LITMIR.BIZ

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“You’re like catnip to a bunch of tomcats. Men can’t seem to keep their hands off you and that starts fights. And fights cost me money, sweetheart. Much more than you’re worth as a waitress.”

      “But I need this job,” Amy cried, running to grab her suitcase as it hit the ground and burst open.

      “I hear Buddy’s House of Crabs is hiring. Get a job there.” With that he slammed the window shut, leaving Amy to stand on the silent street. She cursed softly then grabbed her jacket from the heap and slipped it on. “Well, I wanted adventure in my life,” she muttered, gathering her things. “I guess I should be careful what I wish for.”

      It was half past two in the morning and she’d just lost her room and her job all in one fell swoop. She should have known something was wrong when she had returned to the bar and the other waitresses had refused to talk to her. The owner had been summoned by the police and when he finally got the full story, he’d pulled Amy aside and told her to clear out.

      At first, she thought he was kidding. But when he climbed the stairs to her room and started tossing her belongings out onto the street, she had no choice. She’d raced outside to collect what she could before the bar patrons stumbling home after closing time were able to grab a souvenir or two. As it was, they all got a nice round of chuckles from her predicament.

      “Now what am I supposed to do?” she murmured. Working at the Longliner had been the perfect setup. She needed to stay below the radar and seeing as she worked for tips only, the owner had no need for proof of her identity or her social security number. But the wandering hands of a customer and her rather indignant response had put an end to what she’d hoped would be a long-term job.

      She hadn’t had much of a plan when she’d left her life back in Boston, only that she was determined to get as far away from her old life as possible—away from her dictatorial father and her socialite mother, away from their powerful influence over her life. And most of all, far away from her scheming fiancé, the man who’d grown to love the Aldrich money more than he loved Amy.

      Her life had been planned for her from the moment she was born, the only child of Avery Aldrich Sloane and his beautiful wife Dinah. And for most of her life, she’d dutifully followed the plan. But then one day, just a week before her big society wedding to Craig Atkinson Talbot, she’d come to the realization that if she stayed, she would never really live her own life.

      She had been on the run for nearly six months, lucky enough to keep just one step ahead of the private detectives her father had hired. She’d lived in Salem, in Worcester and in Cambridge, picking up odd waitressing jobs and calling on old friends to put her up on their sofas. She figured if she could just keep out of sight for another six months, then she was in the clear. The trust fund her grandmother had set up for her would be all hers, no strings attached. The day she turned twenty-six years old, she’d become a comfortably wealthy woman, a woman free to experience all the things she’d missed in life, free to search for adventure and excitement.

      As she arranged her belongings neatly on a bench in front of the bait shop, she thought about what the money would mean. She’d always rejected her parents’ obsession with financial matters, thinking their avaricious nature somehow unseemly. But since she’d been trying to live on her own, Amy had realized that money, at least a small amount of it, came in pretty handy.

      Though she’d been brought up in the lap of luxury, Amy had always wanted to test her parents’ boundaries. She’d argued for public school, but was forced to attend an exclusive private prep school. When she’d insisted on a public university, a big college where she could get lost in the crowd, her parents gave her a choice of Sarah Lawrence or Vassar. That time she won a small victory, choosing Columbia University in New York.

      It was at graduate school at Columbia where she’d met her fiancé, a wonderful man from a good Boston family who was studying law, hoping to open a community law office. When she’d first introduced him to her parents, they’d been pleased with his family connections but worried over his career prospects. He was the perfect man for her next rebellious step.

      But that soon changed once Craig fell under the spell of her father’s money and influence. It wasn’t long before he was working for Aldrich Industries as a corporate lawyer. A few months before their wedding, he was promoted to Executive Corporate Counsel, a powerful position that came with a six-figure salary and stock options. It was then that Amy realized his dream of a community law office had been put aside and that the man she’d fallen in love with was not the man she was about to marry.

      So she ran. Just a week before she was scheduled to walk down the aisle, she packed a bag in the middle of the night, drove her car to the train station and hopped the last train out of town. She’d cleaned out her checking account the day before, giving her enough cash to live on for three months. That cash was long gone.

      Amy reached into her pocket and withdrew a wad of bills she’d collected as tips. By the light from the streetlamp, she began to count it, wondering if she’d have enough for a room for the night. She glanced up at the sound of footsteps, quickly hiding the money in her jacket pocket. But then she recognized the man who approached. It was the guy who’d started the fight in the bar, the man responsible for her predicament.

      It was as if he appeared from nowhere again to rescue her, her hero with the dark windblown hair and the chiseled features. Amy swallowed hard. A shiver of attraction raced through her but she refused to acknowledge it. She was cold. She’d been sitting outside for fifteen minutes and she was simply cold, that’s what caused the shiver. “What are you doing here?” she asked when he stopped in front of the bench.

      “I was just taking a walk to clear my head,” he said. “What are you doing sitting out here? You shouldn’t be here all alone. Are you waiting for a ride home?”

      “Actually, that was home,” she said, pointing back to the Longliner. “I lived above the bar…until about fifteen minutes ago. Until you got me booted out of my job and my place to stay.”

      “Me?”

      “You heard me,” Amy said. “Because of you, I lost my job and my place to stay, not to mention two decent, though incredibly greasy, meals a day. I told you I could take care of that guy.”

      “He had his hands all over you.”

      Amy laughed softly. “You don’t hang out much at the Longliner, do you? That’s par for the course. Besides, a little grope here and there makes the tips better. I know my own limits and I know how to enforce them.”

      He shook his head. “The owner couldn’t have fired you just because of one fight—a fight that really wasn’t your fault. Let me go talk to him. I’ll—”

      “This was my third fight, if you must know. I guess he was getting a little sick of paying for shattered glasses and broken tables.”

      He sat down next to her, bracing his elbows on his knees. “You must have friends or family you could call.”

      Amy shook her head, warmed by his concern. “No. My family lives on the west coast,” she lied. “Besides, we don’t talk much. And I haven’t been here long enough to make friends.”

      “Well, where are you going to go?”

      Amy shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll figure out something.”

      He cursed beneath his breath. “I suppose you don’t have money for a motel room?”

      She heard the concern in his voice, caught the trace of guilt in his expression. He did believe this was his responsibility, even though Amy knew it really wasn’t. She reached in her jacket pocket and pulled out the cash she’d made on tips—barely thirty dollars. “It’s your fault, you know. I was handling the problem. If you wouldn’t have butted in, I could have stopped the fight. But as soon as you pulled me out of there, all hell broke loose.”

      “If you had stayed, you would have gotten hurt,” he said.

      “We’ll never know, will we.”

      They

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