Let It Be Me by Becky Wade (top young adult novels .TXT) 📕

The infant had slit her eyes open as if she found the light of the world to be an unwelcome assault. Her lips formed a pink rosebud. Her eyes were dark, as was her dusting of hair.

She looked just like Dylan had when he’d been a newborn.

Sebastian had never felt such an overwhelming pull toward a woman in his life. He knew why he felt the pull. Leah was brainy, kind, at peace with herself, challenging, funny. He loved that she said random things about flowers serving as a metaphor for life and melons shaped like rhomboids.

What he didn’t know: Why, of all people, did the woman he felt this way about have to be the woman Ben loved?

After leaving the hospital, they came to a stop at Leah’s car, parked in an outdoor lot.

She dashed a piece of hair away from her face. “My head is spinning with everything I just learned.”

“I can imagine.” He wished he had something more comforting to offer. “Are you going to contact Trina and Jonathan Brookside?”

“I don’t know. At this point, I’m simply planning to stalk the Brooksides on the Internet . . . in a very friendly, non-creepy way—”

“Very non-creepy.”

“—to see what I can learn about their lives and about their daughter’s life.”

When Sebastian was young and had asked his mom about his father, she’d told him plainly that she’d met him at a party and that they’d had a one-night stand. Later, when his mom discovered she was pregnant, she’d contacted his father as a courtesy. Sebastian suspected they’d both been relieved when they’d learned the other was happy to continue leading separate lives. His father didn’t have to be a father. His mother could be a mother without a stranger’s influence.

Sebastian knew his father’s name, but felt nothing toward him except vague resentment. No connection. No affection. No desire to communicate with him.

Leah held her purse strap with both hands, stacked one atop the other. “I can’t thank you enough for stepping in and helping me with all of this.”

“Not a problem.”

“No, really.” She regarded him steadily. “Thank you.”

His body roared in response, and he had to lock his teeth together to keep from saying Don’t fall in love with Ben. Please don’t. “You’re welcome.”

His awareness of the rest of the world—the noise, the cars, the colors —sucked away.

“There’s something special about you, Sebastian. Something appealing. You should feel very proud of the man you’ve become.”

Her words came as such a shock that it took him a second to compute them. She found him appealing? Pleasure collided with guilt, freezing him.

She slid into the driver’s seat of her gray Honda Pilot, which was old but in good condition. “Good-bye.” Holding the door ajar, she waited for him to respond.

Say something, you idiot.

She started her car. “Good-bye,” she repeated, maybe thinking he hadn’t heard the first time.

“Good-bye,” he said.

She shut her door and drove away.

As soon as she was out of sight, he swung on his heel and tunneled his hands into his hair.

The day of the farmers market, Ben had said that Leah was rare.

He’d been right. She was rare.

And she wasn’t coming back.

Had that been awkward? What she’d just said to him?

“There’s something special about you, Sebastian. Something appealing. You should feel very proud of the man you’ve become.” Her words had seemed appropriate to her while she was speaking them, but then his face had gone strangely blank in response.

She replayed it. Huh. The statement still seemed acceptable to her. Friendly and complimentary. Of course, it was possible that that had been an awkward thing to say and had only seemed normal to her.

If so, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t warned him about her lackluster social skills.

And, of course, it could have been worse. She could have confessed her fascination with his lips or, unforgivably, failed to solve a quadratic equation in his presence.

Where was she driving?

She’d been so preoccupied with Sebastian that she’d failed to type Trina and Jonathan’s address into her GPS before leaving the hospital. Smoothly, she pulled into a strip mall and parked. She peeked at her reflection. Even now, after the gale force winds of her parents’ identity and Sebastian’s nearness, it mollified her to see that she looked calm.

She typed 11482 Riverchase Road into her phone.

“Turn right at Beverly Road,” her phone’s Irish male voice instructed her. She had a closer relationship with that voice than she’d ever had with a boyfriend.

She followed the Irishman’s directions.

A twenty-minute drive brought her to the well-established Morningside Lenox Park neighborhood. Hilly tree-lined streets harbored homes that had been built in the first half of the twentieth century. This neighborhood would have been pricey for a young family three decades ago, just as it was now.

Leah parked a little ways down and across the street from 11482.

Feeling conspicuous, like a cop on a stakeout, she scoured the length of the street, then eyed Trina and Jonathan’s house. What if one of her family members walked out that door? Or spotted her from inside and came out to question her?

Stillness encased the entire block. Nothing moved, except for gently swaying branches. Most likely, she could stay here for a short period of time without anyone noticing.

The Dutch blue trim of the home emphasized its muted brick exterior and charming black front door. Planting beds tucked tidy shrubs against the base of the structure. The flowerpots on the front step burst with geraniums.

When she was brought home from the hospital as a newborn, she ought to have been brought here, to this stately Americana home. It was easy to picture a baby nursery in that front right room. It would have a big window, wood floors, crown molding.

In her earliest memories, she’d lived in an uninspiring two-bedroom apartment. Dad had had the design aesthetic of a frat boy; Mom had accessorized their hodgepodge furniture with international treasures from places she’d never had the opportunity to visit. A wall hanging from India. Art from