Read Lightning That Lingers for Free Online

heart.
    He had seen her too. The sweet-cruel eyes had begun to fill with interest, amusement, and to her horror what appeared to be a dawning recognition. It was impossible surely that in so many people, over so many nights, he would have retained her image—but he was coming toward her. With her pulse thumping, she backed up quickly until thebrick wall at her back slammed her to a stop. The stovepipe hat fell forward onto the bridge of her nose.
    Strong hands in cashmere gloves pulled her out from the wall and, with a slow, careful movement, resettled her hat. Sky-blue eyes smiled into hers. The warm mist of his breath caressed her lips. Natural light made him more real, much more man than ornament. No dream held her, but a forceful human being. Smothering in his nearness, she missed the approach of the other man until he spoke.
    “Friend of yours, Philip?” The tone was filled with disdain, and, twisting to look at the handsome face above the suede jacket she encountered the look she was most accustomed to receiving from very good-looking men: dismissal. But instead of dwelling on that discovery, she thought disjointedly that she knew the blond man’s name.
Philip
. It was one of those names she could never say without imagining it written in longhand in Spencerian script as though it belonged to some Elizabethan scholar-playwright.
    “I’d know this worried brow anywhere.” Philip drew off his own light wool muffler and teasingly covered the part of her face that her own hands had hidden recently at the Cougar Club. “No doubt about it. Same lady.”
    She recognized his accent. The diction was upper-class, but softened by a lack of either emphasis or affectation. It was the type of voice her mother called Midwest Patrician, and it clearly didn’t match his profession. That profession and all the circumstances of their previous meeting were strong in her mind as she tried to assert herself in asituation that was inherently flattening. His light touch felt like a capture.
    “Look,” she said to the open space between the two men, “I’m sorry about the snowball,”—especially if you think I threw it at you to attract your attention, she added mentally—“but you see, there were four children …” who naturally by now had vanished. Her eyes were drawn irresistibly back to Philip, whose face carried nothing to indicate whether he thought the children were fictitious, or even that it mattered. He was smiling at her in a way she couldn’t fathom, a way she found immensely threatening.
    She had no idea what to expect next, so she was startled when he took the muffler and began to arrange it with care around her neck. The fleecy fiber held his body’s warmth, and the soft cashmere of his gloves brushed underneath her chin on skin made hypersensitive by the cold. Bittersweet shocks of reaction wavered through her upper body and compressed her chest, and she inhaled a stinging lungful of chilled air as his hands lightly covered her cheeks, gently massaging them. Filled with strangled pleasure, she was so taken aback that she couldn’t immediately frame the words to make this bewildering attention stop.
    Rubbing the back of his forefinger gently up and down the wind-pinked length of her nose, he asked, “Have you recovered from your exposure to the show the other night? Maybe I should say, from my exposure to you.”
    She choked.
    “It didn’t appear to be exactly your cup of tea,” he said. “What’s your name?”
    “Jennifer Hamilton.” The sound of her own namebrought her abruptly to her senses, or at least what she hoped were her senses. The wall behind her hampered a dignified retreat, so she jerked herself sideways to escape his hands and almost collapsed backward over the log cabin. His firm grip cradled her waist, steadied her, then released her, and he took one step backward, too.
    His expressive gaze lit briefly on the Lincoln fund drive poster. “Are you a librarian?”
    “Yes,” she said