LITMIR.BIZ

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across the driveway to where she stood, glancing at the van, then at her. His eyes met hers, held them, and she thought she saw something sad in them before he covered it with a smile. Could he be sorry to see her go?

      He broke eye contact and nodded hello to Stormy.

      “Hey, Lou,” Stormy called. “We’d just about decided you weren’t coming to see us off.”

      “Wouldn’t miss it. How are you feeling, Stormy?”

      “Fine, except for being sick of everyone asking how I’m feeling.” She softened the words with a smile. “You?”

      “Can’t complain.” He eyed the van, his glance tripping over Max’s tummy on the way. Good, she thought. It would have been a waste of good low-rise jeans and a cropped-short T-shirt if he hadn’t even noticed the bared section of skin in between.

      He cleared his throat, nodded at the van. “Are you going to have to make a few trips with that thing, Max?”

      “Nope. Everything that’s going is packed up and ready. Except my car, anyway. I’ll have to come back for that.”

      “Everything?” He lifted his brows. “You couldn’t have fit furniture in there.”

      “You’ve been to my sister’s house, Lou. Morgan’s will left me everything, furniture included.”

      “Still, seems like you’d want some of your own.”

      “Most of the stuff in this house isn’t my own, anyway. It’s nearly all hand-me-downs from my parents.” She never qualified the word parents with the word adoptive, even though it was true. “Besides, what do I have here that would fit there? That place is … opulent.”

      “Yeah, but it’s not you.”

      She planted her hands on her hips and frowned at him. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not opulent?”

      He lifted his brows. “It wasn’t an insult, Maxie, just an observation. Morgan’s house is—hell, it’s Morgan. Dramatic, dark, rich. You should be in a place that’s … I don’t know. Cute, quirky, fun.”

      “Sexy?”

      He sent her a quelling look.

      Maxie sent him back a wink. “That’s what you meant, and you know it. But don’t worry, Lou. Once I get settled in, I’m going to redecorate a suite of rooms just for me. I can’t exactly do the whole place, though. It’s not like Morgan’s really dead, after all.”

      “No, I suppose not.” He lowered his head, shaking it slowly.

      “What?” she asked.

      “We talk so matter-of-factly about it. Like it’s nothing. And then every once in a while it hits me. Everything that happened. Everything we saw. Stuff I thought was nothing but superstition, turning out to be real. The fact that one of Mad Maxie Stuart’s conspiracy theories turned out to be dead on target.”

      He said it with a teasing smile that made her want to lean up and kiss it right off his face. Instead, she only shrugged. “I wish you were coming with me.”

      “Yeah, well, I told you, I didn’t retire from the force with the goal of going back to work fulltime.”

      “Right. Instead you’re going to buy a fishing boat and spend your time lying around, smelling like bait and growing a beer belly.”

      “Sounds like paradise, doesn’t it?”

      “Yeah, for a seventy-year-old in failing health, maybe. Not for you.”

      He eyed her, maybe seeing a little beyond the words she said out loud, so she averted her eyes. She hadn’t meant to sound petulant or pouty. Childish was the last way she wanted him to think of her.

      “I’ll visit, I promise.”

      She shot her eyes back to his. “When?”

      “When? Well … I don’t know.”

      “How about now?”

      “Now?”

      “Today.”

      “Maxie, sometimes I don’t even know how to follow your conversations.”

      She rolled her eyes. “Hell, you’re going to make me admit it, aren’t you?”

      He held up both hands, shaking his head, as if she’d lost him.

      “I’m not sure I can drive that … thing.” She nodded toward the van. “It’s huge, and I can hardly see over the steering wheel. It steers like a truck, shifts like a tank, catches every breeze like a sailboat. It wobbles and rocks, and I can’t see behind me with those stupid mirrors.”

      He looked again at the van, then at her. Stormy said, “I’m going back inside, make sure everything’s locked up, shut down, turned off, you know.”

      “You drove it here from the rental place,” Lou said, as if he hadn’t even heard Stormy’s announcement. Stormy shook her head, sent Max a surreptitious thumbs-up and hurried back into the house.

      “Of course I did,” Max admitted. “How do you think I know how hard it is to drive?”

      “I think you’re trying to twist my arm to get me up there.”

      “I can think of a lot of men whose arms wouldn’t require any twisting at all,” she said.

      “Then have one of them drive you.”

      “I don’t want one of them. I want you.” She let the double entendre hang there.

      He pretended not to notice. It was damned infuriating. He responded to all her flirting that way, either pretending it sailed over his head—when she knew damn well it hadn’t by the flash of fire it sometimes evoked in his eyes—or by changing the subject. She was beginning to think he didn’t take her efforts at all seriously.

      “I’m going fishing for the weekend,” he said. “Leaving from here, in fact. Got my bag all packed in the car, and a friend with a big boat waiting for me at the pier.”

      “God forbid I interfere with that,” she said.

      “You’ll do fine on your own, Maxie. You’re the most capable woman I know.”

      She drew a breath, sighed. “Fine. Just fine. Will you at least hang around until I get the beast backed out of the driveway? You can pretend you’re a traffic cop again.”

      “Aah, the good old days.” He looked toward the house. “You gonna wait for Stormy?”

      “She’s driving her car up. And she knows the way.” She dug in her jeans pocket for the key, then climbed up into the van and cranked the engine. Through the windshield, she saw Stormy step out of the house and close the door. She sent her friend a secret smile. Stormy frowned, looking worried.

      Max shifted the van into Reverse and looked in the side mirrors. She saw Lou standing in the road, making hand motions at her, probably to tell her to back out. She popped the clutch. The van bucked and then stalled.

      She started it again, and this time backed up a little before the bucking and heaving began. She kept that up—start, stop, start, stop, jerk, cough, sputter, start—until a car came along the road and Lou changed his hands to a “stop” position. Then and only then did she back up smoothly and quickly, over the mailbox, aiming dead into the path of the oncoming car.

      A horn blasted. Tires squealed. Stormy shrieked, and Lou shouted.

      Max stalled the van again and got out, leaving it sitting there, with its ass-end poking out into the road. The car had skidded to a stop five feet short of the van, and the driver, a neighbor she recognized, got out, looking scared half to death.

      “Sorry about that, Mr. Robbins,” Max called, sending the man a sheepish wave and walking behind the van. Lou and Stormy

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