Blue Twilight. Maggie Shayne
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eyes widened and met hers.
“Something’s different—since the coma. Something’s wrong, Storm, and it’s about time you come clean about it.”
Stormy shook her head slowly. “Never could fool you, could I?”
“So what is it?”
“I don’t know. I just know I don’t feel the same.”
“That’s not an answer,” Max said.
Stormy rolled onto her side and closed her eyes. “It’s the only one you’re getting tonight. I’ll be okay. Go back to bed.”
“Are you sure? I can sit with you if you—”
“Lou, make her go to bed, will you?” Stormy muttered, snuggling more deeply into her pillows.
She looked fine, Max had to admit. And it didn’t seem there was a damn thing she could do for her friend, anyway. She sent Lou a helpless look. He only shrugged, then leaned over to pull Stormy’s blanket up over her shoulder. “Call if you need us,” he said.
“I will.”
He nodded at Max, and they both left the room. In the hallway, she looked up at him. He licked his lips and averted his eyes. “I’m sorry about busting into your room. When I heard her scream, I thought—”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s really not.”
She reached out to him, closed her hand around one of his and then studied it as her thumb ran over his knuckles. “I gotta tell you, Lou, it does me a world of good to know you’d come on a dead run if I were to cry out in the night.”
“I know.”
She nodded. “I’m scared to death there’s something wrong with Stormy. Something big. Major, you know? And no matter what you say, I know I’m right about that. That’s topmost on my mind right now. You catching a glimpse of me in the bathtub is barely a blip on my radar compared to my worry about her.”
He nodded. “I think you’re overreacting.”
“So what’s new? You always think I’m overreacting.”
He sighed, lowering his head.
“Even so, Lou, the only thing keeping me from going off the deep end over this is having you here. Knowing you’ve got my back even if you don’t agree with me. You’ll hold me together if I start to fall apart. I trust you like no one else. I trust you with my life. And with Stormy’s. And I can’t even tell you how glad I am that you’re coming with us tomorrow. Because I’ve got a bad, bad feeling about all this.”
He turned his hand in hers and squeezed. “You, too, huh?”
She met his eyes. “Yeah. Why? Don’t you feel good about it, either? “
“I don’t know why, but my gut’s telling me we’re walking into the lion’s den.”
He sighed. “If I thought I had a snowball’s chance in hell of talking you out of going down there, I’d try. But I know you too well.”
She nodded.
He released her hand. “We should get some sleep. Get an early start.”
“Yeah. Just … one more thing first.”
He looked down at her. She swallowed hard and gathered up her courage—drew it straight up from her ovaries, she thought. “I never thought of you as a gelding, Lou. I don’t believe for one minute you’re too old to react to a little flirting.”
She watched his brows go up. He seemed to be searching for words, so she shook her head. “I’m not trying to put you on the spot for a response to any of that. I just—I thought you needed to know.”
With a firm nod, she turned and walked down the hall to her bedroom and just left him standing there.
7
One vehicle seemed more practical than two, so Stormy left her Miata safely at the house in Maine, and Lou drove Maxie’s Bug. Not because he was the man, Stormy supposed, but because he was still pretending Maxie’s lousy driving was the reason he’d come along in the first place. She knew better and, personally, thought the two of them were pretty pathetic. Meanwhile, though, they were both still way too overprotective of her. God, it was getting old fast. She could only imagine how much worse that would be if they knew what was really going on with her.
Hell, how could they? She didn’t even know.
Either way, the upshot of it was that Lou drove, Maxie sat in the front of her own car, beside him, and Stormy had the small but comfy back seat all to herself.
Not that she minded all that much. She leaned with her back against the side of the car, and her legs on the seat, knees bent. She’d rolled up Maxie’s ever-present car blanket to use as a cushion. The position gave her a chance to observe the two of them. Much more pleasant, she thought, speculating on the state of their issues than wondering about her own.
Lou seemed stiff, guarded, as he drove. He must feel the tension—it was emanating from Max in waves a dead man couldn’t have missed. Not anger, not exactly. Or not purely anger, anyway. She was pissed off, sure, but mostly, Stormy thought, she was frustrated and impatient with him for so thoroughly misreading her for the past six months. She must feel like all that flirting had been totally wasted. And she’d done some class-A flirting!
Lou didn’t talk much, except about where they were going, driving directions or when to stop. Stormy didn’t blame him. He was a male, which meant Max’s mood was likely confusing him. He had no idea what he’d done wrong, so he didn’t dare say much, in case he made things worse.
Poor clueless man.
Max was off her game this morning, too. A little awkward, unsure of herself, and probably resenting the hell out of him for making her feel that way. She couldn’t relate to him as she usually did, with teasing, flirting and baiting, because he’d called a halt to that, and she hadn’t yet figured out the next best way to talk to him, so she didn’t talk at all. It wouldn’t be long, though, before Max had a brand-new approach. In the meantime, she was unnaturally quiet. Someone who didn’t know her as well as Stormy might think she was brooding, but Stormy knew better. Maxie was regrouping, working out a new plan of attack.
Meanwhile, though, the usual teasing banter between them was gone. Stormy found herself missing it.
She leaned back in her seat, bored with pondering her two hardheaded friends. Instead she wondered what it would be like to see Jason Beck again after all this time. He would be older, more experienced, maybe harder than he’d been before. Life seemed to have that effect on people. She wondered if he would look drastically different—whether he’d let himself go, grown a beard or put on a ton of weight. Whether he’d let his hair grow back or kept his head shaved, the way he used to. She wondered if he would still be the conservative ‘fraidy cat he’d been before.
What if he wasn’t? What if he’d opened his mind, grown a little more outgoing over the years? Stormy swallowed and closed her eyes, told herself she wasn’t going to New Hampshire to audition Jason as her new love interest—she was going to help him find his sister. Period.
Besides, she’d agonized over her decision not to pursue more than friendship with him in the first place. He was too buttoned-up, too tight-assed. He wasn’t for her. She would have driven him crazy, or he would have clipped her wings. Neither was a happy outcome.
Whatever she might have expected of Jason, though, it couldn’t have prepared her for the reality she faced four hours later.
They drove into town a little after noon, rolling past a green sign that read Welcome to Endover, followed by another that read Curfew Enforced. Stormy frowned and wondered about that, but she wasn’t sure if either Lou or Max had noticed. They were both focused on the opposite side