LITMIR.BIZ

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Muriel and he smiled. “I was.”

      Muriel was too softhearted for her own good and she wasn’t about to stand around and watch her being manipulated. So she became the other woman’s champion and challenged Malone. “Like what?”

      “I read a story,” he said simply.

      Did he think he could just sit back and relax because he happened to be better looking than most movie stars? That didn’t give him a get-out-of-jail-free card. Not in her book.

      “You can read on your own time, Mr. Malone,” Lisa informed him. “The court didn’t send you here to entertain yourself.”

      “I wasn’t,” he contradicted. “I was entertaining your little friend.”

      Lisa narrowed her eyes. She hadn’t the slightest idea what this man was talking about. “What little friend?”

      “The little girl you were trying to bolster when I found you earlier.” It took him a second to remember the name the girl’s mother had used. “Monica. She looked lonely when I walked by, I stopped and gave her a book.” A whole stack of worn children’s books sat on one of the tables. The girl had looked embarrassed and had just held the thin book. That was when his suspicions had been aroused. “Except that somewhere along the line, public education failed her because she can’t read.” As quickly as his anger rose, it abated, hiding behind the shield he always had fixed in place. “So I read to her.” He looked at her intently and directed his question to Lisa rather than the woman who was paid to run the shelter. “Or is that against the rules?”

      Lisa shifted, feeling uncomfortable. What’s more, she felt like an idiot. Maybe she was being too hard on Malone. After all, she didn’t really know him. His attitude just rubbed her the wrong way and had led her to certain conclusions.

      To jump to certain conclusions, she amended, chagrinned.

      “No,” she said, “that’s not against the rules.” Lisa paused, pressing her lips together. “I guess I owe you an apology.”

      There was amusement in the blue eyes. They weren’t icy, she decided, changing her initial opinion. They were warm. Maybe a little too warm.

      “It might sound more convincing if you didn’t act as if your mouth were filled with unappetizing dirt when you said it.”

      “As opposed to the appetizing kind?” she guessed.

      Ian laughed. She’d gotten him. Words were his stock and trade, but of late, in the last nine months, it felt as if he’d just closed up shop. Nothing was coming. No ideas, no snippets of plots, no stray dialogue flashing through his brain at odd moments, begging to be written down before they were forgotten. It was as if his fictional world, the world he often sought out for solace and in which he often took refuge, had completely deserted him, leaving him to fend for himself and deal with what was around him without the crutch he had come to rely on so heavily.

      This with a deadline breathing down his neck.

      For now, he smiled, his eyes on hers. “I stand corrected,” he allowed.

      He looked over Lisa’s head at the woman he had checked in with when he’d first walked through the doors. He couldn’t help wondering if she was very shrewd or very vacant. Her expression could be read either way.

      “Has anyone thought about setting up a few informal classes to teach the kids while they’re staying here? If most of them are transient, then enrolling in the local schools doesn’t sound like anything their parents are going to be looking into. Whole chunks of these kids’ educations are falling through the cracks and nobody’s noticing.”

      Lisa looked at him, surprised by the observation. Was he actually deeper than that brilliantly blinding smile of his? “You sound like you’ve given this matter some thought.” She studied him for a moment, looking to be swayed one way or the other about him. “Like you’re familiar with it.”

      The shrug was careless, tying him to nothing. “In a manner of speaking.”

      Given the glimmer of a hint, Lisa wasn’t about to back off easily. “What manner of speaking?”

      “Mine,” he replied.

      The single word just hung there, suspended in space. Ian didn’t feel like sharing anymore, didn’t feel like telling this woman or her superior that he’d once been one of those kids who’d had sections of his life carelessly lost in the shuffle because no one was looking out for him.

      After his family had been killed in the Palm Springs earthquake, it had taken Social Services more than six months to locate his mother’s parents. His grandparents, Ed and Louise Humboldt, lived on a small operating farm in Northern California, close to the Oregon border. Estranged from their daughter because of her marriage to a man they didn’t feel was good enough for her, they had no idea that anything had happened to her or to her husband and daughter, until Alice McKay from the Orange Country Social Services office had taken it upon herself, on her own time, to locate his only living relatives.

      They were little more than strangers to him when Alice brought him up to the farm. He hadn’t wanted to stay with them, had wanted instead to go home with Alice because she was kind and her smile reminded him of his sister’s. But that wasn’t possible. So he had remained with his grandparents, who took him in out of a sense of duty.

      They fed him, clothed him and gave him a roof over his head. In exchange, he did chores on the farm before school, after school and practically until he dropped at night.

      Ed and Louise were good people, they just weren’t good grandparents. He knew they didn’t love him. They didn’t concern themselves with his education other than his getting one. He thought of running away several times, but instead, he remained. And then, as he settled in, a funny thing happened.

      A whole new world opened up for him whenever he was around books. A world where there was no weight on his shoulders, no pain waiting for him around every corner and no guilt ready to spring up at him without warning. He read everything he could get his hands on, especially science fiction.

      When he wasn’t doing chores or studying for school, he was reading. Morning, noon and night.

      Around the time when he turned fifteen, he discovered that he could not only read about those worlds that existed between the pages of a book, he could create them. Create worlds where things happened the way he wanted them to. He wasn’t a victim anymore. Instead, he became a god. A god who presided over invisible worlds that existed first only in his mind and then on paper as well.

      He finished writing his first book at seventeen, fashioning a strange world where people were ruled by their nightmares. Twenty-seven publishers rejected it. And one made him an offer.

      He was on his way.

      None of it would have happened if Alice McKay hadn’t taken it upon herself to hunt down his mother’s parents. Because if she hadn’t, if she had been content to do her job and nothing more, he would have gone on being sent from one foster home to another, one school system to another and, because of his progressively rebellious nature, never remaining anywhere long enough to learn anything or find any peace.

      He’d dedicated Nightmares to her, paying her the highest compliment that he could by making her the godmother of his firstborn.

      “I think it’s a good idea,” Muriel decided, after thinking about the idea of classes for a moment. Her eyes shifted back and forth between the two of them, finally resting on Lisa. “Why don’t the two of you see what can be worked out?”

      Lisa frowned. She didn’t want to be pulled into this. Redeeming idea or not, she didn’t like the thought of working too closely with Malone. One altruistic moment did not a saint make.

      “It’s his idea,” she protested, looking at Muriel pointedly.

      The expression on Muriel’s face was mild. But once she’d made up her mind, nothing could dissuade it. “Yes, but you’re the teacher,” she reminded her.

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