Cindi Myers - Rocky Mountain Revenge стр 2.

She stopped at the only grocery in town to buy a frozen dinner and the makings of a salad, then drove the back way home. She tried to vary her route every few days, which wasnt easy. There were only so many ways to reach the small house in a quiet subdivision three miles from town.

The house, painted pale green with buff trim, sat in the middle of the block. It had a one-car garage and a sharply peaked roof, and a covered front porch barely large enough for a single Adirondack chair, which still wore a dusting of snow from the last storm.

She unlocked the door and stood for a moment surveying the room. A sofa and chair, covered with a faded floral print, filled most of the small living room, the television balanced on an old-fashioned mahogany table with barley-twist legs. An oval wooden coffee table and a brass lamp completed the rooms furnishings, aside from a landscape print on the side wall. The place had come furnished. None of the items were things she would have picked out, but shed grown accustomed to them. No sense changing things around when she couldnt stay.

She stooped and picked up her mail from the floor, where it had fallen when the carrier had shoved it through the slot. Utility bills, the local paper, junkthe usual. Nothing was amiss about the mail or the house, yet she couldnt shake her uneasiness. She eased out of the

boots and padded into the kitchen in stocking feet and put away the groceries. She wished she had a drink. She had no liquor in the houseshe hadnt had a drink since shed left New York. It seemed safer that way, to always be alert. But today shed welcome the dulling of her senses, the softening of the sharp edges of feeling.

She put water on for tea instead, then went into the bedroom to change into jeans and a comfy sweater. Maybe shed start a fire in the small woodstove in the living room, and try to lose herself in a novel.

The bedroom held the only piece of furniture in the house she really likedan antique cherry sleigh bed, the wood burnished by years of use to a soft patina. She trailed one hand across the satin finish on her way to the closet. She stopped beside the only other piece of furniture in the room, a sagging armchair, and slipped out of the corduroy skirt and cotton turtleneck. Sensible clothes for racing after six-year-olds. Elizabeth would have laughed to see her in them.

She opened the closet and reached for a pair of jeans. She scarcely had time to register the presence of another person in the room when strong arms wrapped around her in a grip like iron. A hand clamped over her mouth, stifling her scream. Panic swept over her, blinding her. She fought with everything she had against this unknown assailant, but he held her fast.

Shhh, shhh. Its all right. I wont hurt you. The mans voice was soft in her ear, its gentleness at odds with the strength that bound her. Look at me.

He loosened his hold enough that she could turn her head to look at him. She screamed again as recognition shook her and choked on the sound as she stared into the eyes of a dead man.

Jake Westmoreland watched the woman in his arms closely, trying to judge if it was safe to uncover her mouth. He wasnt ready to release his hold on her yet. Not because he feared shed strike out at him, but because hed waited so many months to hold her again.

She was thinner than he remembered, fragile as a bird in his hands, where hed never thought of her as fragile before. Her hair was darker too, cut differently, and the bright streaks of color were gone. Hed seen her picture, so he should have been prepared for that. But nothing could have really prepared him for meeting her again, not after the trauma of their last parting. For months, he hadnt even been sure she was still alive.

I thought you were dead, she said when he did remove his hand from her mouth. Tears brimmed in her eyes, glittering on her lashes.

I was sure Giardinos goons would go after you next.

Your friends got to me first. But they never told me you were still alive. How? The last time I saw you... She shook her head. So much blood...

They told him later he had died, there on the floor of the suite at the Waldorf Astoria. But the trauma team had shocked his heart back to life and poured liters of blood into him to keep his organs from shutting down. Hed spent weeks in the hospital and months after that in rehabmonths lying in bed with nothing to do but think about her.

He brushed her hair back from her temples, as if to reassure himself she was real, and not a dream. Elizabeth, I

The pain in her eyes pierced him. Its Anne. Elizabeth doesnt exist anymore. She died that day at the hotel.

Hed known this, too, but in the moment his emotions had gotten the better of him. He stepped back, releasing her at last. Why Anne?

It was my middle name. Her bottom lip curved slightly in the beginnings of the teasing smile hed come to know so well. The old smile hed missed so much. You didnt know?

No. There was so much he hadnt known about her. Can we sit down and talk? He nodded toward the bed, the only place where two people could sit in the room.