LITMIR.BIZ

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legs at seeing Johnny Walker again. It was merely fatigue making her eyes sting and her lids flutter to keep any suspicious moisture from flowing down her cheeks.

      This didn’t go into the top ten worst days, it was in the top five.

      She was almost to the door when she realized Johnny had followed. He stepped around her, blocking her exit. “Where do you think you’re going? You can barely walk.”

      “Away. From. Here.” She punctuated each word with a harshly snarled breath.

      “Running away. Your M.O, isn’t it? You get embarrassed and hit the road.” He shook his head in disgust. “Typical Emma Jean Frasier.”

      She clenched her back teeth so hard her jaw hurt. But she’d already given the town gossips quite enough to chew over tonight on the gossip lines, thank-you-very-much. She was not about to get into a screaming tizzy of an argument with Johnny over who’d run out on whom. “Please leave me alone.”

      She tried to walk around him, finally giving up on the stupid shoe, which made the ache in her ankle even worse. She bent over and yanked it off, letting it dangle by the strap from the tip of her finger. Then she marched toward the door, with her head held high. Or, at least as high as it could be, considering she descended a good three inches each time she went from her good foot—still in the high-heeled sandal—to the bad one, which was completely bare. The bad one also made her cringe with pain every time she put her weight on it.

      Johnny, however, wasn’t going to let her make her grand exit. Emma could barely suck in a shocked breath when she felt him scoop her up from behind. “Stubborn woman.”

      He held her easily, bracing her behind the shoulders and beneath the knees. She might have been a stuffed doll for all the effort it took him. Emma had just enough time to clutch at her dangling shoe before it fell out of her fingers as the grocery store door opened before them with a swish, letting in a thick blast of stale summer air.

      Before they could exit, however, a titter and a few whispers reached her ears. Emma groaned. It wasn’t bad enough that she’d fallen, but now she was being swept out of here like some romance heroine…by the guy who’d given her her first adult taste of heartbreak as a teenager.

      She leaned close to his ear to avoid being overheard. Forcing her nose to stop working so she wouldn’t smell the familiar earthy scent of his skin, and her eyes to stop noticing the cute way his hair still curled behind his ear, she whispered, “Put me down right now or I swear I’ll kick you.”

      He raised an amused brow. “With a broken foot?”

      “My other foot’s not broken.”

      “It will be if you kick me. Those shoes of yours are pretty useless, aren’t they?”

      “Johnny, please don’t do this.”

      “I already did. Now shut up, Emma Jean, and let’s get you X-rayed.”

      Over his shoulder, she saw a cluster of shoppers inching closer. They made no bones about trying to hear every word she and Johnny exchanged. Surely nothing this exciting had happened in Joyful since, oh, say, ten years ago. That would have been the night this bastard had seduced her in public, then roared away, leaving her to explain to a bunch of gawking onlookers while trying to fasten two-dozen tiny, silk-covered buttons up the back of her pink prom dress.

      Before they could escape the store altogether, however, a female voice said, “Hey, Johnny, what about your sauce?”

      Emma glanced at the cashier who’d spoken, a young woman with teased up bright red hair and a serious case of acne. The woman watched them with eyes as big as dinner plates, and a definite pout on her heavily glossed lips.

      “I’ll be back for it,” Johnny informed her.

      “You have to buy it. You bent it all up when you dropped it,” the belligerent cashier exclaimed.

      “Yeah, and your date’s gonna be real disappointed if you don’t make her a gourmet meal,” Emma muttered.

      The woman’s voice rose in pitch. “My boss’ll make me pay for it if you don’t.”

      Right. As if her boss wouldn’t have heard the whole sordid story within six-point-five minutes on the infamous Joyful grapevine. Every person in the store was practically shifting on their feet, itching for Johnny and Emma to get gone so they could spread the news to the four corners of the Joyful kingdom.

      Emma tried to wriggle out of Johnny’s arms. “Go pay for your sauce and I’ll go out and get back in my car. I can drive myself to the clinic.” Then, giving him a slightly malicious smile, she whispered, “You damaged the can. I wouldn’t want you to get falsely accused of vandalism…again.”

      Direct hit. His eyes widened at the insult, and his lips thinned. He obviously remembered when he’d told her about being accused of vandalizing the town fountain as a kid. Another memory from prom night—during their hours of talking, he’d told her what it was like growing up a member of the trashiest family in town.

      Not too unlike what it had meant growing up a rich kid in boarding school.

      Lonely.

      “Damn, you got bitchy while you were away, didn’t you?”

      The camera-hungry old man, whose pants were hitched up almost to his nipples, snorted with laughter. Yes, he probably approved of the caveman tactics. Emma shot him a glare and he quickly turned away, pretending to carefully examine a sign advertising a weekly special on toilet paper.

      Over near a breakfast display, a harried-looking mother shoved a box of marshmallows and sugar masquerading as breakfast cereal into her toddler’s hands to get him to stop crying. Heaven forbid she miss a word of Emma and Johnny’s confrontation.

      “And you got hard of hearing,” Emma finally retorted, making no effort to keep her voice down. She didn’t much care if everyone in the store heard and took notes. “I said put me down.”

      “Uh, okay, that’d be a big no.”

      Without another word to anyone, he strode out the automatic door, still holding her securely in his arms. Emma watched over his shoulder as the cashier, her co-worker and every shopper in the place rushed to the front window. They might as well have pressed their noses against the glass for a better look.

      He didn’t even pause as he passed by her convertible. When he reached a black SUV, he lowered her to the ground, effectively trapping her against the car with his long, firm body. Another flood of memories invaded her brain. She remembered what it had been like to dance with him, both vertically at the prom, and later, horizontally under the misty, moonlit sky.

      “Don’t you understand the meaning of the word ‘no’?” she asked, wondering why she sounded so darned weak all of a sudden. “Or has it been so long since a woman said it to you that you’ve simply forgotten what it sounds like?”

      He raised a brow. “Jealous?”

      “Oh, puh-lease.”

      “Emma, answer me one question. That little car you squealed in here on. Manual or automatic?”

      Flustered by the change of subject, not to mention his, umh…closeness…she admitted, “Manual.”

      He nodded, unsurprised. “Of course. You would never buy a car you couldn’t drive like a screaming bat out of hell. Your poor gears are probably already ground down to nothing.”

      She couldn’t deny it. An automatic transmission had seemed almost sacrilege in an eight-cylinder car meant to go from zero to ninety in the length of time it took to touch up her lipstick in the rearview mirror.

      “Which ankle did you twist?”

      She followed his pointed stare toward her left foot, already looking swollen and tender. Then she knew where he was heading. The clutch would be a killer. “Oh.”

      “Right.”

      He opened

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