Read Online Clean Slate by Holley Trent - Free Book Online

float unless you
relax.”
    She shifted her weight and offered a smile to a woman
approaching with a clipboard. “I don’t know. I never learned to swim.”
    “Really?”
    She shrugged as he offered a glossy catalog to the
newcomer. The woman took one of each soap and walked away. When she was gone,
Daisy whispered, “Currents at the beach used to scare me so I never learned
there and we didn’t have a pool, so…”
    “I see. I’ll make it my ambition to teach you how before I
fly home.”
    “Yeah, you’ll never see me in a swimsuit,” she mumbled.
    “What’s that?”
    She glanced down the aisle toward the crowd clumping
around the booth a company demonstrating a new hair straightening serum. Her curiosity
was piqued, not that she would actually volunteer to be a guinea pig. “Nothing,
Ben. I just…I doubt you’ll have time.”
    “Why, are you hopeless?” He chuckled, and the deep sound
made her pull her attention away from the ruckus and look at him. His sunburn
was giving way to a deep tan that looked wonderful in contrast to the pink of
his shirt. Barry would have never worn pink anything .
Barry wouldn’t have looked so good in it, anyway, with his ruddy coloring.
Barry had certainly never made all of her feminine muscles clench at the mere
sight of him, whether in or out of a shirt.
    She crossed her legs at the ankles and tried not to fall
over when Ben brushed her side with his and leaned down to whisper into her
curls, “Are you holding out on us? What’s in your hair?”
    She sucked in some air. “Just…just some lavender stuff
I’ve been playing with to get the frizz under control.”
    “It’s divine.” He inhaled deeply and straightened up.
“Seems almost edible.”
    She let out a little whimper as he pulled and released one
of her curls before walking to the other end of the table. Thankfully, he
didn’t hear it.
    Daisy, Daisy,
dork-dork.
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Clara Thys couldn’t make sense of the jumble of emotions
she felt, although that wasn’t unusual for her. Her medications generally kept
her at even keel at the expense of any significant display of emotion. She
hated feeling like a machine, merely going through the motions of life rather
than actually living it. She hadn’t always been that way. In fact, when she was
a young woman, years younger than her grown sons, she had a certain joie de vivre —downright
happy-go-lucky. Trusting.
    Too trusting.
    As a woman of barely eighteen, she had worked the
reception desk at a hotel that catered to business travelers. Back then it’d
all been so glamorous, or at least she felt that way having grown up in the
country. With her blonde hair slicked back in a bun and dressed up in her
smart, navy blue skirt suit, she’d felt so sophisticated even amidst the
handsome businessmen who flicked their credit cards across the counter at her
without even meeting her gaze.
    But there’d been one man who looked at her. He’d smiled at
her and told her goedemorgen —good
morning—in fairly passable Dutch. He actually thanked her after she
registered his room, and made sure to nod at her each time he passed the
counter.
    It wasn’t until he returned six weeks later that he asked
her name.
    “Clara,” she’d said and he’d kissed her hand.
    She blew the memories away on a ragged exhale and studied
the contents of her pill bottle. Three. Her doctor had been stepping her down.
He didn’t know how long it would take for her to feel anything again beyond her typical inadequacy, but she worried
it’d all barrel into her like a freight train over a soda can.
    What choice did she have, though? Feel nothing and be nothing? Or feel everything and try to be something more than she had been in thirty
years, even if it meant she was courting irrationality.
    She’d been dumb. She’d made a mistake—a lot of
mistakes—but she couldn’t feel her way through life like a zombie seeking
heat anymore. Jerry, the son she didn’t get to raise—the one