Protected In His Arms. Suzanne McMinn

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СКАЧАТЬ just wanted things to go back to normal.

      Normal was a town in Illinois. At least that was part of the pep talk she’d been trying on herself lately. There was no such thing as normal. Not for anyone, much less for her, and if she stopped telling herself that normal was something she needed, then she’d be able to relax. Deal with things. Accept life as it was. Crazy was the new black.

      She was half Polish, half Italian, and she’d been married to an Irish guy. What did people expect from her anyway?

      It was nearly closing time. She raced through the store, grabbed a small jar of ground cinnamon, some flour, then a bag of apples, and headed for the checkout. No. She needed ice cream. She definitely needed ice cream. She picked out a gallon of vanilla bean from the freezer case, juggling it with the other things until she got up front.

      “Looks like somebody’s makin’ something good tonight,” the Foodway checker said as she rang up the items. “Yum. Wish I was going to your house.”

      Mary tugged a ten out of her wallet.

      “Pie,” she said.

      There was nothing more normal than apple pie and vanilla ice cream. She handed the bill to the girl behind the register. She looked like she was about nineteen. Mary hadn’t seen her before, so Keely must have just hired her.

      She could see her friend coming up the aisle from the back of the store. Keely had spotted her.

      The girl made change. She dropped the coins in Mary’s hand. The all-too-familiar-now snap of what sometimes felt like electricity jolted her. Mary met the girl’s eyes, the coins hot in her fist now.

      She was a pretty girl with big, trust-me eyes, and she was going to get fired tomorrow for stealing.

      “Hey,” Keely Schiffer said, reaching the checkout. “I thought that was you I saw whizzing through the store like somebody shot you out of a cannon. Not planning to stop and say hey to your best friend tonight?”

      “I was in a hurry. And you looked busy in your office, so I didn’t want to bother you.”

      “Was that two excuses for the price of one?”

      Mary didn’t argue the point her friend drove home all too well. Yeah, so she was a little antisocial and a lot in denial.

      She looked away from her friend’s piercing eyes, her gaze landing on the stack of weekly newspapers sitting next to the register. She focused on the headlines as if she was interested. Construction was starting on a new field house at the high school. The mayor was up for reelection. A mobile home fire was under investigation. The deer population was on the rise.

      “I was thinking we should get together, go shopping or something,” Keely said. “I hardly see you—”

      “I can’t,” Mary said. She gathered her packages. “I’m sorry.”

      She thought about telling her the new checker was a thief, but then Keely was going to find out on her own pretty soon if that were true, wasn’t she? Just like the librarian was going to find out she was pregnant next week, and somebody was going to get in that Impala in the parking lot and have some superfabulous sex tonight.

      Or Mary was just crazy like everybody said. Either way, keeping her lip zipped seemed like a good choice. Even if Keely was maybe the only person in Haven who might, just might, not call her crazy. But Mary knew Keely herself had kept her own experiences after the earthquake close to the vest, even if she had shared one of those experiences with Mary.

      Or maybe it was Mary who didn’t want to talk about it and she was projecting, wrongly. A piano teacher by trade, she’d spent ten years hobbying as pretend psychic at community fairs and school carnivals. Until the earthquake had changed everything. The real thing wasn’t quite as much fun.

      And what was the point because nobody believed her? People thought she was crazy, other than the occasional crackpot who, thanks to the media circus surrounding her husband’s death, called her for the “psychic” services she no longer offered.

      She gave Keely a quick hug. “I’m sorry. I gotta go. I’ll call you later.”

      “No, you won’t!” Keely called after her.

      No, she probably wouldn’t.

      The man was still there, now leaning against the Impala and watching her.

      She walked between their cars to her driver’s-side door, juggling packages along with her oversized purse.

      “I’m sorry about your husband.”

      She dropped the bag of apples.

      “What?” She stared at him over the top of his car. It had been nine months since Danny had died. She was used to sympathetic platitudes, even from strangers. But how this stranger knew who she was…She’d never seen him before, she was certain of that.

      “I know how it feels to lose someone. I know you know how it feels, too.”

      “How did you—” She broke off, stared at him again. A floodlight on the building revealed his features. Square jaw, intensely jade eyes, planed cheeks, a full, straight lean mouth. Dark, thick, almost military-short hair.

      How could she forget him if she’d met him before today?

      He was the epitome of hot, his mile-long legs clad in worn blue jeans and a plain white T-shirt, untucked yet stretching over impressive pecs, revealing forearms tightly muscled. His pose was lazy like a coiled cat. He wore the bearing of a man who did nothing while he looked as if he could do anything.

      Leap tall buildings in single bounds, for example. Action hero material. Definitely.

      He belonged on a movie poster with curling flames as his backdrop.

      Any woman who got into that Impala with him would be a very lucky woman, indeed.

      She felt jittery, sweaty.

      It took everything in her to block the sensory assault again. Could she be more lame? Fantasizing about sex with a stranger in a parking lot. Stranger danger, that’s what he was.

      And he certainly looked dangerous. Intelligent, street-tough, almost ridiculously gorgeous—but gorgeous like a long, sharp knife. Nope, she didn’t need any of that.

      She struggled to get her breathing and her nerves under control.

      “How do you know me?” she asked, repeating the question she’d only half managed to get out before.

      “I lost a friend on Flight 498.”

      Could they have crossed paths at the airport that day? She’d gone there, too, just as had all the other passengers’ family members. They’d stood around, waiting for official information as if some miracle was going to be announced.

      She’d known everyone. In her mind.

      Lots of people were scared of flying, especially smaller planes. But just because she’d had a severe and highly imaginative panic attack the day her husband had gotten on one, and just because his plane had ended up actually blowing СКАЧАТЬ