taken me to was for sale and abandoned. I pushed away a dead roach lying on its back.
Christine nodded. “Her parents wanted her to get rid of the baby, but she didn’t. So, we brought her here, and she’s been living here the past several months. I’ve been bringing her food and whatever else she needed. But last night she…she started to feel pain, and when I came to see her this morning on my way to school, as usual, she was screaming.”
Amy was sweating and let out a loud groan as another contraction waved through her body.
“Her water broke like half an hour ago, and that’s when I thought I’d come to get you,” Christine said. “I don’t know what to do.”
I stared at the young girl, no more than fifteen. Christine had told me that Amy had gotten pregnant a long time ago, but I had assumed that she had an abortion since I didn’t hear anything else. I knew that was what her parents wanted. I couldn’t believe she had been hiding in this house for months, and Christine had kept this a secret from me.
“What the heck, Christine?” I said. “What was your plan? To have her give birth here? In all this dirt?”
Amy let out another loud groan, and I realized she was closer than I had thought. I had to act fast.
“We need to get an ambulance,” I said and grabbed my phone. I looked at Christine. “I’ll deal with you later.”
The ambulance came quickly, but by then, it was too late to move her. The EMTs decided they had to let her have the baby there, and Christine held Amy’s hands as she went into labor right there on the bathroom floor of an abandoned house.
“There you go, Amy. You’ve got this,” I squealed and remembered my own birth just a few weeks earlier. It had gone pretty smoothly and uneventful since it was my fourth child.