A Soft Place to Fall (10 page)

Two days later thirty-six year old Kevin
Galloway was dead of a massive heart attack. Kevin left behind a
grieving widow, a heartbroken family, and an old family friend who
wondered if he was somehow to blame. He couldn't look at Annie
without feeling responsible for the sorrow in her beautiful
eyes.

Call her, Susan had said. Pick up the damn
phone and call her. Stop being the Family Friend and start acting
like a man.

Easier said than done, Susie.
Annie's
phone wouldn't be up and running until tomorrow afternoon.

He could hear his pal's snort of derision.
What's the matter with you, Talbot? Get in your fancy-schmancy
Rover and drive over there. Bring a bottle of wine with you and
toast her new address.

He glanced at the heavy watch on his left
wrist. Ten minutes to midnight. The Family Friend still knew the
boundaries. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The
Pfeiffer cesarean had been rescheduled for tomorrow afternoon.
Rounds were mid-morning. Maybe he would buy up a bag of donuts from
DeeDee's first batch of the day and bring them over as a low-key
housewarming present. It wasn't a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisee but even
the Family Friend had to start somewhere.

#

She wouldn't stay put. No matter how hard Sam
tried to keep her in the sleigh bed, she kept finding a way to
slide out of it. Finally he climbed in next to her and blocked her
exit with his body. She'd already nearly set the house on fire and
then come close to drowning. He wasn't about to test the theory
that bad luck came in threes.

The two cats were still at the far corner of
the bed, down by the foot. Max was curled up in the hallway,
snoring deeply. Outside the ocean crashed rhythmically against the
shore while he spent his first night in Shelter Rock Cove in bed
with a beautiful woman. They hadn't made love or kissed or held
each other close and yet he felt as if they had shared all of that
and more. He had come up here to be alone for the first time in his
life while he tried to figure out his next move. The career that
had defined his life for so long was dead and the future – hell, he
couldn't see it through the fog.

And then he saw her leaning over a grocery
cart in the parking lot of Yankee Shopper and everything changed.
He had made his living playing the odds, balancing the wise choice
against the gamble, and he had always come out a winner. But when
it came to life he took few chances. The lives of his brothers and
sisters were in his hands and he wasn't about to screw that up.
There had been women, not many but enough, but no one woman who
made him feel as if everything that had come before was only a
dress rehearsal. Besides, how many women wanted to throw in their
lot with a guy who had five kids to raise at age nineteen?

He had watched as his friends met and
married. He toasted a trio of godchildren and bought more baby
presents than he could count. The wheel kept turning and after a
while he wondered if maybe he was meant to be the helpful big
brother, the terrific best friend, the world's best godfather who
even endured the "Uncle Sam" jokes with a smile.

Funny how he had finally reached a place
where he understood that not every man had a happily-ever-after
ending in his future when fate sent The One into his life.

She murmured something in her sleep and
shoved her rump up against his side. Her sweet warmth was more
intoxicating to him than the champagne she would regret in the
morning. He knew how she looked when she stepped from the tub and
that she had a tiny birthmark near her right nipple. He knew that
she wore a wedding ring on her left hand even though she was a
widow and that the guy with the thinning blond hair had seemed
taken with her.

Was she sleeping with him? The thought that
another man might have the right to touch her twisted his gut into
a painful knot.

And where was her furniture? She didn't
strike him as the minimalist type, not with this enormous sleigh
bed. The sleigh bed was the property of a sensualist. No doubt
about it. The wood was smooth and curved and lustrous. The
mattress, high and firm and welcoming. The abundance of pillows
belonged to a woman who understood comfort and went out of her way
to find it even if the bed took up the entire room.

There was so much he wanted to know. Who did
she love? Was she happy? He wondered if Warren Bancroft knew the
answers and, if he did, would he share them with Sam.

He turned on his side and fitted his body
around hers, drew her warmth into his skin, and let the world fall
away.

