Page 34 of The Woman Left Behind

Nadia was Doc’s (now pregnant) wife.

And Harry’s breakfast with Lillian was one hundred percent making the rounds.

“We’ll be nice,” Doc said. “We won’t scare her off.”

“With her, it isn’t that.”

“Bullshit.”

It was.

It was bullshit.

It was such bullshit, Harry had been wracking his brain for two days for some excuse to call Lillian, stop by her house, anything to get in touch with her, see how she was doing, try to make her smile.

As a matter of ongoing police work, but also as his only reason to talk to Lillian, he’d phoned her parents’ dentist office to ask after their files, only to find it was “busy season” (whatever the fuck that meant) at the office and they hadn’t had time to send anyone out to the storage unit to check. But considering the weighty matter at hand, they promised to do it the next day, even if it was a Saturday.

“Where did you find her?” Doc asked. “Jess says she’s a knockout.”

So it wasn’t the breakfast for Doc, it was Jesse who had the big mouth.

“She’s lived here decades.”

“Whatever,” Doc muttered. “Glad you’re finally pulling your head out. Nadia’s beside herself. She’s got Ledge poring over cookbooks, trying to decide what to serve when you two show. And we can just say my eleven-year-old son is pretty pleased about this too, considering normally he’d probably break out in a rash if he even touched a cookbook.”

“I met her because we’re waiting on the identification of two sets of remains found in Idaho, and there’s a very good chance they’re her murdered parents,” Harry told his friend.

“Fucking hell,” Doc whispered.

“So…yeah. Now is not the time for me to make a move.”

“You got too many scruples, brother,” Doc said. “Most men would think now’s the perfect time to make a move.”

“I’m not most men, and that shit is fucked if most men think that way. She’s vulnerable.”

“This is what I know, Harry,” Doc started. “Most men would look at this as a way to use a woman’s weakness to get in her pants. And you’re right. That’s fucked and you are not most men. So if you’re into this woman, it isn’t about that. Or not just about that.”

It wasn’t.

Not just.

It had been a long dry spell since Winnie.

But even if that was the case, what he wasn’t allowing himself to come to terms with, but he still knew it was there, was that wasn’t all there was with what he felt for Lillian.

Though, he definitely felt it.

Definitely.

He could spend a very happy week just thinking about what it would feel like to have two handfuls of her sweet, round ass.

But that absolutely wasn’t all this was about.

Doc continued, “And she lives in this town, she’s gonna know that about you. So bottom line, we can’t always pick our times. Sometimes, the time picks us.”

It hit Harry then that Doc had met Nadia just months after Nadia’s mother was brutally murdered by her father. And Doc was even more of a confirmed bachelor than Harry was.

But those two fell fast, fell hard, and stuck.

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