LITMIR.BIZ

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thought your uncle would go on forever.” Their eyes met for a moment. “Outlive us all.”

      “Yes,” she said quietly, waiting for the ache to set in, the one that always came when she lost a loved one, “me, too.”

      There was an awkwardness in the air. Brad felt he should say something more. He had no idea what. “He never married, did he?”

      “Not officially, at least, not that I know of,” she amended, then smiled. “He was too much into ‘free love.’ Thought that monogamy was a waste of time, although he was pretty faithful to his ‘lady of the moment’ as he used to call them. When I was little, my parents used to have him over for the holidays because they kind of felt sorry for him.” There was irony for you, she thought. Titus was always smiling. Her parents never were. “I think he enjoyed life a lot more than they did in the long run.”

      “At least he got to do it for longer.” Brad glanced at his watch. “Oh, hey, look at the time. I should have already been halfway to the hospital. I need to make my rounds before I go to the office,” he told her, striding toward the threshold.

      He was halfway to the front door before he stopped and turned around. Hurrying back to the kitchen, he caught her off guard.

      “Did you forget something?” she asked.

      In response, he took her into his arms and kissed her forehead. “I really am sorry about Titus.”

      He could have knocked her over with a feather. Stacey smiled up at him. She doubted that he realized it, but that was worth far more to her than the two hundred dollars he had left on the counter.

      “Thanks,” she murmured.

      Brad released her. “I’ve got to rush.”

      She followed him to the door. “That really meant a lot to me.”

      Brad nodded as he left the house. But he really didn’t understand why Stacey had said that.

      CHAPTER 9

      The long flight from LAX to Titus’s small Pacific island gave Stacey the opportunity to read for more than five minutes at a clip. She’d almost forgotten how to savor and enjoy a lengthy story. Everything these days came at her in tidy, bite-size pieces. Magazine articles ended within two pages. News stories came with highlights that summarized their content quickly for the rushed. The end result was that she no longer really knew how to immerse herself in something she was reading, had no patience to wade through deep prose, no matter how beautiful. Her brain seemed to lack staying power.

      The first half hour of her journey was spent trying to keep her mind from straying as she struggled to focus on the written words before her. At the end of that first half hour she realized she’d been reading the same page over and over again. It took more effort than she would have ever guessed. So was keeping a lid on the impatience drumming through her. She kept wondering about things that she had left behind. Not the usual did-I-leave-the-stove-on anxieties, but misgivings about how Brad would fare in the house without her. He’d assured her he’d be fine, but she had her doubts.

      And what if Jim needed her while she was gone? Or Julie?

      She took a deep breath. They were all adults, all three of them. Even Brad. They would be fine. But would she?

      Stacey propped the book up on the tray before her, trying again to lose herself in the pages of the mystery she’d purchased expressly for the trip. There was a time when she would curl up on any available space and read for hours on end, losing herself in whatever story—romance, mystery, historical biography—she selected. When had there stopped being time for reading for pleasure? For reading “just because”? When had life changed for her?

      She couldn’t pinpoint a moment, an earth-shattering event, that had transformed her. It had happened in tiny increments, stealthily, so she hadn’t really been aware of the change. Until it had overwhelmed her.

      The same was true of her marriage, she supposed. They’d started out being partners, two crazy-in-love partners, sharing every moment, every thought with each other. Living on love and dreams and not much in the way of creature comforts, but it didn’t matter. As long as they had each other. Now they were like two strangers who met at the same bus stop every morning. There was recognition, an exchange of a sentence or two, but very little else. Certainly no feeling of communion, or even camaraderie.

      She hadn’t changed, had she? Not in the way she felt about things. Not about any of the things that truly mattered to her.

      But Brad had.

      Brad had changed, oh so much. Her mouth curved in a sad smile. She had married James Dean and woken up one morning to find herself sleeping next to Dennis the Menace’s Mr. Wilson. Conservative, grumpy and so not a risk taker.

      She missed James Dean more than she could possibly put into words.

      Stacey looked down at her book. She was twenty pages further along than she had been earlier—and couldn’t remember a single word of the story that had transpired, or how the mystery’s feisty protagonist had wound up standing in a grave.

      Annoyed, Stacey flipped back twenty pages, hoping to be more successful in keeping her mind from wandering this time around.

      C’mon, Stace, you can do this. You can read this book. You remember what it was like to read, don’t you? To block out everything else except for the characters in your book? Strike a blow for the not-so-distant past. Do it for Uncle Titus.

      She smiled to herself. Uncle Titus loved to read. It was one of the forms that his rebellion took as society conspired to take its citizens away from the printed word and place them in front of a digital display.

      For Uncle Titus, she thought, amused.

      Buckling down, Stacey narrowed her eyes and forced herself not to think about anything except the novel she had before her.

      Ian Bryanne looked exactly the way he sounded over the telephone.

      Tall, thin, faded blond hair worn just a tad longer than the norm in deference to his chief employer. The former citizen of Great Britain was all angles and sharp points in a subdued gray Armani suit. The only splash of color came from his red tie. And from his electric-blue eyes.

      The commercial flight she’d taken from California only took her as far as Honolulu. Ian had chartered a small local plane to bring her the rest of the way to Titus’s island. The trip had roughly been a hundred miles. Roughly because the weather had turned inclement just before she’d boarded the small aircraft. Her stomach was in complete upheaval by the time they landed.

      She hadn’t been this nauseated since she’d been pregnant with Julie. Disembarking on very shaky legs, Stacey was convinced she would have been subjected to less turbulence had she made the short trip riding inside of a blender.

      It felt like a full-fledged tropical storm by the time they touched down in the field where Titus kept his private Learjet. The moment she stepped out of the plane, Ian introduced himself, leaning forward to give her the benefit of the shelter afforded by the huge black umbrella he had brought with him.

      Gusts of wind had the rain falling almost sideways, sailing beneath the umbrella and soaking her, but she appreciated the gesture. Together they walked side by side, careful not to slip on the metal steps of the ramp that had been pushed up against the plane.

      “Welcome to the Island,” Ian told her crisply, raising his voice above the wind.

      Attention focused on getting down to ground level, Stacey only smiled and nodded in response.

      The Island. Her uncle hadn’t liked naming things. When he had purchased the fifteen-mile-wide island, rather than fixing some vain moniker to the tract of land, he referred to it by its description.

      “Keep things as simple as you can,” he had told her more than once.

      He had the same attitude when it came to everything. The stray canine he’d taken in some five years ago answered

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