LITMIR.BIZ

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Miss Greer whispered. “Don’t get me wrong, she’s a lovely girl, sweet and generous to a fault and a hard worker. But she doesn’t have a head for business. Have you ever seen her checkbook? It’s the stuff of my nightmares.”

      Reece couldn’t help it, he actually shuddered. He’d caught a glimpse of Sara’s checkbook when she’d brought it out to pay one of her hippie-artist friends for a handmade ceramic teapot—an entirely useless item in his opinion, but Sara had been in raptures about it. The checkbook register was written in five different colors of ink and had more cross-outs than a third-grader’s book report.

      “I know exactly what you mean,” Reece whispered back.

      “You can’t let her touch the B and B’s checkbook—or the calendar. She’ll write down the wrong dates.”

      “I’ll handle it, promise,” Reece said. “You focus on getting well.”

      Miss Greer pinched his cheek. He hadn’t let anyone get away with pinching his cheek since he was eight years old. “You’re a good boy, and so handsome, too. How is it no woman has caught you?”

      A few had tried, especially after a radio station had named him one of the top-twenty bachelors in Manhattan. But he suspected most of them had been more entranced with the cachet of the Remington family name than with Reece himself.

      The truth was, he liked living alone. He liked having everything just so, and the one time he’d gotten close enough to a woman that she’d halfway moved in with him, it had driven him crazy.

      “She’s in here.” Sara directed the paramedics into the kitchen, where they had Miss Greer on a stretcher in no time. The older woman didn’t complain, but Reece could tell by the tension in her face that she was in pain.

      “We’ll follow in Reece’s car,” Sara said, patting Miss Greer’s arm as the stretcher passed by her.

      Reece waited until the stretcher had cleared the kitchen door. “We will?” he said to Sara.

      “Of course we will.”

      “Shouldn’t we call someone from Miss Greer’s family?”

      “She doesn’t have any family. She’s never married or had children. And we can’t let her go to the hospital by herself.”

      “I thought I would stay here and clean up the mess in the pantry,” Reece said, “and fix the shelf. Shouldn’t one of us be here to take care of the guests?”

      “The guests know where we hide the key. They’ve all stayed with us before, so it’s no big deal. But if you want to stay here I guess that’s okay.”

      “Isn’t it kind of unsettling, just letting strangers into your house to roam about?”

      Sara laughed. He loved to hear her laugh, the sound a bell-like tinkling. “You New Yorkers! You think the Silversteins are going to steal us blind when we have their credit-card information?”

      Good point. He nodded.

      “Anyway, B and B guests are nice people in general. That’s what I’ve found. They never steal anything.”

      Personally, Reece thought Sara was far too trusting—of everyone. The way she wandered all over the world, crashing wherever someone offered her a bed, sharing meals at the homes of people she barely knew, anyone could take advantage of her.

      But she would never believe him. Something bad would have to happen before she would become suspicious and skeptical like him.

      He frowned at the thought. He liked her innocence. It was part of what made Sara, Sara.

      “So can I borrow your car?” she asked.

      “You don’t have a car?” Come to think of it, he’d never seen her drive. He’d seen her ride off on a battered bicycle, but he hadn’t imagined that was her only transportation.

      “Mine broke down when I was driving back from Santa Fe, and I couldn’t afford the repair bill, so I sold it and rode the bus the rest of the way home.”

      “How do you survive without one?”

      “Port Clara’s not that big. I walk or ride my bike, and now that the streetcar is running again, I ride that. But the hospital is all the way in Corpus Christi. So can I borrow your car?”

      The thought pained him. He’d just bought that car—a cream puff of a Mercedes, barely used. He’d been thinking about buying a car anyway, and he’d intended to purchase something conservative and practical. But the little blue Mercedes had caught his eye.

      He seldom succumbed to impulse purchases, and the car was unlike anything he’d ever owned, but he hadn’t been able to walk away from it.

      He hadn’t even let his cousin Max drive it.

      “All right, I’ll go to the hospital with you,” he said to Sara. Miss Greer would probably appreciate someone there to handle the paperwork, he reasoned.

      When they were settled into the Mercedes’s leather bucket seats, Reece entered their destination in his satellite navigation system and they were off. The GPS routed them over the causeway that linked their little barrier island with the mainland, which was a relief. He always felt nauseous on the ferry, which was the other way off the island.

      “I’ve been dying to ride in this car,” Sara confessed. “Do you like it?”

      “So far.” It was the most sinfully decadent car he’d ever bought.

      “Why didn’t you hire someone to drive your car down from New York, like Cooper did?”

      “I didn’t own a car. With the cost of parking and maintenance in Manhattan, using public transportation or taxis makes more fiscal sense. I’ll probably end up selling this one.”

      “But what if you want to take a Sunday drive? Or a road trip?”

      “It’s easy to lease a car if you really need one.” But he hadn’t taken a road trip since college, and even back then he hadn’t seen the point in it.

      “I miss my car,” she said wistfully. “It had over two hundred thousand miles, and I logged every one of them.”

      “Maybe time to get a new one then. Old cars aren’t as safe as the new ones, and not as economical or environmentally friendly, either.”

      “Yeah, well, if I could buy a new one I would. I’ll have to settle for a used one, once I save enough money.”

      At least she understood the concept of saving money. A lot of people didn’t—they wanted to buy everything on credit.

      He wondered how people like Sara made it in the world. She was obviously not stupid. She was pretty—more than pretty, actually—and personable. He knew not everyone had been born with the advantages he had, and maybe her parents hadn’t sent her to college, but there were lots of careers that didn’t require a degree.

      She could have gone into sales, or gotten an entry-level job at a company and worked her way up. But instead she’d chosen to drift aimlessly—at least, that was the way it appeared to him. He doubted she had any savings or property. “Have you made any plans for retirement?” he asked suddenly.

      She stared at him as if he’d just sprouted an extra nose. “Excuse me? I’m twenty-nine. I haven’t planned for next month.”

      “Now is the perfect time to start thinking about it. If you saved just a hundred dollars a month—”

      “What is this? You’re not going to try to sell me swampland in Florida, are you?”

      Obviously he’d made a conversational gaffe. “I just worry about you.”

      “Oh.” She backed down a bit. “Well, that’s sweet, but I don’t worry about me, so why should you?”

      “Exactly.”

      His answer

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