Handful of Dreams by Heather Graham

Author:Heather Graham
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781480408395
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2013-03-04T17:35:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

THE THIEF’S NAME WAS Harry Bloggs; he was thirty-nine, a drifter with a record who was last incarcerated in Massachusetts, which would surely please the northern Maine natives, since they felt they were too peaceful and civilized to produce criminals.

Sheriff Grodin asked David all kinds of questions, and then he asked Susan all kinds of questions, which David didn’t mind, because Susan’s nightgown was by then hidden beneath her forest-green floor-length robe; he idly wondered what had happened to the white one. Harry Bloggs was handcuffed in the back of the patrol wagon, and Ed Beaufort, the deputy sheriff, was staring at him.

Susan was very calm and seemingly unaffected by the incident, which pleased David. What hadn’t pleased him had been a few of Bloggs’s comments.

Once the sheriff had arrived, Bloggs had apparently decided that David wasn’t going to shoot him—not in front of the law, at any rate. He’d come up with a vicious line of bravado.

“Hey, tough guy, they can’t hold me. No one’s ever gonna really hold me. And, buddy, when I get out this time, I’m coming back. You’d better watch out. You’d just better watch out.” And then he’d smiled as if he could read David’s mind. “And when I get my hands on her a second time—”

“There ain’t gonna be no second time for you!” Sheriff Grodin had warned Bloggs curtly. “We’re going to lock you up until you’re so old, you wouldn’t even be able to attack a baby!”

And Sheriff Grodin—a lawman with twenty years at his post—had assured David that it was true. Bloggs was a drifter with no money and no relatives willing to claim him. There would be no chance of his getting out on bail before his trial. He would go up for numerous accounts of armed robbery and assault, and the state would find little sympathy for such a man.

It was all over except for the paperwork, the hearing, and the trial. David assured Grodin that he would gladly come back to town if they needed him.

It was long past dawn by the time the sheriff left with his prisoner. Susan was sitting at the breakfast table, sipping coffee. David, having locked up again after showing the sheriff out, came back in to find her there, flushing a little as she glanced at him, staring at her coffee cup again.

“How are you?” he asked. Susan held her breath and swallowed as he came to her and lifted her chin, his thumb lightly stroking her throat.

“I’m fine,” she said a little too huskily. He released her quickly.

David poured himself more coffee, leaned against the counter, and gazed at her. “You really shouldn’t stay here, you know,” he said softly.

He saw her color deepen further. “David, if that’s another ruse—”

“Ruse? What would have happened if I hadn’t been here?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have gone downstairs. I would have hid in a closet. I would have been robbed, of course, but nothing else.”

David emitted an inarticulate oath and pulled out the chair opposite hers.

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