When I Found You (Silver Springs #8) - Brenda Novak Page 0,2

she preferred to pretend that she’d known what she was getting into when she rented this place—that it hadn’t been the act of a woman so desperate to escape her current situation that she’d jumped from the frying pan into the fire. She had to convince him that she was going to be fine so that he’d leave. The sooner, the better. Then she could get on with the business of rebuilding her life, wouldn’t have to deal with the conflicting emotions he evoked.

He’d been with her for three days, and she still wasn’t entirely sure why he’d come. To help, certainly. He’d done plenty of that. But why did he want to help her? That was the question. Since when did what happened to her matter to him?

Actually, that wasn’t fair. Mack, like his brothers, had tried to look out for her during those few years when her mother was married to his father. He was the baby of the family, so although she was nine years younger, she was closest to him in age. After she graduated from high school and confessed her love for him, however, he’d pulled back a great deal. Although he’d continued to check in and let her know he cared about her, and she would visit him and his brothers whenever she returned to Whiskey Creek, he wouldn’t allow their relationship to go any deeper, especially after that one night during Victorian Days. And after she got married, she’d actually heard from his brothers—Dylan, Aaron, Rod and Grady—more than she heard from Mack. She wasn’t even aware of how he’d learned that her life had imploded. The news hadn’t come from her own lips. If she could’ve hidden it from him, she would have.

It was possible he’d read about it, though. It’d been such a shocking and horrible situation; the media had been all over it.

Or her mother could’ve told him. Although Anya had divorced Mack’s father years ago, she was still in Whiskey Creek. Mack and some of his brothers still lived there, too, where they ran the original location of their family business, Amos Auto Body. Knowing her mother, Anya stayed because she considered them the only family she had, and even though Natasha doubted they felt the same way, they continued to help Anya whenever she got down on her luck.

Natasha refused to lean on them the way her mother did. She preferred to stand on her own two feet, had decided long ago that if she couldn’t have Mack’s love, she’d at least have his respect. That was why it was so difficult to let him see her now. This should’ve been a moment of triumph, when she faced him as a practicing pediatrician who no longer needed him.

Instead, because she’d hired the wrong nurse, she was standing amid the rubble of everything she’d established so far.

“Well, structurally sound or not, I can’t bring in the furniture,” he said, hooking his thumbs into the waistband of his faded jeans, which had a hole in one knee, as he surveyed his surroundings. “Not until we get a few things done in here, anyway. And—” he wrinkled his nose “—it stinks.”

“That’s a skunk,” Lucas piped up. “Oh, look! A potato bug!” He dropped down on his stomach so he could examine the insect crawling on the floor.

At least he wasn’t by the rat droppings.

“I’ll be okay,” she said. “I’ll check under the house to see if we have a dead animal there. It’s probably nothing, just residual spray—”

“Which means we can’t do anything about it,” he broke in.

“It’ll fade with time,” she said. “And I’ll work around the furniture, once we bring it in, so that you can take the truck back to LA.” After all, she didn’t have that much; her ex had taken their bedroom and living room furniture and their washer and dryer. “I can get this place fixed up on my own, a little at a time.”

He gave her a look that said she must be crazy. “You want me to leave you alone with this mess?”

“Why not?”

“Have you ever put in a window?”

She had no idea what she was going to do about the window. She’d poured everything she had into becoming a doctor. When would she have had the time or the opportunity to learn anything about home improvement? “I can probably get the landlord to handle that much.”

“You told me the lease you signed was ‘as is.’ That the landlord had no money for