Читать книгу Beautiful Stranger - Ruth Wind - Страница 8

The girl showed up on his doorstep, wearing nothing but an oversize windbreaker to protect her from the February cold. Her shoulders were painfully thin under the jacket. Her stomach bowed out in an unmistakable shape she tried to hide, a shape all wrong on a fifteen-year-old.

The long hair hadn’t been washed in a few days, and Robert could tell she was wearing the same makeup she’d set out with. Whatever belongings she’d carried with her were in a very small backpack.

When the knock came, it startled him into breaking a fragile bit of red glass he’d been fitting into a small frame, edging it with heat to ease it. Tsking, he flipped his safety glasses to the top of his head and went to the door. The girl was standing there on his step, her chin lifted at that cocky teenage angle that was all bravado, yet hid a scared little girl heart. She popped a big wad of gum. Long earrings glittered against her tangled hair, and her eyeliner was smeared, as if she’d slept in it.

“Hey, uncle,” she said, like she’d just come in from school. As if she wasn’t five hundred miles from home. Like he expected her.

Robert met that I-dare-you gaze for one long moment, seeing, with painful memory, himself at fourteen, fifteen, wanting somebody to—

Without a word, he opened the screen door. He didn’t yell or ask what the hell she was doing. He simply pushed the door aside, opened his arms and she fell against him, her twig arms fierce against his ribs, her relief an almost palpable presence. She didn’t have to tell him she was in trouble, that she’d run away, that she had nowhere else to go.

When her tough-girl facade cracked, it cracked wide open, and his fifteen-year-old niece, five months pregnant if she was a minute, burst into tears and sobbed like a baby. He just held on.

There wasn’t much room for her in his little house, and heaven knew he was the last man on earth who ought to be an example for anybody, but Robert held her while she cried, then sent her to take a shower while he made her a big bowl of soup. He made her eat, then put her to bed in his own room before he called his sister, Alicia, who responded pretty much as he’d expected—her new husband was more important to her than her daughter. Robert forgave her before he even hung up. They’d had the same mother after all.

He leaned in the doorway and watched Crystal sleep, a knot of pain in his chest. No matter how bad he’d be at the father thing, he was better than nobody. He’d managed to oversee a motley crew of soldiers through a war—how bad could one teenage girl be?

He set to work on cleaning up the back room, boxing up his tools and supplies so she would have a room of her own. Tomorrow they’d figure out the rest.