LITMIR.BIZ

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found a box of notecards and held them up victoriously. “Your ticket to a new life.”

      “I’m sure this Damon person will want you, Matty,” Felicity said. “We’ll just tell him the truth.”

      Liza plopped back into position on the floor. “I’ll write it for you. He won’t know. What’ll I say?”

      “‘Dear Damon,’ for starters,” Felicity said, ignoring Matty’s bursts of laughter.

      “Got it. How about ‘You don’t remember me,’?” Liza looked to Matty for approval.

      Matty managed a small nod. It would be true, of course. “Say I was two years behind him, but we were in Evolutionary Biology together. And Advanced Biochemistry.”

      “Matty was studying for medical school,” Liza told Felicity, although the other woman already knew. “She graduated at the top of our class.”

      Felicity didn’t ask what had happened to Matty’s dreams. She and Liza had moved into Matty’s house after Frank Stewart’s death two years ago. Both women knew about Matty’s sacrifices. “Be sure you tell him about Matty’s work in neonatal. Tell him how good she is with babies. Nobody’s better.”

      Liza scribbled frantically. “‘I have always lived in Carrollton,’” she read as she wrote. “‘I’m ready for new adventures and a warmer climate. I’ve always done the expected and the safe. Now I’m looking forward to taking risks.’”

      Matty wondered if that part, at least, was true. The letter to Damon was just a joke, but even her alcohol-fogged brain cells could realize that at their root the things that Liza was writing were no laughing matter. She could spend her entire life in Carrollton, living in this house, working at the hospital taking loving care of newborns someone else would have the joys of raising. She had respect and friendship here, an adequate income. But unless she took some drastic steps, she would never have anything else.

      “Say, ‘I’m slender and attractive, with a terrific smile.’” Felicity tapped her lips again. “And say, ‘I’m bright enough to understand at least half of what you talk about.’”

      “More than half.” Liza scribbled some more. “Anything else?”

      Matty spoke up. “Tell him I’ve never forgotten the way he came to my rescue one day, and now I’d like to return the favor.”

      Liza frowned. “What?”

      “Just tell him.”

      “It’s your proposal, not mine.” Liza finished with a flourish. She reread the letter silently, then slipped it into its envelope, which she addressed with a bold scrawl. “Stamps?”

      Matty was suddenly all too aware of how much champagne she had drunk. She watched Liza rise to rummage through the drawers again. “Liza, don’t waste stamps. We’ve gone far enough.”

      “Of course we haven’t.” Liza gave a lopsided grin. “Damon Quinn’s not nearly good enough for you. Nobody is. But he’s a start.”

      “We’re not mailing that letter….”

      “Watch me.” Liza glued a row of stamps in the proximity of the right-hand corner of the envelope, then wove her way to the mail slot in the entry hall and stuck it halfway through. “There!”

      Matty began to giggle again, and by the time Liza had rejoined them on the floor, all three women were laughing so hard they were gasping. They fell asleep that way, heads pillowed on cushions, bodies covered by worn afghans they’d thrown over each other, cuddled together like teenagers at a birthday sleepover.

      Matty didn’t even bother retrieving the envelope before she fell asleep. The mail always arrived in late afternoon, as it had every day since her childhood. Damon Quinn would never see the letter that had been nothing more than a birthday salute from her best friends. He would never know that Felicity and Liza had used him to try to open her eyes to the world of possibilities that existed beyond the safe, familiar confines of Carrollton, Minnesota.

      She fell asleep trying to visualize Damon’s face, and she was still sleeping soundly early the next morning when the mail carrier, following the map of his newly divided route, removed the letter addressed to Damon and stuck it in his pouch.

       CHAPTER ONE

      Miami International was every bit as crowded and harried as Damon had expected it to be. His flight in from George Town had been uneventful, but as he’d neared Miami, he had asked himself again and again exactly what on earth he was doing. He had made some huge mistakes in his life. He had trusted the wrong people. He had looked at the world through a distorted eye, refusing to see that the ordinary events of everyday life were as important, as earthshaking, as anything he could discover in the laboratory. But never, at any time in his life, had he set out to unfairly use another human being.

      Not until now.

      An airline official in quasimilitary garb began to announce the arrival of another flight at the nearest gate, and Damon watched idly as people who had been lounging in the chrome-and-imitation-leather chairs began to stand expectantly. He didn’t join them. Matty Stewart’s flight had been rerouted due to a freak blizzard in the Midwest, and nobody seemed to know which alternate flight she had been switched to, because computers had succumbed, as well. She’d had no way to reach him, of course, so he had been forced to meet every potential flight, hoping that she was on board and, more important, that they would recognize each other if she was.

      He was about to marry a woman who might pass right by him and never know she’d done it.

      A trio of casually dressed young women, one with a baby slung over her shoulder, passed just in front of him to line up outside the roped-off exit. He wondered whom they were meeting, and if the baby had been lugged through the busy airport for a tender reunion or simply because baby-sitters cost too much money.

      The first passengers stepped through the jetway, and Damon watched without getting to his feet. He counted four men in business suits, a middle-aged couple with three carryons apiece, a mother and father dragging a screaming blond-haired toddler between them. The parade of passengers continued as he ticked them off mentally. By the time he began to lose interest, the three young women had disappeared with three equally young men.

      Unlike the last flight he’d met, there hadn’t even been any near misses on this one. The two unaccompanied women of the right age hadn’t begun to match Matty’s description or resemble the photo she’d sent him. One woman had been short and dark-haired, and the flurry of Spanish she’d uttered when she caught sight of a dark-haired young Romeo behind the rope had confirmed his opinion.

      The other woman, a willowy blonde in a pale gold sweater and dark stretch pants, had seemed too self-possessed to match the voice he’d come to know so well. Matty had a sweet voice with an unmistakable flutelike waver that said everything about how unsure she was that she was doing the right thing by becoming his bride.

      And how could he blame her? He was asking a total stranger to give up the next year of her life, perhaps much longer, to make his own life more convenient.

      There was more to it than that, of course. Heidi’s future was at stake, too, a reality that eclipsed anyone’s convenience. And even though fatherhood was a relatively new experience for Damon, he had already learned that a father did anything for his child. Anything and everything and the entire spectrum in between. A father even begged a stranger to marry him if it meant that his daughter’s future would be safe and secure. And that was exactly what Damon had done.

      The flight attendants strolled through the exit, chatting and pulling their black flight bags behind them. Damon glanced at his watch, then back at the gate. But obviously the plane was empty now and Matty was on a different flight. He consulted the list he’d been given at the ticket counter to check what he already knew. The next possibility didn’t arrive for two hours.

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