Flirting With Forever by Gwyn Cready (new books to read TXT) 📕

woman’s good name at risk for it. He looked at the smal sketchbook and the letter it contained. In truth, he had been wil ing to do more than that. And now, no matter what he had been wil ing to do or not, he had changed her future. The realization sickened him.

He couldn’t change the past, no matter how fervently he might wish to, but he certainly had no business playing God with Campbel ’s future. He must return to the Afterlife and accept his fate.

But before he left, he had one final deed to perform. He must beg Campbel Stratford’s forgiveness. He picked up his coat and scarf, grabbed the sketchbook and left.

46

A block from my building? Cam looked in disbelief at the address on the paper clutched in her hand. Peter’s been living a block from my building al these weeks?

She’d driven halfway to Bal ’s house before she’d been able to raise him on the phone, and only scored Peter’s address after reassuring him she was traveling without a weapon. She’d written it down, aghast, at a stoplight, and had driven to Mt. Lebanon in her gala outfit.

She swung the car into the first space open on Alfred Street, hopped out, locked the door and began hurrying back toward Washington Road, holding her long skirt above the sidewalk. She wasn’t sure in which direction the number was, so she started south. She made her way past the Anne Gregory For the Bride shop, stopped, then realized this was the address. She almost laughed. He not only was staying a block from her, he was staying in the only building in Mt. Lebanon that was crenelated like a castle.

She doubled back to the residential door to the left of the shop windows, and with a sigh began to scan the names next to the bel s. Bal had not given her an apartment number, and, in fact, had only been able to come up with the address by rifling through the papers on his desk to find the delivery slip from the company he’d hired to transport the paintings to his house.

Three bel s, three names. “Joshua Smith,” “M. Curran”

and— Oh, very funny—“K.T. Holmes.”

Jerk, she thought instantly, then bit her tongue in dismay.

She rang the Holmes bel and waited. No response. She was just about to walk away when the door swung open.

Peter was throwing a wool scarf around his neck. He froze when he saw her.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“That’s odd. I was just coming to talk to you.” He tucked the scarf in his coat meekly and fol owed her out onto the sidewalk.

The December wind blew down the street, lifting the curls of hair over his ears. He slipped his hands in his pockets and moved automatical y between her and the gusts. “What is it?”

How could she have missed it? That smoky quiver that had always sat in his eyes wasn’t laughter or mocking or even desire. It was pain. She should have recognized it.

She’d had opportunity enough to examine such a thing, after al .

“I found an article about you.”

The quiver disappeared, like the lens of a camera, hidden behind a protective cover.

“Oh?”

She felt her own vulnerability rise, a frightening combination of sorrow and culpability. “Why didn’t you tel me?”

It was as if a whoosh of vacuum had sucked al the noise and wind and traffic from the street, leaving only a blurred silence and the two of them. The lens lifted briefly, and she saw that he understood. Peter looked down at his shoes.

Cam felt her throat cramp, so afraid was she of the next word.

His gaze lifted, and a tear had striped his cheek. “One doesn’t easily fit ‘My wife died in childbirth’ into a conversation.”

She flew into his arms. “Oh, Peter. And your son.”

“And my son.”

She could feel him quake, and she was crying, too, thinking of her brother and the son he’d never see grow up, and for an instant the world seemed fil ed with such cruelty.

“My brother,” she cried into his coat, “lost his wife and son in a car