LITMIR.BIZ

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it didn’t make much difference. Meat loaf was meat loaf. Vanilla pudding was vanilla pudding. “You want me to cut anything up for you?”

      “There’s nothing wrong with my hands. But thanks. I don’t usually act this way, you know. Helpless, I mean. I’ve been looking after myself ever since I left school, and I’ve hardly been sick a day in my life. Maybe that’s why all this threw me.” She took a bite of meat loaf, grimaced and looked for the salt. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

      She threw him off stride. She was supposed to be evasive. Instead she was asking for it, which screwed up his theory.

      So he dragged up a chair, sat down and lined up his questions, but before he could begin, she asked one of her own.

      “Why did you stay? You don’t know me—you certainly weren’t under any obligation. Are you from the home? Should I know you? It’s been so long... I’ve kept up with a few classmates, but they’re all girls. Well, women, now.”

      She sipped her coffee, and Joe made a few mental notes and got set to try again.

      And again, she beat him to it. “Want my corn bread? It’s dry, but there’s some...well, I don’t suppose it’s butter, but it’s something, anyway. I could ring for a nurse and see if she could bring you something to drink.”

      So they talked about the food and whether or not caffeine was any worse than decaf. Joe still hadn’t managed to get around to asking her if she was the brains behind Rafe Davis’s long string of robberies, or if she’d only acted as his fence when a woman in a lab coat came in and asked him to step outside.

      He did, feeling frustrated, but as soon as he went back inside and started to question her again, someone else came along with a clipboard, and he gave up.

      Forty minutes later, he had checked into a hotel, ordered room service, set the air-conditioning on max and run himself a tubful of hot water. He’d waited this long. He could wait a few more hours.

      

      The next morning Joe slept through the alarm. Slept until a crack of sunshine sliced through the drawn draperies and drilled through his eyelids.

      He ordered pizza for breakfast, did a few of the exercises the physical therapist had promised would put him back in peak working condition and then eased the resulting kinks out of his carcass under a hot needle-spray shower.

      He thought about riding out to the house while it was still empty, going over it with a fine-tooth comb and then facing her with the evidence. They could cut through a whole lot of crap that way.

      But he didn’t. Instead he called his grandmother and asked how she was feeling, and what she’d been up to. Frowning, he listened to her lethargic responses. “Well, look—I’ll be headed back in a few days. Right now I’m going to go by the hospital and check on Sophie and the baby. Remember, I told you about her last night? You wouldn’t believe how homely she is. The baby—not Sophie. I thought all babies were supposed to look like the kid in the toilet paper ads.”

      

      Sophie didn’t feel like getting out of bed, but then, it wasn’t the first time she’d had to do something she didn’t want to do. At least this time she had a good reason to get up. They were going home. She was taking Iris Rebecca Bayard home, and then they’d see how much of her old training from the Children’s Home she remembered. She used to be pretty good with the babies but that had been a long time ago. Nearly eighteen years.

      She could have used another day to rest up and prepare herself for the responsibility of motherhood, but her insurance wouldn’t cover it. And thanks to a handsome, smooth-talking rascal who had stolen her heart, her savings, her self-respect and just about everything else of value she possessed, she couldn’t swing it on her own.

      At least he’d left her with something, although that was purely accidental. If she hadn’t taken it to the bank with her that day to show it to her friends and see if it would fit into a deposit box, he would’ve taken that, too.

      She was wearing her old maternity tent. The going-home outfit she’d packed wouldn’t fit over her flab and her outrageous bosom. She’d felt like crying, but then they’d brought in her baby and she’d felt wonderful all over again. Tired, aching, but still wonderful. Euphoria, her new friend would’ve called it.

      She had just asked the orderly to call her a cab when he poked his head around the door and then followed it with a pair of shoulders wide enough to scrape highways. Joe Dana, she decided, was a man who didn’t like to reveal too much of himself. Yesterday she’d seen his scars. Before that she’d noticed only that he was big, even bigger than she was. And dark. Black hair shot with gray. Dark eyes that reminded her of the tinted glass some people had in their cars. From the inside you could see out, but those on the outside didn’t stand a chance of seeing in.

      Even as distracted as she’d been then, and as tired as he’d obviously been, she’d felt his intensity. It was almost audible. Like humming power lines.

      “Good morning,” she greeted, a self-conscious smile trembling at the corners of her lips. “We never got around to finishing our conversation, did we?”

      “You’re fixing to go somewhere?”

      “Home. I’m already cleared for takeoff, as they say in all the airplane movies. I’ve never flown. One of these days I’m going to, though.”

      She beamed at him. He looked baffled, as if he didn’t know what she was talking about, which was understandable. She always talked too much when she was nervous. “I just sent someone to call me a cab. The hospital’s lending me a car seat for the baby until I can get one of my own. Isn’t that nice of them?”

      “No need to call a cab. my truck’s right outside.”

      “Oh, but I can’t—”

      “Sure you can. I’ve got a vested interest in little Miss Fatcheeks, remember? The least I can do is see her home.”

      “Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind. And then you can ask me whatever it was you wanted to ask me.”

      “Yeah, sure,” he said, and saying something about pulling his truck up to the front entrance, he left.

      For one crazy moment Sophie started to call him back. Didn’t want him to leave her. She told herself it was only postpartum silliness, and that it would pass. She was already forgetting the birth pangs, just as the nurse said she would. In a few days she’d be back at her computer, juggling nursing, diaper changing and writing ad copy for the agency that currently helped pay the bills while she mailed out résumés and tried not to get her hopes too high.

      All the same, she wondered just who he was, and why he was still hanging around.

      Miss Fatcheeks, indeed! Her name was Iris Rebecca Bayard.

      Three

      “It was the yard that convinced me. That big old oak tree will be just perfect for a swing. And you saw my garden. In a year or so I’m fixing to fence in the other side to make a play yard. I might even get a few laying hens. Out here in the country, you can keep chickens, you know. It’ll be a wonderful place for Iris to grow up.” Sophie only hoped she sounded as confident as her words implied as they turned off the highway.

      Joe had hardly spoken a word since they’d left the hospital, but then she’d already discovered that he wasn’t much of a talker. She’d chattered all the way home because it was what she did when she was nervous, but she was beginning to run out of things to talk about. The truth was, she was feeling less confident with every mile. What on earth had she been thinking of, moving way out here in the country? The closest neighbor was nearly a mile away, and not even particularly friendly. She’d made the mistake of paying a call soon after she’d moved in, and it had been plain from the first that she’d interrupted the grumpy old man in the middle of his morning nap, or something equally important. The first words out of his mouth were that if she was selling something,

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