Hard Habit to Break by Linda Cajio

Author:Linda Cajio [Cajio, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79886-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

Ten

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Callahan.”

Matt’s head jerked up at the sound of a voice coming from where he’d least expected it. He’d been carefully squeezing his way through the hole in the side hedge, and now sharp twigs scratched his face and stabbed viciously at his belly.

“Dammit, Liz! What the hell are you doing out here at this time of night?” he grumbled while scrambling the rest of the way through the hedge. Silently he vowed to cut a nice big square in the boxwood, put in a gate, and to hell with any gossip. Crawling around on the grass like a two-year-old was ridiculous.

“I’m pondering the meaning of life,” she said in answer to his question. “And I’ve decided it’s the pits. Have a cigarette?”

There was no moon, and he could barely make out her shadow in the darkness even though she was sitting against her garden shed less than two feet away from him. Unfortunately he couldn’t miss the small red glow that seemed to dance all by itself as Liz raised a cigarette to her lips.

“I gave up cigarettes when I was sixteen and realized they wouldn’t make me any tougher than the rest of the guys in the street gang I belonged to,” he said. He sat down next to her and leaned his back against the shed’s flimsy steel side. “When are you going to give up the things?”

“I hate secure people,” Liz said, taking another puff of the cigarette. “You’d probably be able to tell Millie Jackson to sell her two-hundred-year-old farm and not even flinch at all the years and memories she’d have to give up just because it’s best for her.”

Realizing Liz needed comfort and that he’d been lecturing at her again, Matt swore silently. He had heard Millie Jackson had been widowed just before he moved to Hopewell. Liz had had an extremely bad day, and she obviously was agonizing over it. Feeling like an ogre, he snatched the pack of cigarettes out of her hand, took one, and stuck it between his lips. “Gotta light?”

She chuckled dryly, then pulled the cigarette from his lips and crumbled it into pieces. “I won’t lead someone else astray. It was only a momentary lapse when I offered you a cigarette. From now on, leave the vices to me.”

“And you do them very well,” he said, placing his arm around her shoulders and settling her against his side. She wore a heavy sweater and jeans, and he resigned himself to the bulky wool that separated his hands from her silky skin. “You have your cigarette, honey. Foreclosures must really be rough.”

“It isn’t a foreclosure, thank goodness.” She sighed. “Millie’s a widow, and she can’t keep up the farm by herself. What she needs is someone to manage the farm and hands to do the work, but she won’t get either without a dependable cash source. And farms work on speculation, which is borrowing from the bank and crossing your fingers that you can pay the money back.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.