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

mouth. Eight weeks had gone by since Leah’s last visit, and only a few things had altered: today Isabella’s blanket was lavender, and her mom wasn’t present. Megan must have just stepped out because her Bible rested open on her chair.

“I thought sepsis might take her down,” Sebastian said. “But it didn’t.”

“Pull through,” Leah said to the baby, entreaty in her voice.

“She’s a fighter.”

“Then fight,” she said to Isabella.

Silently, she prayed over the tiny girl.

How would she have dealt with this had it been Dylan lying here with a machine breathing for him? How could she have kept it together if Dylan’s life had been the one hanging by the thinnest piece of thread, a thread that God could extend or cut?

All life hung by a thin piece of thread.

Her life included. She knew this.

It’s just that inside this room, Isabella’s thread seemed excruciatingly fragile.

Leah transferred her focus to Sebastian and found him watching her with a look both soft and somber.

“C’mon.” He extended a hand.

She took it.

Sebastian drove Leah to a museum that contained many fine works of art and one particularly private and dim corridor between galleries. When he came to a halt in the corridor, she glanced at him. Immediately, she read what he was thinking in his unrepentant expression.

“Sebastian. You’re a well-respected surgeon in this city. You cannot be found making out in museum hallways.”

“Can’t I?”

“No.”

He stepped toward her, his hands curving around to support the back of her head. “As far as I know, making out in hallways isn’t against museum policy.”

“How familiar are you with this museum’s policies?”

“As familiar as I want to be.”

“How familiar are you with what’s in good taste?”

“Leah?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve never cared about what’s in good taste.”

She saw so much desire in his eyes that her breath turned shallow.

Heat rose, awareness built. One of his fingertips caressed the tender skin at the back of her neck. She could feel the hammer of her heart, hear the hitch in his inhalations.

“You wouldn’t want to ‘let a gorgeous guy like me out of your sight,’ would you?” he asked.

She could not resist a man who quoted Han Solo to her. But in the name of spunkiness, she leaned toward his ear and reciprocated with another quote. “‘Don’t get cocky.’”

“Kiss me.”

“I don’t remember a quote about kissing—”

“That last one,” he whispered, “wasn’t a quote.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake, who cared about what was or wasn’t in good taste? She pulled him to her and they kissed deep and slow.

A sound of approval rumbled in his throat.

Someone might come in.

But the danger of discovery only heightened the thrill.

His fingers speared into her hair.

Sebastian.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Late the next morning, Leah woke in her hotel room to a column of sunshine falling across the foot of her bed. Clean, crisp sheets cocooned her.

A text from Sebastian, who’d be back at work by now on this Monday morning, awaited her.

Meet me for coffee before you drive home? I know a place.

Is this my life? she thought, tossing a hand onto the pillow above her head with a happy sigh.

The enormous gray monolith otherwise known as the Lewis R. Slaton Courthouse had been constructed more than a hundred years ago. Leah sat in the waiting area of the “closed file room,” smelling the building’s age in its dust-scented air and seeing the building’s age in the old-fashioned glass partition separating her from the room’s attendant.

This morning she’d placed a phone call to the courthouse and learned that criminal records were not available online, but that both criminal and civil records were available here. So she’d checked out of her hotel and relocated to the courthouse computer lab. She’d begun by searching for criminal and civil proceedings that named her parents, Erica and Todd Montgomery. Her efforts generated no matches. Nor did her efforts generate a match for Trina Brookside.

When she’d moved on to Jonathan Brookside, however, she’d hit pay dirt. So much pay dirt that she’d been momentarily caught by surprise, like a hide-and-seek-player who jumps when they discover their friend blinking at them from underneath a bed.

Seven civil suits had been filed against Jonathan over the years. But only two—one for wrongful termination and one for breach of contract—had been filed recently enough that the associated documents were available digitally.

She’d combed through those two suits and recorded all the pertinent details on her phone. Then she’d jotted down the case numbers for the other five cases.

When none of the nurses’ names resulted in a single criminal or civil charge, she’d consulted the staff member in the computer room, who’d informed Leah that she’d need to visit the closed file room to gain access to documents pertaining to the old suits filed against Jonathan.

She’d submitted a records request for the case numbers in question thirty minutes ago. Ever since, she’d been waiting alongside an elderly woman speaking Spanish quietly into her phone and a middle-aged couple. The wife was reading Better Homes & Gardens and the husband was dozing while sitting upright.

Seven suits against Jonathan.

Seven! That seemed like an unusually high number, but perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps that was a low number of suits for an individual who owned a company as large as Gridwork Communications Corporation.

“Ms. Montgomery?”

She approached the young blond man stationed behind the glass.

“Here you are.” He slid her the stack of pages he’d photocopied from the originals.

She thanked him and returned to her still-warm chair.

Quickly, she skimmed the pages. One suit for breach of contract. One for discrimination. One for intellectual property rights. Two for wrongful termination.

At first glance, it appeared two of the suits had been settled out of court and that he’d been acquitted of the rest. Which, of course, did not necessarily mean Jonathan had been innocent. The acquittals might simply mean that he’d had an excellent defense team.

Leah crossed her legs, collected a pen from her purse, and started wading through the dense legal language of the topmost sheet. Page by page, she circled every key fact—names,