His Healing Touch. Loree Lough

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СКАЧАТЬ a hand, traffic-cop style. “A doctor without a phone? How will your patients get hold of you in case of an emergency?”

      “My partner takes over when I’m away, and when he’s gone, I do the same for him.”

      “I didn’t see a car out front—”

      “Friend dropped me off.” As if it’s any of your business, he added mentally. “He needed to borrow my pickup and—”

      She stopped his explanation with a weary sigh.

      “Sorry,” Adam said, “but it’s too late to hike out of here tonight, especially with this weird weather—”

      “When will your friend be back?”

      He grinned at her interruption. “First thing tomorrow morning.”

      She straightened her back, tucked her hair behind her ears and bobbed her head. “Oh, well…” she said, shrugging.

      He liked her grit. For all she knew, he was a madman. Yet there she sat, pretending not to mind that the wind had blown her into a stranger’s house.

      “…lemons and puckers and all that.”

      He would have asked what that meant…if he hadn’t looked into her eyes. Adam couldn’t help noticing how big they were, how long-lashed, how green. And then she smiled, and he had to add beautiful to the list.

      There was something about her, though, something vaguely familiar….

      He set the thoughts aside when she made a thin line of her mouth, slid the pucker left, then right. “What I really wanted to know was, what are you doing way out here in the middle of nowhere, all by yourself?”

      Man, but she was cute! Adam cleared his throat. “I come up here every other weekend or so. You know, the old ‘get away from it all’ routine.”

      She nodded. “How in the world did you ever find this place? I mean, it’s so…” Fingers drawing little arcs in the air, she hummed the tune to an old Beatles’ song. “It’s so nowhere, man!”

      Chuckling, he said, “Inheritance. The property belonged to my grandparents.”

      “They lived here?”

      Adam shook his head, biting back the sadness the thought aroused. “Not exactly. Theirs was a traditional farmhouse, swing on the porch, potbellied stove in the dining room…. Unfortunately, it burned to the ground a decade or so ago.” He swallowed as the flash of memory prickled his mind. “I had this one built a couple of years back.”

      Another nod, another glance around. “I like it. I like it a lot.”

      So now I can go to my grave a satisfied man, he thought, grinning. Adam sliced each sandwich in half, poured the soup into two deep bowls.

      “I feel like a lazy oaf, just sitting here while you do all the work. Let me set the table, at least.” She hopped off the stool. “Where do you keep the silverware? And the napkins?”

      Adam opened a drawer, saw her eyes widen and her mouth drop open. “What?” he asked.

      Blinking innocently, she said, “O-o-oh, nothing.”

      “Seriously, what?”

      “Well, if you hadn’t already told me you were single, I’d have figured it out after poking my nose in there, that’s for sure!”

      What was she rambling about?

      “How do you ever find anything?”

      “I just dig ’til I come up with what I went hunting for.”

      She bobbed her head from side to side. “Makes sense, I guess.” She pointed at the contents of the drawer. “You need a license to hunt in there, ’cause it looks dangerous.”

      If she hadn’t punctuated the comment with a wink, he might have taken offense. But then, it seemed he took offense at just about everything these days. Adam put the food on the counter, topped off her hot chocolate with more. “Now then—”

      She held up a hand to forestall the question. “I know, I know. Turnabout is fair play and all that.” Laughing softly, she said, “My name is Kasey Delaney. I’m twenty-six years old—well, I’ll be twenty-seven in a couple of weeks—and I, too, am single. I’m a floral designer by trade and—”

      “Floral designer? What’s that?”

      “You know those big bouquets you see in department stores and hotel lobbies and what-not?”

      He hadn’t. But he nodded, anyway.

      “Well, that’s what I do.”

      “You make them?”

      “I make them.”

      He came around to her side of the counter, sat on the stool beside hers. “So, you’re artistic, then.”

      “Maybe.” She held her thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “Just a little.”

      But wait just a minute here…. What had she said her last name was? Something French. No, Irish. De-something. Devaney.

      Delaney.

      His pulse raced and his mouth went dry. She couldn’t be that Kasey Delaney, could she? But then, how many Kasey Delaneys could there be in the Baltimore area? “’Scuse me a sec, will you?”

      She blew a stream of air across the soup in her spoon. “Sure, but don’t be gone too long. Might not be anything left when you get back.”

      He hadn’t prepared the meal to satisfy his own hunger, anyway. The main reason he’d made a sandwich for himself was so she wouldn’t feel uncomfortable eating alone. But now Adam was the uncomfortable one. Because what if…what if she was—

      Only one way to find out.

      He’d carried the photograph in his wallet for fifteen years, to the day, almost. He’d cut it out of The Baltimore Sun the morning after Halloween that wretched year. For a few years after that, he’d carried it as is, but as it yellowed and turned up at the edges, Adam began to worry it might disintegrate. And he couldn’t have that. He needed the article to remind him who and what he’d been, who and what he could become if he didn’t force himself to remember what he’d done that night. It had been encased in plastic since his eighteenth birthday.

      In the bright overhead light of the bathroom, he slid his wallet out of his back pocket. It required no hunting to find the article; he’d read it numerous times since…since the night that stupid, stupid prank went so wrong.

      He looked at it now, reminding himself that the girl in the black-and-white photo had been twelve when the picture was taken. She wore braces, a ponytail, one of those dark-plaid, private-school–type uniforms. One look at those big, smiling eyes cinched it. The Kasey pictured here and the one in his kitchen, who’d made him laugh and smile—and mean it for the first time in years—were one and the same.

      Why СКАЧАТЬ