LITMIR.BIZ

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hurry.” The new customer, a well-dressed, fortyish woman, detoured toward a display of afghans and furniture scarves hung from quilt stands along the side wall.

      Jenna looked back at Mack. He glanced toward the woman over by the afghans, then spoke in a low voice. “I want to talk to you. Alone.”

      “No!” The word came out all wrong. It sounded frantic and desperate.

      “Yes.” Lower still and very soft. Gentle. Yet utterly unyielding.

      “Miss?” The customer was fingering the fringe of a piano shawl. “There’s no price tag on this one.”

      Jenna realized she was scowling. As she glanced toward her customer, she rearranged her face into a bright smile. “I’ll be right there. Just one moment.” She turned to Mack again, the cheerful smile mutating instantly back to a scowl. “We have nothing to say to each other.”

      “I think we do.”

      “You can’t just—” Her voice had risen. She cut herself off, got herself back under control, then went on in an intense whisper. “You can’t just wander in here after all these years and expect me to—”

      “Jenna.” He reached out and snared her right hand.

      Before she could think to jerk away, he tugged her behind a wrought-iron shelving unit stacked with Egyptian-cotton towels and accessories for the bath. Vaguely stunned that he had actually touched her, she looked down at their joined hands.

      “Let go,” she instructed in a furious whisper.

      He did, which stunned her all over again, somehow. One moment his big warm hand surrounded hers—and the next, it was gone.

      He said, “I’m not expecting anything. I only want to talk to you. In private.”

      She could see it in his eyes, in the set of his jaw. He was not going to just go away. She would have to deal with him, to listen to whatever he’d decided he had to say to her.

      Right then, guiltily, she thought of Logan, her high school sweetheart, her dear friend—and now, her fiancé. Logan had waited a long time to make her his bride. And when this little problem with her divorce from Mack had cropped up, Logan, as usual, had been the soul of understanding. He hadn’t reproached her, hadn’t asked her how she’d managed, over five whole years, to let it slip her mind that she’d never received her copy of the final divorce decree.

      He’d just gently suggested that she get the situation cleared up.

      So she’d called Mack.

      And Mack had said that he did have the papers and he would sign them, have them notarized and send them to her right away. So she’d reported to Logan that everything had been worked out. When the papers came, in the next few days, she would file them. Within six months she and Logan would be free to marry.

      Logan hadn’t been thrilled about the waiting period required by California law. But he had accepted it gracefully.

      She wasn’t so certain how he’d accept the news that Mack had appeared in person and demanded to speak with her in private.

      But then again, maybe he wouldn’t even have to know about this little problem until after it had been resolved.

      Logan, who was an M.D. in family practice, had left two days ago for a medical convention in Seattle. He wouldn’t return until Sunday night—two more days from now.

      By then, Jenna told herself, she’d have everything under control. By then, she would have listened to whatever Mack had to say, taken the papers from him and sent him on his way. The whole situation would be much easier to explain to her fiancé once she had the papers in her hands.

      “Miss?” It was the woman over by the afghans, beginning to sound a bit put out.

      “Go ahead,” Mack said. “Take care of her.”

      The woman bought the piano scarf. Mack waited, standing a little to the side of the register counter, as Jenna rang up the sale.

      Once her customer had left, Jenna sighed and conceded, “All right. I close up at seven. After that, we can talk.”

      “Good,” Mack said. “There are a couple of promising-looking restaurants down the street. I’ll drop back by when you close and we’ll get something to eat.”

      Not on your life, she thought. She would not spend the evening sitting across a table from him, fighting the feeling that they were out on a date.

      “No,” she said. “Come to the house at seven-thirty. We can talk there. Lacey’s visiting for a while, but she won’t bother us.”

      “Lacey.” He said her younger sister’s name with more interest than he’d ever shown in the past. “Visiting? From where?”

      “She lives in Los Angeles now.”

      “What does she do there, rob banks?”

      Jenna gave him a too-sweet smile. “She’s an artist. And a very talented one, too.”

      “Still the rebel, you mean.”

      “Lacey makes her own rules.”

      “I believe it—and how’s your mom?”

      Jenna didn’t answer immediately. Sometimes she still found it hard to believe that Margaret Bravo was gone. “She died two years ago.”

      He looked at her for a long moment before muttering, “I’m sorry, Jenna.”

      He’d hardly given a thought to Jenna’s mother while she was alive. Mack McGarrity didn’t put much store in family ties. But right now he did sound sincere. Jenna murmured a reluctant “Thank you,” then spoke more briskly. “Seven-thirty, then. My house.”

      “I’ll be there.”

      “Bring the divorce papers. You do have those papers?”

      “I’ve got them.”

      He had the papers. Relief washed through her. Maybe this wouldn’t be as bad as she’d feared.

      Chapter Two

      Jenna walked home from the shop. It was only three blocks to the big Queen Anne Victorian at the top of West Broad Street where she’d grown up. She enjoyed the walk. She waved to her neighbors and breathed the faint scent of pine in the air and thought about how much she loved her hometown. Tucked into a pocket of the Sierra foothills, Meadow Valley was a charming place of steep, tree-lined streets and tidy old wood frame houses.

      At home, Jenna found the note Lacey had left on the refrigerator.

      “Last-minute hot date. Don’t wait up.”

      Jenna grinned to herself at the words scrawled in her sister’s bold hand. When Lacey said, “Don’t wait up,” she meant it. Since about the age of eleven, Jenna’s “baby” sister had never willingly gone to bed before 2:00 a.m. Lacey loved staying up so late that she could watch the sun rise before calling it a night.

      Jenna’s grin became a frown.

      Without Lacey, she and Mack would be alone in the house.

      She crumpled the note and turned for the trash bin beneath the sink. She saw Byron then. He was sitting on the floor to the right of the sink cabinet door, his long, black tail wrapped neatly around his front paws.

      “I don’t want to be alone with him,” Jenna said to the cat. “And do not ask me why.”

      The cat didn’t, only regarded her through those wise yellow-green eyes of his. “Don’t look at me like that,” she scolded as she tossed the note into the trash bin and shoved the cabinet door shut.

      The cat went on looking, beginning to purr now, the sound quite loud in the quiet kitchen. Byron never had talked much. But he could purr with the best of them.

      Jenna

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