Tomorrow morning they would introduce
themselves and go their separate ways but until the sun rose up
over the ocean, the night belonged to them.

#

Annie opened her eyes then quickly closed
them. Angry beams of sunlight stabbed her in the retinas, the
temples, across her forehead, and around the back of her head. She
took a deep breath then tried again. This time the room tilted at
an odd angle while her stomach threatened to slide out from under
her. Bad idea. She wasn't about to do that again.

The vague memory of an empty stomach and a
bottle of supermarket champagne swam into view. That would explain
why she felt like a herd of elephants was learning to tango across
her brain pan. Since when did George and Gracie snore like 747s on
takeoff?

Just take it slowly. No sudden movements.
All you have to do is get from here to the shower and you'll be
okay.

Eyes tightly closed, she rolled over
carefully, one little inch at a time, and was about to swing her
legs over the side of the bed when she found herself face to face
with the man she'd met in the Yankee Shopper parking lot yesterday.
He was lying there next to her, bare-chested and in jeans, with his
face pressed deep into one of her pillows. She glanced down at
herself and realized she was wearing his shirt, half-unbuttoned,
over her clearly naked body.

"Oh . . . my . . . God!"

He woke up on the last word, just before she
let out a scream loud enough to bring the entire Shelter Rock Cove
police department to her door.

"Nothing happened," he said. "You're not in
any danger."

She felt like someone was blowing up balloons
inside her head. "What in hell are you doing in my bed?"

"I was making sure you didn't hurt
yourself."

Hurt herself? Just breathing made her
fillings hurt. "Ten seconds," she said. "If you're not out of here
by the time I count to ten, I'm calling the police." He didn't have
to know that her phone service wouldn't be turned on until
afternoon.

He swung his legs from the bed and stood up
in the hallway. "You got drunk. You took a bath. Your robe caught
fire and then you almost drowned in the bathtub."

"Please." It was hard to look dignified when
you were nursing the mother of all hangovers. "Do you really expect
me to believe that?"

He met her eyes. "Yes."

The smell of scorched fabric . . . the dream
about him carrying a flaming robe . . . the sight of him plunging
that robe into the bathroom sink . . . "I thought I dreamed
it."

"The robe's hanging over the shower rod and I
used all of your towels to sop up the water on the floor." A grin
tugged at the corners of his mouth. "And don't worry about the
front door. I'll take care of it as soon as the hardware store
opens up."

She groaned and fell back against the
pillows. "What happened to the front door?"

"I didn't have a choice," he said. The grin
widened. "Good thing I took kick-boxing."

Another awful thought, one even worse than
the kicked-in front door and the ruined robe, occurred to her. "You
were in my bathroom last night."

He nodded. "Yep."

"And you –" She couldn't finish the sentence.
It was too horrible.

"I tried not to look," he said as the grin
turned into a downright smile, "but I'm only human."

She sat up, tugging at the shirt, wishing it
covered her from neck to toes. "Then you got what you deserved,"
she snapped. "I'm ten pounds overweight and I haven't done a sit-up
since 1997." Each word reverberated through her cranium like
gunshot.

"You're beautiful."

"You're nuts."

He said nothing, just watched as she coiled
her tangle of hair into a knot on top of her head. Her fingers felt
disconnected from the rest of her aching, queasy body and she
fumbled about, growing clumsier with each second that passed.

"Are you going to stand there blocking the
doorway all day?"

"You had a bad night," he said. "I want to
make sure you don't have a worse morning."

"I can take care of myself, thank you."

"You weren't too good at it last night."

"Listen," she said with as much dignity as
she could muster, "I'm sure you'll understand that making polite
conversation with a strange man who saw me drunk and naked in the
bathtub is more than I can handle in my current condition. Now if
you'll step out of the way, I'd like to make it into the bathroom
before I disgrace myself any further –"

She must have looked as green around the
gills as she felt because he stepped aside immediately and she made
it to the john in the nick of time.

