One More Dance by Roxanne Rustand (fun books to read for adults TXT) 📕

Sylvia had counted on Jared. Tutored him. Worked at carefully managing the right introductions so he could marry well after earning his law degree, and provide his mother and sister with the elegant, comfortable lifestyle they deserved.

Sylvia’s modest stock portfolio and rigid attention to the market had kept them afloat, but Jared had made a grave mistake in his choice of wife, and even now—twenty years

later—his selfishness burned.

Maybe his tacky little wife had lured him into an unfortunate marriage all those years ago. But with Julia, Sylvia wasn’t going to let anything go wrong.

Nanette took a delicate sip of her raspberry iced tea. “And how is your daughter?”

“She’s still out East, but she’s nearly done with her thesis. After that, well...” Sylvia made a graceful, offhand motion with her fingertips, carefully dismissing the years Julia had spent trying to “find herself” in college. “She’s still thinking about medical school or a Ph.D. in biology. And your son?”

“Robert is still leaning toward family practice.” Nanette shook her head, obviously distressed. “I keep telling him that plastic surgery is the way to go, with all the baby boomers sliding into old age, but he says he’d rather work with the disadvantaged. Can you imagine? I’m sure he’ll come to his senses, though...once he finds the right woman and settles down. He has no idea how much it costs to raise a family these days.”

The perfect opening.

“So true. Those responsibilities do bring things into focus.” Sylvia idly toyed with a mandarin orange in her salad. “Our children seem so alike.”

“Perhaps we can try arranging another meeting. They seemed to like each other rather well at the club on the Fourth of July.”

The Laughtons were an old, moneyed family, with a sprawling estate on Lake Minnetonka and a palatial home on a cliff overlooking Lake Superior. The possible connection was definitely enticing.

Sylvia imagined Robert and Julia living on an equally grand estate with a pleasant little mother-in-law cottage, and then urging Sylvia to move there. The vision filled her with a sense of warmth and security she hadn’t felt in a long time. “That would be lovely. I can just imagine—”

From inside Sylvia’s vintage Gucci handbag came the soft trill of her cell phone. She swiftly reached into the bag, glanced at the caller ID on the screen and pressed a side button to mute the ring, irritated at the interruption. Whatever Kate had to say, she could certainly leave it as voicemail.

Sylvia had noticed three other messages when she walked out of the salon—calls she’d missed due to the constant chatter and the noise of hair dryers. She’d simply have to catch up on all of them later.

Nothing was as important as this conversation with her friend.

“Sorry. As I was saying, just imagine our two together.” Sylvia gave Nanette a conspiratorial smile. “Wouldn’t Robert and Julia give us the most adorable grandchildren?”

THE VISION OF JARED’S ashen, damaged face kept crowding into Kate’s thoughts as she sat curled up at one end of a couch in the waiting area by the operating room. The television was blaring in the corner, but she had no idea what the newscasters were saying.

The longing to touch Jared, to talk to him, welled up inside her, her emotions swinging between hope and fear as she fought to stay in control.

Two other families had filed in, settled down to wait, then left—one overjoyed, the other overwhelmed with sorrow. And still, there’d been no word about Jared since the anesthesiologist had come out with his release forms.

Jared had suffered that second cardiac arrest just inside the OR, but he’d rallied and had now been in surgery for almost an hour. An hour that seemed like a lifetime, marked by the inexorable ticking of the second hand on the clock.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Kate’s fingers itched, flexing involuntarily as she imagined holding the same surgical instruments. She remembered the broken hips and backs and legs she’d operated on—snaking rods up through the marrow on femurs and tibiae; using screws and pins and wires to draw fractured shards together into a solid, functional structure.

But it was her husband on the other side of those double doors...the father of her daughter, the man who’d been a part of her life all these years. It was still almost impossible to wrap her mind around the thought that any moment could be his last, and there was nothing she could do about it.

“Dr. Mathers?”

She swallowed hard against the fear rising in her throat and looked up to see a somber chaplain with an equally grim-faced nurse at his side. Her heart stuttered. “Jared—”

“Oh, my dear,” the elderly gentleman said quickly. “We didn’t come with bad news. As far as we know, he’s still weathering surgery very well. How are you holding up through all of this?”

Kate looked down at her knotted hands and willed herself to relax. “I wish our daughter was here...I haven’t heard a word from her yet. Has anyone been able to reach Jared’s mother or sister?”

“We’ve left several messages for his mother, but we did reach his sister, Julia,” the nurse told her. She pulled a slip of paper from her pocket. “The receptionist in the ER took a message from a friend of yours. Deanna, is it?” She unfolded the note. “Your daughter’s plane was held up due to bad weather, so she missed her connection from Minneapolis to Madison. The next open seats wouldn’t get her to Madison until late tomorrow afternoon.”

“Oh, no,” Kate breathed. She imagined Casey trying to find a shuttle to a hotel or simply camping out in the airport for the night. Either way she was all alone, a young college student who felt independent but who would always be Kate’s baby. She’d be so devastated if she didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to her dad...

The staggering thought blindsided Kate, sending a gut-deep wave of grief rushing through her.

“But your friend and her husband are already driving to Minneapolis