LITMIR.BIZ

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had talked about some of the workers. Patty, the receptionist, distracted the staff if left to her own devices. Carol couldn’t spell and even spell-checker could not save her. Shirley was just too cute to scold, Shamus had said of his granddaughter. Eddie would do everything to perfection—to a fault. The others each had some workable flaw except Delainey. Apparently the only thing she couldn’t do was walk on water. Shamus had said he might want to ask her about that someday.

      A door slammed somewhere downstairs. The staff was beginning to arrive.

      He could have guessed Patty’s flaw without Shamus telling him, as she had been happy to relate her life history, which, while fascinating to someone... Carol and Shirley had been more reserved, although he did now know Carol was thirty-eight, single and loved her collection of eyewear. Shirley was checking things out to see if she should follow in Shamus’s footsteps, but no way was she staying in this tiny town, she had said, and blushed. Eddie, who had graduated nearly a year ago from high school and had been a paid intern since, seemed happy just to be a part of it all and was clearly in love with an older woman, Shirley, who must have been all of twenty.

      Eddie might be trying to decide on a career. With his goggle-eyed innocence, Hunter hoped it wasn’t law, at least not law in the big city. It just might break a boy like that.

      He opened another folder. It felt strange, even after being out of the office for two months, not to have client meetings, teleconferences or even a court date scheduled. Several folders later and there hadn’t been a single file without Delainey’s neat handwriting in it somewhere.

      Yesterday the rest of the staff had said hello and welcome and had enjoyed the champagne and cake. Except Delainey—she hadn’t had cake. She had slammed one glass of champagne and split as soon as she could get away from Shamus.

      Her hair looked as if it was still that soft, silky golden. Her figure had filled out, and long after she had left the room, he’d found himself wanting to touch her, stroke her hair, feel her body against his.

      During the sleepless hours last night, he had refused to let his mind linger there. She had moved on.

      But in the light of day, he couldn’t figure out what she was still doing in Bailey’s Cove working as a paralegal. She either hadn’t gone to law school or she’d given it up for some reason. That she wouldn’t have passed the bar was not an option, for she was the only person in their high school whose grades were better than his.

      Once he had looked through the stack of files he had pulled, the chatter level downstairs had risen to boisterous. He doubted they knew he was here, as Shamus’s wife had insisted she make breakfast for him, and Shamus had driven him to the office. His rental car would arrive in two days. A reminder how remote Bailey’s Cove was from the rest of the world.

      His office door stood open, so if anyone came upstairs, they would see him, but diplomacy dictated it was time to go downstairs to let them know he was here. He didn’t want to be charged with big-city guerrilla tactics or give anyone a heart attack by coming down later in the morning and have them get all paranoid about what he might have heard or seen that they didn’t know about. And he smelled coffee.

      In a few moments, he was down the stairs and approaching the door to the coffee room. Break room, they called the fully equipped kitchen with three large round tables and a dozen and a half chairs. The closer he got, the more understandable the words were through the door.

      Something indistinct and then clearly, “...Delainey.”

      “She’ll be in after she talks to her daughter’s teacher,” Patty was saying to someone.

      Hunter stopped cold. Daughter? Delainey had a child? Maybe she was married after all. Though her name was still Talbot, that didn’t really mean anything anymore.

      “I guess she wants to bring dinosaur cookies for her birthday next week and the teacher is enforcing the sugar moratorium they agreed on for the class New Year’s resolution.”

      “Well, that’s hardly fair to do to a bunch of six-year-olds.”

      Hunter hadn’t gotten into a prestigious law school by being a dullard, and the math of that simple statement smacked him in the face.

      Delainey had a child who would be six years old next week. Unless she was having sex with someone else at the same time she was having sex with him...his child.

      How could she not tell him?

      He spun around to head back toward Shamus’s office.

      As he yanked open the door to the stairway, Delainey entered the building and looked at him, horrified, as if she had been caught after committing some horrible crime.

      As far as he was concerned, she had.

      * * *

      DELAINEY FLED UP the stairs to her office. She was well aware Hunter followed her and as she turned to close her office door, he was there, his hand holding the door open, his eyes intense. “We need to talk.”

      She looked at him today, whereas yesterday she could barely glance at him, afraid she’d give away too much. Today she studied him head to toe. His hair was still thick and that dark honey-blond lusciousness that she had run her fingers through. His face, cleanly shaven and smooth. She had loved to run a line of kisses from his ear, across his cheek and down his neck.

      And his eyes. Navy blue. True navy, like lustrous jewels. A woman could get lost in their depths.

      The strong, long-fingered hand against the door did not have a wedding band. She liked that, too, but surely she had no reason to rejoice in such a thing.

      She had reveled in the happily-ever-after for those three weeks. That was gone now, forever. At twenty-two she had known she was a woman. Now she knew she wasn’t a very world-wise one.

      When Hunter left her behind, he had taken all notion of happily ever after with him. She had come to understand that had been her dream and not his.

      She turned and walked to her desk. Today she had decided to be herself. Though her faults were varied and many, they did not lessen her. Whatever Hunter Morrison’s problems were, they did not belong to her. She had a child to think of and being the best mother possible was, had to be, her focus.

      Hunter stayed in the doorway. He wore a soft-looking dark green V-necked sweater with the unbuttoned collar of a crisp white shirt standing up underneath. The jeans he wore looked as if they had just come off the rack at a fancy department store and had never been washed, certainly never worn before today. She smiled at his first attempt to try to fit into the office’s milieu. He couldn’t give up his fancy lawyer shoes, though.

      Contrived and uneven, the ensemble looked good on him. Probably most things looked good on him.

      She shook her head in disgust with herself, then nodded. “Of course we need to talk, but I can’t do it now or here. You can’t do it here. We have to work with these people and I’m already late to see a client.”

      “I’ll come to your house after work.” He looked fierce when he spoke, and it seemed aimed at her.

      “No. No, you won’t come to my house.” What had she done to deserve that?

      He drew his dark blond eyebrows together, making the frown creases visible, a reminder they were no longer twenty-two with very little life experience. “There are still few places in Bailey’s Cove where whatever we say won’t be open to public speculation.”

      She searched his face, his eyes, trying to learn what she could, maybe find out what had happened to him in the intervening years. It seemed the time had robbed him of his lighthearted jock look and substituted a stern, suspicious one for the carefree college graduate.

      Maybe the high school Delainey and Hunter, the prom queen and king, the pals and study partners, deserved to know what had happened to each other. “Do you have a car?”

      He dropped his hand from the door. “It’s coming in two days.”

      “I’ll pick you

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