LITMIR.BIZ

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beneath the worn fabric.

      Realizing she was staring, her glance jerked up.

      He was waiting for her to move.

      Her purpose for being there had her starting for the stairs. But she’d barely taken a step before his hand clamped around her arm.

      “Be careful,” he told her. “The third and fifth steps are loose.”

      Sam’s fingers circled her biceps. Beneath the thin fabric of her sleeve, the heat of his broad palm seeped into her flesh. The sensation unnerved her. More unnerving still was the way that heat slowly moved through the rest of her body.

      Doing her best to ignore the disturbing effect, she murmured a quiet, “Okay.”

      “Watch where you’re going when you get up there, too.”

      Her response this time was only a nod. Yet, it satisfied him enough to let her go. Even then, the heat of his touch lingered, distracting her, making her even more aware of the feel of his eyes on her back as she started up the stairs, and carefully climbed past the boxes of nails and odd-looking metal brackets. The handrails had been removed, the steps were trailed with sawdust and most of those that weren’t loose creaked. But she was mostly conscious of the big man moving behind her—and the way he watched her when they reached the top and she stopped to glance around.

      Many of the interior walls had already been removed. Piles of old lumber and sheets of knotty pine paneling were stacked everywhere. With little left to divide it, the area was mostly a series of upright studs and dangling wires.

      With her back to him, Kelsey looked past a pair of sawhorses and a table saw with a long orange cord that ran to an electrical outlet beneath an open window. The glass globes had been removed from the overhead light fixtures. Bare bulbs and afternoon sunlight illuminated the varying degrees of destruction. In some places, the ceiling was missing.

      The only room she was concerned with, however, was the one at the end with most if its paneling still intact. She could see into it through the row of studs that had once been the hallway wall. The wall separating it from what had been Grandma B’s sewing room was still there.

      Sam lifted a board angled across what remained of a doorway. It landed with a clatter and a puff of dust on the stack behind him. “There’s not much left up here to see.”

      Hugging her purse to her side, growing more uncomfortable by the second standing between him and her fantasies, she skimmed a glance past the open window. The window in Michelle’s old room was open, too.

      Before he could catch her calculating, she glanced around once more.

      “It feels different in here without the furniture and the walls. It’s sort of…”

      “Unfinished?” he suggested.

      “I was thinking more like…lonely.”

      There always had been so much laughter there. Reminding herself there would be again once his little nephews moved in, she nonchalantly nodded toward the room that had been Michelle’s. In the middle of the wall jutting toward her, presumably resting on the floor, was the object she had no hope of reclaiming at the moment.

      “Is that room going to stay the same size, or are you going to take out that wall, too?”

      “It’s coming out.”

      Her heart jerked. “Oh?”

      “My sister wants more space for the kids up here.” He motioned behind her. “This will all open up to a playroom and study.”

      Hoping to appear as if she were merely showing neighborly interest, she edged to where he’d left a tool belt draped over one of the sawhorses. With the hallway part of the wall already gone, she wondered if she could see between the panels. “Is that what you were working on when I interrupted?” she asked, taking another step back.

      She could have sworn she felt his glance narrow on her.

      “Actually I was tearing apart the door frame you’re about to back into. That whole wall is going.”

      She drew herself to a halt before he could do it for her.

      Still aware of the warmth on her arm where he’d grabbed her before, telling herself she was only imagining she still felt his heat, she took a more careful step toward the stairs. If she was rattled by anything, it was what she was doing. Casing a place, or whatever it was called, wasn’t exactly her area of expertise.

      “Then, I should let you get back to it,” she told him. “I need to get back myself before Mom thinks I abandoned her.” The floor creaked as she edged toward the stairwell, slowly, though what she really wanted to do was bolt. “I really appreciate you letting me look around.”

      He dipped his dark head, his eyes on hers, his tone as casual as she was trying to be. “Anytime.”

      “Thanks.” With the promise of escape only seconds away, she turned toward the stairs, only to turn right back. “Don’t forget your pie.”

      “Not a chance.”

      His claim drew a faint smile an instant before she started down the stairs. Watching her go, Sam stayed where he was and wondered at the betraying tightness he’d seen at the corners of her mouth. That strain hadn’t been there when he’d seen her smile at the diner’s regulars that morning. Or in the brief moments she’d recalled bits of her childhood.

      Standing in the midst of his demolition, he heard the last step creak and the quickness of her footsteps across the living room floor. She wasn’t running, but she wasn’t wasting any time getting out of there, either.

      Moments later, rusted hinges gave an arthritic groan when she pushed the screen door open.

      It was only when he heard it bang shut that he headed down the stairs and to the door himself.

      From the seclusion of the interior’s dim shadows, he watched her hurry along the cracked concrete path and climb into the car she’d parked under the sweeping branches of the maple tree shading the driveway.

      She didn’t stop anywhere along the way, though he did see her glance toward the house before she climbed into the car and drive out to the narrow main road leading into town.

      He could practically feel a frown settle between his eyebrows as he stepped onto the porch and watched her car disappear across the expanse of meadowlike front lawn. He would have bet his badge that there was something more going on with her than she was letting on. Her body language alone had practically screamed that she wasn’t being entirely up-front with him. At least, it seemed to him that it had.

      Still, as he headed back inside, he couldn’t help wonder if maybe the department psychologist hadn’t been right—that he did need the break. From the way Kelsey had breezed in and out of there, it seemed she really had just wanted to look around the place—and that he’d seen intrigue where there was none at all.

      Kelsey could hardly believe what she was doing. It was two o’clock in the morning, she was dressed like a cat burglar in a dark stocking cap she’d found in her old ski bag and a long-sleeved navy T-shirt and jeans, and she was climbing through a second-story window of a house that did not belong to her.

      Ten minutes ago, she’d parked her car at the old mill, taken the bridge across the stream and the path through the woods, and quietly made her way to the back of the house. She’d nearly stopped breathing every time the snap of a twig beneath her feet broke through the cacophony of crickets, croaking frogs and the hammering of her heart. She felt as if she were barely breathing now.

      In the light of the half moon, Sam’s darkened trailer had seemed to glow like snow on a winter’s night. His truck sat parked like a shadow near its door.

      Mercifully the back corner of the house wasn’t visible from the trailer. That had made it relatively easy to get the ladder she’d seen earlier on the back porch and carry it to the window next to Michelle’s old bedroom. When she’d been there before, both

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