The Debutante's Second Chance. Liz Flaherty

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      “Right. And if a paper boy or girl forgot to deliver it, the editor took a copy out to the subscriber the same night and gave him the next week free.”

      They were at her back steps now, and she tried not to lean on his arm as they walked up. Her leg wasn’t more painful when she climbed stairs, but lifting her foot repeatedly was awkward and tiring.

      “Is that what you’re going to do? Bring that back?” Keep him talking and he won’t ask you why you limp.

      “I’m going to try to,” he corrected her. “It was that kind of newspaper that made me want to be a journalist.”

      She led the way into the kitchen of her house, tossing her coat over the back of a chair to dry. “Let me take your coat.”

      She hung his raincoat in the laundry room and returned to find him standing at the cold fireplace in the kitchen. “Light a fire if you’d like,” she suggested. “I know it’s not that cold, but the chill from the rain gets into your bones.” Especially ones that have been broken. She longed to swallow some aspirin to ease the ache in her leg, but didn’t want to invite comment.

      He knelt before the fireplace, laying a fire carefully. “Was this kitchen like this when you moved in?”

      “Pretty much, though I refinished the old floor and put up wallpaper everywhere. Sam down at the paint store goes into ecstasy when he sees me coming. I’m pretty sure I’m putting his oldest daughter through medical school.” She turned a burner on low under a pot of chili and went to the windows that overlooked the river, turning the wands that closed the blinds. “Do you want to see the rest of the house?” She couldn’t keep the pride out of her voice.

      “Sure.” He straightened and looked around. “I’d like for the St. John house to feel like this one. Cozy, I guess, but not lacy or fussy.”

      She grinned at him. “The lace and fuss are upstairs. Come on.”

      Micah was a perfect house tourist; he liked everything, even the rose-strewn wallpaper in her bedroom and bathroom.

      “Did you have a decorator?” he asked.

      “I did it myself,” she said. “Well, me and Sam and Jessie and everyone I hired to do the things I was afraid I’d screw up.”

      They sat at the kitchen table with their dinner. “Blake had a designer do Grandmother’s house when we moved into it,” she said, “and it was beautiful, but Jessie said it felt like a hotel she couldn’t afford to stay in.”

      Landy watched Micah covertly while they ate, putting bits and pieces of what she saw into the safe place where she kept good memories.

      He was tall and broad-shouldered like her husband had been, but had maintained his muscled build in a way that Blake had not. Micah’s dark brown hair was well cut, but not particularly neat, looking as though he combed it with his fingers throughout the day. He squinted sometimes, and she pictured his lean face with reading glasses sliding down his nose. His eyes were the same gray as the pewter pitcher on the mantel, fringed by thick lashes. His smile was wide and lovely, and came seldom. His hand, when he’d held her arm, had been strong but not bruising. She didn’t think Micah Walker had a need to convey power; it was there in his quiet presence.

      Without in the least meaning to, Landy sighed.

      Across the fat candles that flickered between them, Micah caught and held her gaze. “What happened?” he asked, and she knew he wasn’t asking her about the sigh.

      She hesitated. He was a reporter, she reminded herself. He was like those people who had dogged her every step for days, had been at the hospital, the mortuary, in the courtroom and camped in the front and back yards of Grandmother’s house. They had held microphones in her face and shouted questions at her. They had created an obstacle course that a woman on crutches could scarcely navigate.

      But the one time she had fallen, when, blinded by tears, she had tripped over someone’s thick black cord, one of the reporters had stuffed her recorder into her pocket and come to Landy’s aid. She had helped her up the steps and into the house, speaking quietly in her ear. The voice had been low, but the words had included the term “predatory sons of bitches” and Landy had laughed in spite of everything. The young woman helped her to a seat and then left her alone, and when Landy got up and peered outside through a lifted corner of a curtain, there had been no one left in her yard.

      She’d always wanted to thank the reporter for rescuing her, but had never seen her again in the hordes who had followed her until someone else’s drama took news media precedence over hers.

      “You were the debutante,” said Micah. “Your life was supposed to be charmed.” His voice was soft, gentle, the kind of voice that could lull you into thinking you were safe. Could, if the time was right, talk you into bed naked before you knew your bra was unfastened.

      “I never knew what I did,” she said, “to make you think I was like that. I went to the same school, church, Kmart that everyone else did, but I couldn’t ever be just everyone else. To you, anyway.”

      “I know,” he said. “When I was eighteen, I divided the world into those who had and those who didn’t. You had, which made you worthy of my contempt. At the time, I imagine I thought your family even hired people to go to the bathroom for you.”

      The self-directed sarcasm startled a laugh from her. “Not quite,” she said, “but speaking of bathrooms, would you excuse me?”

      In the pretty little powder room under the stairs, she swallowed three extra-strength pain relievers and willed them to work. The ache in her leg had become a raging fire, with little arrows of flame shooting and swirling all the way from her hip to her ankle.

      

      They sat in comfortable chairs in front of the fireplace, their coffee on a cloth-covered round table between them. Landy stretched her jeans-clad legs out straight, propping her feet on the ottoman the chairs shared, and Micah saw a spasm of pain cross her face. The expression cleared immediately, however, to be replaced with a Mona Lisa smile he recognized as a mask.

      “It’s pretty much a classic story,” she said. “Blake started hitting me in high school, stopped while we were in college, and started up again before we’d been married three months. We’d go to counseling, it would get better, then he’d drink and it would happen again. It became such a cycle I was almost able to mark it on a calendar.”

      She spoke without expression, though the color in the cheek he could see was hectic and her hands had that look about them again. That tension that made her grip her coffee cup and raise it to her lips in a studied motion.

      “Why?” He had to force the word out.

      “Why what? Why did an intelligent woman stay with an abusive husband? I told you it was a classic story—my reasons are just as classic. He didn’t mean to, I deserved it, it won’t happen again, I can’t manage on my own because I don’t know how. You’ve probably heard them all before.”

      He nodded slightly, his jaw hurting from being clamped so tightly. This shouldn’t have happened to her. It shouldn’t happen to anyone, but especially her. She’s fragile, small, a debutante, for God’s sake.

      “Finally, five years ago, we got divorced. It was very civilized, СКАЧАТЬ