Healing Hearts (New Hope Falls #6) - Kimberly Rae Jordan Page 0,14

frowned. Still, she shook her head. “He just doesn’t know you, so that…worries him.”

“Has he only been hurt by strangers?”

Sophia sucked in a breath. How was she supposed to respond to that? Clearly, she’d been naïve to think that Ryker would take her request at face value. That he wouldn’t wonder about Bryson’s previous experiences that had caused such fear to surface in the child.

“No. He hasn’t been hurt by strangers. He just doesn’t like people he doesn’t know.”

Ryker seemed to be on the verge of pushing the subject, but instead, he looked away from her to the large picture window in the living room. She followed his gaze and spotted Bryson standing there, his hands clasped beneath his chin as he stared at them with a worried expression on his face.

“Are you sure he’ll respond positively to what you’re suggesting?”

Sophia wasn’t sure about any of this, but she had to try something. “I think he’ll be okay if I’m there too.”

Ryker looked back at her. “Let me think about it, okay?”

“Of course.” Stepping back inside, she picked up the diaper bag and the car seat and brought them out to the porch. “Thank you for considering it.”

“I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

Sophia watched as Ryker walked down the sidewalk to his truck. Well, that hadn’t gone quite as she had hoped. But at the same time, he hadn’t out and out refused her.

Back inside, she closed and locked the door, then drew Bryson to the rocker recliner in the corner. She sat down and helped him climb up into her lap.

As she rocked, she ran her fingers through his curls, doing her best to assure him that Vivianne was fine and that she’d be back the next day. If she thought he’d eventually get past this anxiety he had about Ryker, she would have just waited it out. But for some reason, he was as focused on it as he’d been the very first day Ryker had come by.

She had needed to do this. She just hoped Ryker could understand that, even though it didn’t impact him one way or another.

~*~

Ryker sat down at his small dining room table and opened the flat box to reveal the pepperoni pizza he’d picked up on his way home. Now that Lani was bringing Michael food each evening, he was back to his own devices most nights. And after the day he’d had, he was more than happy about that.

Well, the whole day hadn’t been bad, just the part where Sophia had asked for his help in putting her son at ease about his presence. It wasn’t that he didn’t want the little boy to be more settled about his role in Vivianne’s life, but what would it cost him to do that?

Even now, several hours later, he could picture Bryson’s expression as he’d stood at the window watching them. The thing was, it sat horribly wrong with him that there was any child who feared him in the way that Bryson seemed to.

So even though he’d asked for a little time to consider it, Ryker had known from the moment Sophia had posed the request that he would do it. He just needed a little time to prepare himself.

Though part of his willingness to help her stemmed from wanting to put Bryson at ease, he also wanted to know what had caused the boy to become like that in the first place. Sophia may have denied that Bryson had been hurt, but Ryker knew that abuse took many forms. Physical being just one of them.

As a pediatrician, he’d been taught how to recognize the signs. Plus, he’d heard plenty about them from his psychiatrist mom. It wasn’t in his nature to let the little boy suffer if there was something he could do to help him out.

He wished that he could talk to his mom about the situation, but she’d want details that he just didn’t have. And something told him that Sophia wasn’t going to part with those secrets easily, so asking her about them would just be an exercise in futility. She trusted him to a certain extent now, but he doubted that it would be enough for her to confide in him.

As he thought of the mother and son pair, Ryker had to admit to a certain amount of curiosity. Whether that was because of the boy’s intense reaction to him or the fact that they both carried a haunted look that wasn’t helped by the fact that they