Hidden Summit - By Robyn Carr Page 0,75
I think my sister is about to throw us out of the house. This is a small house, about the size of yours—just two bedrooms and a small living room, which we manage to fill up completely when the three of us are rolling around on the floor. And they get wound up and can’t settle down. She’s gone to run them around the park to see if she can wear them out a little. She took the day off today to spend time with me and to cook a nice dinner for me and her boss…the boss she says is keeping things very professional while she’s working up a crush on him. I’m going to get a chance to look him over.” Then he chuckled again.
“You sound…you sound so wonderful,” she said. But the image she conjured of him hugging his younger sister and rolling around on the floor with his nephews made her wonder how he was going to make himself leave them. “It must feel so good to be reunited with them.”
“They should have me completely worn out by Sunday, when I leave. Speaking of Sunday—are you checking the news?”
“I look online every day,” she said.
“They published my name before the preliminary hearing, but I haven’t seen it again in reference to the pending trial. And no picture. At least not yet.”
“Why would they publish your name?” she asked with a tinge of anger.
“It’s not malicious, Les. It’s part of public record. They needed the name of the witness to get the search warrant to collect all the other evidence. It was news. Once something like this happens to you, you begin to notice things, like the names of victims published, if they’re not minors. I’m just grateful they haven’t run a picture yet, because I look an awful lot like Danson Conner. And if I can keep all my Virgin River friends from figuring this out before the trial…”
“But, Conner, no one from around here would wish you any harm!”
“Of course not. I just don’t want pretrial publicity to lead to you.”
“I don’t know what you mean....”
He took a breath. “I don’t want your safety compromised to get to me. You don’t watch cop shows, do you?”
“No. Lately I haven’t watched anything but you.”
“Well, don’t start watching them now. In another week and a half, this will be over, and I’ll be back.”
“Are you sure, Conner?”
“What do you mean, am I sure?”
“It’s going to be so hard for you to leave your sister and nephews.”
“It was always going to be hard,” he said. “When she married Charlie, she was only twenty-six, and off she went to Fort Bliss in Texas. Less than a year later he brought her back to me, pregnant, and left her with me while he deployed. For the past five years I’ve tried to prepare myself for the day she’d meet the right guy. The chances have always been good that she and the boys would move away.”
“You sound more like a father than a brother,” she said.
“I felt like that sometimes,” he said. “Maybe I got a little stodgy—I had a lot of responsibility at a young age....”
“You’re not stodgy now....”
“Until now, I was tied to that store. It was our legacy—I had to make it work to ensure the future. Not just mine, but the whole family’s, because there was an equal chance Katie wouldn’t meet the right guy and move away....”
“It’s different now,” she said. “You’re free to go anywhere.”
“Yes, I am. And I’m coming back to you.”
Conner felt as if he could’ve stayed on the phone with Leslie for a long time, but not only were Katie and the boys coming up the walk toward the house, Leslie did have a job to attend to. He reluctantly said goodbye with a promise to call her at his next opportunity.
He saw them from the living room picture window—they were running, of course. They didn’t walk anywhere. Katie was bringing up the rear, much more slowly. The boys blasted in the front door and tackled him, one kid on each leg. He laughed and said, “Yeah, you’re tired out. Right.” When Katie came in the door, he smiled at her and said, “You did a good job of wearing these guys down.”
“I need a nap,” she said. “Where do they get the energy?”
They ran off to the TV, firing up their current favorite movie, Avatar.
“I think we should stop feeding them,” he said.
“I’m going to make lunch, then with any