His Healing Touch. Loree Lough

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СКАЧАТЬ this might be easier to hear if you were sitting down….”

      Easier? Was the man out of his mind? Kasey slammed her door, knowing even before her teary face met her pillow that nothing would ever be easy again.

      The radio alarm jarred Adam awake.

      “…and the vagrant reportedly hit by the train was never found,” the rise-and-shine announcer was saying. “Engineer Al Delaney is survived by his wife and daughter.”

      Heart pounding, Adam leaped from bed, bare feet slapping on the hardwood as he raced toward the kitchen. “Mom,” he gasped, “where’s the Sun?”

      Without looking up from the Today section, she pointed.

      Adam paged through the rest of the paper scattered on the tabletop, eyes narrowed as he searched for a corroborating story. And then, on page twelve of the main section he found it: Vagrant Missing; Engineer Dead. The article explained how, just before he’d breathed his last, Al Delaney told paramedics that a vagabond had staggered onto the tracks behind Crescent Lawn Memorial Gardens.

      Thirty-five-year-old Al Delaney, the report said, had a long history of heart disease. The tidbit didn’t matter one whit to Adam. What mattered was that Mr. Delaney probably wouldn’t have died last night if it hadn’t been for—

      Adam’s gaze froze on the black-and-white photograph of the Delaney family—Al, his wife Karin, their daughter, Kasey, age twelve.

      Twelve. Same age Adam had been when his own dad died, four years earlier.

      Overwhelmed with guilt and shame, Adam stood and, taking the paper with him, trudged woodenly back to his room.

      “Do you see the time, young man?” his mom said from behind the paper. “School starts in less than half an hour, y’know.”

      Yeah, he knew. But he wouldn’t be going to school today. Too much to think about….

      Five minutes later, when he opened the back door, his mom was at the sink, rinsing her coffee mug. “Where’s your book bag? And what about your lunch?”

      “Don’t need ’em.”

      She started toward him. “Adam Thorne, where—?”

      “Got stuff to do,” he muttered.

      “Stuff? What stuff?”

      Truthfully? Adam didn’t know what, exactly. But he knew this: A man had died last night because he hadn’t had the guts to put a stop to a moronic stunt—and now, he had to do something.

      Shrugging, he stepped off the porch. “Love ya, Mom,” he said over his shoulder. “Have a good day at work.”

      Today, Adam intended to work, too…at finding a way to make right something that had gone so very wrong.

      Chapter One

      Fifteen years later—Halloween Eve

      Kasey Delaney squinted through the windshield.

      Should she turn right or left? Exhaling a sigh of frustration, she threw the car into park and grabbed the directions, written by her so-called assistant in purple ink on lavender notepaper.

      Yes, she thought, she’d followed each instruction to the letter. Which meant there should be a sign at this crossroads that read Kaplan’s Herb Farm. Kasey looked up. There was a sign, all right. A big white one in the shape of an arrow. But it said Thorne’s Getaway in bold, black letters.

      She glanced around, at thick underbrush spilling onto the gravel, at autumn leaves, at deep murky puddles that had collected beside the road following last night’s downpour.

      She hated to admit it, but she was lost. And if there was anything she hated more than being lost, she couldn’t name it at the moment. But she had no one to blame but herself.

      Not two hours ago, she’d barely sidestepped a run-in with Aleesha.

      “I wrote the directions down ’zactly as the lady told them to me.”

      “But Aleesha…”

      The girl’s lower lip had jutted out and her dark eyes misted with tears. She tucked a black cornrow braid behind one ear. “You ain’t never gonna trust me.”

      The last thing Kasey had wanted was to hurt the kid’s feelings.

      She leaned her forehead on the steering wheel, remembering how they’d met three years ago through an inner-city mentoring program. Fact was, Kasey couldn’t love Aleesha more if she were a flesh-and-blood relative, which was why, despite the protests of half a dozen well-meaning friends and relatives, she’d legally adopted the girl. Hoping the action would prove her trust, Kasey had tucked the directions into her pocket.

      “Should’ve known better,” she muttered now.

      Immediately, she felt guilty for the harsh thought. Aleesha had come a long way in the year they’d been a bona fide family. And she’d go even farther, “with a little more patience and a whole lot more love,” Kasey said to herself.

      She reached for her purse. She’d call Information, get the herb farm’s phone number, and call for directions herself…if only her dinosaur of a cell phone would work way out here in the middle of—

      The phone wasn’t in her purse. Grimacing, Kasey realized that Aleesha had borrowed it earlier that afternoon, and returned it with a dead battery.

      “You shouldn’t leave here without it,” her mother had warned, when Kasey plugged it into the charger. “Marty Bass said we’re in for severe thunderstorms tonight.” Then she said, “What’s wrong with the charger in your car?”

      Kasey’s silent nod toward Aleesha had been hint enough: misplaced. “I’ll only be gone an hour or so,” she said with a reassuring smile. “What could possibly happen in an hour?”

      “A million things,” her mother said.

      One of which, Kasey admitted now, was getting lost.

      Well, no point dwelling on it. “When life gives you lemons, you quote tired old clichés.”

      Grabbing her pruning shears and a wicker basket for cuttings, Kasey decided to take advantage of the acres of wildflowers on either side of the road. She climbed out of the sports car, immediately wrinkling her nose at the sucking sound her hiking boot made when she lifted it from the mud.

      What could happen in an hour? “You could get lost and mired in mud.”

      Squaring her shoulders, Kasey plunged into the hip-high grass. The whole area was lush with seed pods and willow branches. Better to concentrate on work than the occasional cricket. “Now I remember what I hate more than being lost,” she grumbled, lurching at every insect’s hip-hop. “Bugs.”

      Shouldn’t a person who traipsed through fields on a regular basis be used to things that crawled and flew and stung? She’d been the proud owner of Fleur Élégance for more than five years, after all. The floral creations she designed for hotels, restaurants, department СКАЧАТЬ