#

She was deeply embarrassed, visibly angry,
and, unless Sam missed his guess, badly hung over. The last face
she would want to see when she came out of that bathroom was the
man who had seen her at her worst.

She was also deeply vulnerable to kindness.
She radiated loneliness the way some people radiated power and his
own lonely heart responded to it.

He was already in over his head, drunk on the
smell of her skin, branded by the feel of her body pressed against
his in the heart of the night. He had no words for the way he felt,
no easy explanation for what he knew in his bones was more than
lust. He was hungry for her, for the sound of her voice, her smell,
hungry the way a man would be if he had lost her once and then been
lucky enough to regain a piece of heaven.

The feeling scared the hell out of him. He
had no job, no home, no glittering prospects on the horizon. He had
failed the people who relied on him to protect their future and he
had no way to make it up to them. She'd be better off with the man
in the Rover, the one who had looked at her as if she had hung the
moon.

The thing to do was bail out now before
things went too far. He would call Warren from the road and let him
know he wouldn't be using the house and then he would drive north
until he found a town where he could disappear. He needed solitude,
not complications, and that was one thing he would never find here
in Shelter Rock Cove. Not now.

He opened the door to his truck and dug out a
faded brown sweater stashed in among his things. He slipped it on
over his head then snapped his fingers for Max who was lying on the
front porch watching him.

"Come on, Max," he called to the dog. "Let's
go."

No response at all from Max. He didn't even
blink.

Sam snapped his fingers again.

Max refused to budge. The dog rested his head
on his forelegs and wagged his tail.

"You too, huh?"

Max wagged his tail harder. Nothing short of
filet mignon was going to move him from that spot. The place felt
like home to him and the dog saw no good reason to leave.

And that was that.

Life's big decisions weren't always made
after days of somber deliberation. Sometimes a man just got lucky
and his dog made the decision for him. The woman with the sad blue
eyes had cast a spell over both him and Max, and only the dog was
smart enough to know they should wait around a while and see where
it was headed.

Sam climbed into the truck and gunned the
engine. He hoped the hardware store opened early.

#

Once Annie's stomach finally decided to quit
doing somersaults, she washed her face, brushed her teeth, and was
about to leave the bathroom when she noticed her beautiful green
robe hanging over the shower rod. The sight sent a chill up her
spine.

Half of the sash was charred black, as was a
six-inch swath on the right side of the robe. Annie's fingers
trembled as she folded the robe and tossed it in tiny trash can
next to the sink. How many floral arrangements had she sold over
the years meant for victims of house fires? The number was well
into triple digits. A misplaced cigarette. Faulty wiring. Candles
left unattended.

An idiot woman with too much champagne and
too little common sense.

He hadn't exaggerated. If anything, he had
soft-pedaled the story. The man had saved her life – yes, probably
saved it twice if her hangover was any indication of her level of
inebriation – and she had railed at him as if he'd committed a
crime against humanity. So what if he had seen her naked. The sight
of her unclothed body was hardly likely to send him into a fit of
wild desire. The man had been too busy keeping her from either
going up in flames or underwater to waste any time on lust.

At the very least she owed him an apology,
not to mention a home-cooked breakfast.

He wasn't in the living room, the bedroom, or
the kitchen. The spare room was stacked high with boxes, some of
which he'd used to hold the front door in place. An engine roared
to life in her driveway and she flew out the back door in time to
see him turn the corner and disappear.

Great going, Galloway. The man saves your
life and you send him packing.

She started back inside, shivering in the
brisk morning air. It was probably for the best. She had more on
her plate these days than she could handle. Besides, he might be
married with five kids, just like she'd imagined yesterday in the
parking lot. He could just imagine the story he would tell his
wife.
Yeah, she finally woke up and can you believe it? She
didn't even bother to thank me for saving her life.