Thief of My Heart. Janice Sims

are, but I’m happy to hear it.” She paused. “She has gone through something traumatic recently, though, so maybe that had something to do with her sudden turnaround. But that, I’m afraid, is something she’ll have to tell you about herself.”

      Decker was instantly concerned for Desiree. Something traumatic, Lauren had said. Now his curiosity was doubly engaged. But he didn’t press Lauren. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll let you get back to what you were doing. Thanks, Lauren.”

      “Congrats,” Lauren said. “Treat her like the queen she is!”

      “You know I will,” he said with a smile.

      After he’d hung up, he sat on a stool at the island in the kitchen, his brow furrowed by a frown. His heart ached with the knowledge that Desiree was in emotional pain right now, and he could do nothing to lessen it.

      He got up and went to the fridge to get ingredients for a quick beef strip stir-fry. Cooking always calmed him and helped him think. Ironically, it was his father and not his mother who’d given him his appreciation of cooking. Thaddeus Riley, whom everyone called Tad, told his son that knowing how to cook upped a man’s chances of landing the right woman. He swore that was how he’d won June’s heart.

      As he chopped fresh vegetables at the counter, he thought about the first time he’d seen Desiree. The occasion had been a sad one. It was at his uncle Frank’s funeral. The service had ended, and those attending were spilling out of the church, preparing to go to the cemetery for the interment. He’d spotted a tall, shapely woman in a dark skirt suit standing in the middle of the crowd looking around as if she’d misplaced someone. He’d been instantly drawn to her, and before he knew it he was standing in front of her, offering to help her find whomever she had lost.

      Desiree Gaines had creamy golden-brown skin, and when she looked up at him, she blushed noticeably. Her eyes were the color of honey, big, wide-spaced and thickly lashed. He remembered that when his gaze had fallen on her mouth, his heart skipped a beat. Those full lips looked so inviting, he had sighed inwardly when she parted them and said, “I’m all right, thank you. I see my sister just a little ahead of me over there.” She had pointed at a woman who favored her but was a couple of inches taller.

      Decker knew he was running out of time at that point and had started talking fast. “Look, I know this is going to sound strange at a funeral, but you are the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen, and having just found you, I don’t want to lose you again.” He reached into his jacket pocket, retrieved one of his cards and pressed it into her palm. He had felt her reluctance to let him do that. She withdrew her hand from his at the first opportunity. But Decker was determined not to let that be the last time they met.

      He held up his hands to show that he meant her no harm, and said, while backing away, “I’ve got to go. They’re waiting on me so we can go on to the cemetery, but call me, please. You won’t regret it.”

      Desiree had merely smiled at him with a somewhat doubtful expression on her beautiful face. He had never expected to see her again. But less than two hours later, she had shown up at his aunt Veronica’s house with her sister, Lauren. Decker only learned later that Lauren and Colton were an item by then. He just thanked his lucky stars that he’d gotten another chance to speak with Desiree.

      He laughed now. Not that it got me anywhere, he thought. She still made me wait two years.

      * * *

      “How do you feel about gaining five more pounds?” Desiree asked Madison Samuelson, age fifteen, who was seeing her for treatment for the psychological effects of anorexia nervosa.

      It was Tuesday afternoon, and they were in her office, decorated to put her clients at ease. The furnishings were modern pieces done in expensive brown leather. The pillows, rugs and draperies were in earth tones, and the hardwood floor was light pine. The windows were double-paned to prevent outside noises from intruding.

      Desiree sat in a chair with her legs crossed opposite Madison, who sat on the couch with her legs tucked underneath her. She had medium brown skin and big light brown eyes. Her shoulder-length hair was in braids, and she invariably wore a scarf over it, which made Desiree wonder why she covered her head. Was she hiding something? Sometimes girls who had issues such as Madison’s inflicted pain on themselves by pulling their hair out at the roots, cutting themselves, anything that made them forget their mental pain for a moment.

      “I feel good!” Madison cried, eyes looking anywhere but directly at Desiree. Desiree recognized this as avoidance. Madison wasn’t here willingly. Her parents had insisted she come to these sessions, and she probably didn’t think they were doing any good. When Desiree had first seen Madison, who was five-five, she had weighed only eighty pounds. Today she weighed a hundred and five pounds, and her skin, hair, teeth, everything about her physical body looked much healthier. But Desiree was still concerned that so far what they’d been able to accomplish was only a Band-Aid on the surface of what was a much deeper cut to Madison’s psyche.

      They still hadn’t gotten to the root of the problem. Why Madison had started starving herself. Madison would only say some girls at school had told her she looked fat, and she’d wanted to fit in, so she had started eating less. Soon eating less had turned into eating practically nothing in a twenty-four-hour period. She’d been rushed to the hospital with heart failure before her parents realized how far gone she was.

      Desiree suspected Madison harbored resentment for her parents because they hadn’t noticed her going downhill sooner. However, Madison had never said a word against her parents. Her comments, in fact, were always positive, as if giving upbeat responses would get her out of therapy that much quicker.

      Until now, Desiree hadn’t wanted to put any pressure on Madison, believing that the girl would respond to simply having someone to listen to her grievances. However, Madison was pretending she didn’t have anything to complain about.

      Therefore Desiree would have to take a different approach to the girl’s treatment: anger. Some people had to get angry before they could move on to the next level.

      “Madison,” Desiree said, looking at the girl’s face, which was impassive. “How do you suppose your parents missed the fact that you were practically skin and bones before they noticed you needed help?”

      Madison swung her legs off the couch and sat up, staring at Desiree with her mouth agape and eyes wide. She gasped and closed her mouth. She looked at Desiree with one eyebrow raised higher than the other, as if to say, “Oh, no, you didn’t go there!”

      Desiree fought to keep her facial expression neutral because she was delighted that she’d gotten a rise out of the girl. There was actually some spunk left in her!

      Madison looked her straight in the eye and said, “Because they were too busy working, chasing the mighty dollar, to see that I was dying.”

      “And what were you doing?” Desiree asked. “Wearing baggy clothes to hide your body? Pretending to eat at the dinner table, but really throwing food away? Are you saying you had nothing to do with their complacency, their blindness, where your condition was concerned, Madison?”

      “Oh, yeah, sure, I was sneaky about things, but they should have still noticed! I needed them, and they weren’t there. The only thing they were interested in was that my grades were good and I was on schedule for the perfect life they had planned for me. A 4.0 grade point average, my mother’s alma mater, Howard University, becoming a lawyer like both of them, those were the things they cared about. Not the fact that I was being bullied at school, told I was fat and ugly and that no boy would want to be seen with me.”

      “Did you try to talk to them about what was going on at school?”

      “Yeah,” Madison said with a grimace. “They just said it was a part of growing up and to suck it up. It would give me character.”

      “So you turned your rage inward and started punishing yourself,” Desiree said. “You started starving yourself because you felt like no one cared about you?”

      Madison’s eyes