LITMIR.BIZ

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as he stared up at the house. “At least I won’t have to share a room with Ratso any longer.”

      “Don’t call your brother names,” Tim said. Now that he had done this insane thing, had committed his whole family to this change, he was scared to get out of the car. “The house has five bedrooms. One downstairs for me, one for each of you, and one left over for guests.”

      “For Gran’mere,” Eddy whispered from the back seat.

      “Yes, Eddy. Your grandmother will come to visit as soon as we get settled.”

      “No, she won’t,” Jason said with finality. “Not after we tell her what this place is like.” He leered over his shoulder at his brother. “We’ll never, ever see her again.”

      “We will, too!”

      “Jason, stop teasing your brother. Eddy, your grandmother will come to visit. She just can’t move down here with us. I’ve explained all that.” His voice said he’d explained it until he was blue in the face and wasn’t about to try again.

      “If she loved us, she’d move.”

      “Eddy, it’s okay, she does love us,” Angie said. “Jason, stop being a butthole.”

      “Angie,” her father said, but without much heat. He was too tired of driving and refereeing to be upset by much less than ax murder.

      “It’s a prison.”

      “I want to go back to Chicago.”

      “I’m hungry.”

      “I want a soda.”

      “Can’t we stay in a motel?”

      “I hate this place.”

      “I have to pee.”

      He’d decided to feed them a catfish dinner at the Log Cabin. Now he’d have to find someplace else nearby, assuming there was another restaurant this side of Memphis, fifty miles away. They’d be a captive audience. He’d tell them some more stories of his wonderful summers. Tomorrow maybe they’d all go for a long walk. He really wanted his children to love this place, too.

      But he was willing to have them hate it if it kept them safe from crime and gangs and drugs and alcohol and drive-by shootings.

      He would even fight his own children to get them to twenty-one sound of mind and body.

      CHAPTER TWO

      “OH, NUTS. That’s all I need,” Nancy Mayfield muttered as she turned the corner by the village green into her lane. A huge moving van blocked not only the lane itself, but her driveway. There was no way to reach her garage except by driving across her lawn. Even though the ground was July hard, she preferred not to smash what little grass had survived the drought.

      She pulled to a stop a couple of feet from the rear of the van. A large man who seemed to be dripping wet stood on of the tailgate with a psychedelically painted chest of drawers balanced precariously on a dolly.

      “Hey, lady, move it!”

      She glared at him.

      “What’re ya, deaf? Back it up. Move it.” He waved her back with one hand.

      Slowly and carefully she climbed out of her Durango, shut the door softly so as not to wake up Lancelot, snoring softly in the passenger seat, and turned to the man with a sweet smile. “No, you move it, buddy. You’re blocking my driveway and I would like to park my car.”

      “Aw, jeez.” He yelled toward the house, “Hey, Mac, lady out here wants us to move the van.” He laughed. “Lady, ya got to be kiddin’.”

      “Not at all. Blocking access to a private driveway is a crime in the state of Tennessee. If you remain where you are, I will have a sheriff’s deputy here to give you a nice, big citation before you can get that thing down the ramp.”

      “It’s a chest of drawers,” said a baritone voice from behind her.

      “It looks as if it’s been trapped in a riot in a paint store.” She tamped down her temper and turned slowly to look at the newcomer. This must be the “Mac” the mover had been calling. No doubt the driver of the van.

      This Mac certainly looked as though he could move refrigerators without much effort. He was wearing dirty jeans, equally dirty sneakers and a soggy Chicago Cubs T-shirt that needed a good bleaching. He wasn’t quite as tall as Dr. Mac, but he was probably at least six-two.

      He might be even brawnier than Dr. Mac. Moving refrigerators no doubt built muscles. His light brown hair was soaked with sweat, and his eyes were concealed behind fancy mirrored sunglasses. Nancy hated not being able to see people’s eyes.

      He strode up to her as if to make her back down. After everything that had gone wrong today, she was spoiling for a fight. Just let Mr. No-Eyes dare to invade her space and see how far those muscles got him. Heck, she could always sic Lancelot on him.

      Behind her she heard the wheels of the dolly begin to roll down the ramp.

      “Hey! Heads up! I can’t hold her!” shouted the voice behind her.

      As she started to turn, the brawny guy with no eyes grabbed Nancy around the waist and swept her to the side. The chest of drawers trundled to a halt on the road where she had been standing seconds before.

      The man held her against his chest. She could hear his heart beat. Hers sounded like a trip-hammer. He smelled of male sweat and felt as though he was built of concrete. She struggled out of the circle of his arms.

      “You all right?” he asked.

      “Fine, thank you.” She wriggled her shoulders and realized the beating of her heart came not so much from the near miss with the furniture, but from the feel of this male body against her. Damn, when a semiliterate roustabout could raise her pulses, she really had been entirely too long without a man. “Now, move your van.” She pointed to the gravel driveway across the lane that led up to her small cottage. The heck with please. Time to start issuing orders.

      “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize that was a driveway.”

      “Well, it is, and I want access to it.”

      “Look, miss—um—we’re almost finished unloading. If you could see your way clear to park your car where it is for an hour or so, the van will be gone.”

      Reasonable. Only she didn’t feel like being reasonable. She was hot, she was tired, before morning she and Dr. Thorne would probably lose the mastiff they’d operated on this afternoon. She had a blinding headache over her right eye, her neck ached, and she was so sick over losing her dear old neighbors to that nasty man from Chicago that she felt like crying.

      On top of all that, she was foster mother to Lancelot for the foreseeable future until the Halliburtons found a place to live that had room for him. And now this truck driver had disturbed her equilibrium in a way she didn’t like. It was the final straw.

      “Please find the man who hired you,” she said as imperiously as she could. Not easy when she had to look up at Mr. No-Eyes.

      He smiled. It was a nice smile, no doubt he practiced it frequently on irritated customers. This time it wouldn’t work. “I’m afraid I’m the culprit. I’m Tim Wainwright. My family and I are moving in. We’re going to be neighbors.” He pulled off his leather work glove and offered her his hand.

      She felt a wash of heat even greater than the July afternoon. Great. Thank God she hadn’t actually called him a semiliterate roustabout. She’d considered it. He’d let her make a fool of herself. Suddenly it didn’t matter. Screw the moving van.

      Without a word she climbed back into her car, reversed it and drove across her lawn to her driveway and pulled up beyond her dusty azaleas.

      She went around to Lancelot’s door, grabbed his leash and helped him down. Alarmed by the irrational fear that

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