Not a Moment Too Soon by Linda O. Johnston

Author:Linda O. Johnston [Johnston, Linda O.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Suspense
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2004-09-06T05:00:00+00:00

Shauna wasn’t sure what to expect.

But she couldn’t just stand around with Hunter in his kitchen any longer, rehashing their painful history—or watching his frustration and pain on his face as clearly as if he spilled it like a patient participating in therapy.

So, without further prompting, she withdrew her laptop from its bag, put it onto the small table in the guest bedroom, and booted it up. She scrolled through menus until she reached the file containing her story about Andee. And opened it.

She scanned it briefly. It read the same as last night, after she’d been able to save the single small change: Andee knew her daddy was already home from his trip.

She still didn’t understand why the modification remained. It meant nothing, except to make her look like a liar to Hunter.

But he’d thought her that, and worse, before.

She looked up at him. He stood close to her, just to her right, and now he knelt so he could see the screen, too.

This close, she could clearly see the shadow of his dark beard deepening the shade of his cheeks. Could watch the way his Adam’s apple worked in his neck as he tensed his jaw.

Could breathe in the clean scent of soap, for he must have washed his face when he’d excused himself briefly to go to his bedroom.

“Okay,” she finally said. “What would you like me to write?”

“Go to the day after Andee’s disappearance and add some stuff about how we looked for her. Stick yourself in the story. You weren’t there before, but you’re in the thick of it now.”

She had tried to insert herself into the story of her father’s final illness: talking to his doctors, trying to find some new therapy to help him. Then there’d been her growing grief and her ultimate despair—oh, yes, she had tried to add all sorts of things to that tale.

To no avail.

She had shouted at night, in her own room, to her Grandma O’Leary, who had talked with her often when she was a child about how her very special abilities would mature as she did. Grandma O’Leary’s response, in her mind, was always the same:

You can’t change your stories, Shauna. They come to you as our family gift. You’ll learn to live with them. All the O’Leary women who have the gift do.

And she had. But her “gift” had cost her Hunter once.

She didn’t have him now to lose again, but even so, when the ending didn’t change but came to pass, his hating her again—even more this time—would be too hard to bear.

“Are you going to try it?” he demanded in her ear.

She’d been staring at the screen in her dismal reverie. Procrastinating.

“Sure,” she said. She moved the cursor till she reached the spot he’d mentioned. “Here?”

“Fine.”

“Tell me how you want it to read.”

“This is your ball game. You pitch it any way you want.”

A strange analogy, but she understood it. “Okay. How about this?” She wrote, Andee’s daddy, Hunter, had a friend named Shauna who lived in Arizona.

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