a-soft-place-to-fall - Rakhibul hasan (story books to read .TXT) 📗

was to wrap yourself in the memory of love . . . .

"No coupons today, Claudia?" Midge Heckel began running her purchases over the scanner. "There's a cents-off coupon in Pennysaver this week for sweet butter."

Claudia sighed. "No butter for me, Midge. My cholesterol is giving me fits." Midge launched into a litany of her medical woes which Claudia matched, ailment

for ailment. The woman laughed as she bagged Claudia's purchases. "The wonder is we're still alive and kicking."

"I guess God isn't quite finished with us yet," Claudia said as she removed two twenty-dollar bills from her wallet.

"Well, He'd better hurry up," Midge said, "because it seems to me we're running out of time."

#

"We land in Bangor in fifteen minutes, Mr. B."

Warren Bancroft looked up at the young man in the dark blue uniform and nodded his head. "Right on time, Jason," he said with a glance at his watch. "That's ten in a row. I'm impressed."

The young man grinned. "Captain Yardley said you would be."

Warren managed to withhold a grin of his own. "You tell Captain Yardley –" he stopped in mid-sentence. "On second thought, I'll tell her myself once we're on the ground." He liked to deliver bonus checks personally.

Jason gathered up Warren's empty juice glass, a discarded copy of The Wall Street Journal, and a deck of playing cards with loons on the back then disappeared into the galley while Warren folded his reading glasses and put them away in his breast pocket.

Sonia Yardley was turning out to be one of his greatest successes. He had met her ten years ago when she was flying kids for a nickel a pound out of a little air strip near Wiscasset and using the proceeds to help pay for her college degree. He did a little discreet checking and discovered she had a 4.0 GPA and damn little else. He never once regretted seeing that a Bancroft scholarship went her way. Now Sonia had a handsome pilot husband, a beautiful baby girl, and a future that could take her as far as she wanted to go.

Warren felt sorry for rich old men and women who sheltered their money in ice-cold tax havens and never knew the joy of seeing that money turn a young person's life around.

Of course it didn't always work out the way he intended it to. Sometimes not even a man's best intentions could coax good fortune out of hiding for the ones he cared for most of all. That was how it had been with Annie and Sam. Annie's blossoming art career had

been put aside before house payments and her husband's problems. When was the last time she had set up her easel and taken out her paints? Five years. Maybe ten. What about the carvings and sculptures she'd wanted to make? She'd laughed when he asked her to consider creating something for the museum and said she wouldn't remember how. He was saving the place of honor for her just the same. She used her gifts to create exquisite floral arrangements and that was all well and good but it wasn't what she was born to do and anything less was a crying shame.

And look at Sam. He had carved out a brilliant career that had given him nothing in return except money and now, not even that. He had sacrificed everything for his brothers and sisters and they hadn't a clue that he was in the fight of his life.

Warren understood the boy straight through to his marrow. There was no greater sorrow in life than letting love slip through your fingers because you couldn't find it in your heart to say the two little words she needed to hear.

Don't go.

But that was his story and he had made his peace with it a long time ago. He had moved onto other loves but none had ever burned as brightly in his heart than the first.

He wanted Sam and Annie to have the one gift he had never had: the singular joy of loving and being loved for a lifetime. For all of their bright promise they were both still alone and he was determined to change that before his Maker called him home.

Matchmaking wasn't half as easy as bestowing scholarships and jobs on deserving candidates. There was no Wharton School for love, no Harvard Business for romance. The most you could do was put a man and a woman on the path toward each other and hope for the best.

When Sam called earlier that afternoon with his request, it was all Warren could do to keep from offering unsolicited advice. She's a fiercely proud woman, boy, he'd wanted to say as he listened to the younger man's idea. If it smells like charity, she'll throw it back in your face like a week-old cod.

But Sam was high on the idea and in the end Warren acquiesced. He wouldn't be at all surprised if Sam found his offerings in the street before the night was over.

#

It was nearly seven by the time Annie closed up the shop and climbed behind the wheel of her truck. She waved at George, one of the local cops, who was ticketing young Vic DeLuca for a parking violation. George and his wife Sunny had lived next door to Annie and Kevin for seven years before they moved to a small farmhouse a few miles outside of town. If George had ever wondered about some of those late-night visitors who occasionally found their way to Annie and Kevin's front door, he never gave any indication. There were times she had almost prayed somebody would see a strange car idling in her driveway or wonder aloud why so many of the Galloways' checks bounced each month but it never happened. Not once in all those years.

People only saw what they wanted to see and what they had wanted to see was Annie- and-Kevin, everyone's favorite couple, the high school sweethearts who had almost managed the happy ending everyone dreams about.

How did you tell the people who loved you that there was no Annie-and-Kevin anymore? How did you make them hear you when you said you were suffocating under

the weight of the past? She'd seen Claudia's eyes when Sam Butler walked into the shop this afternoon. If looks could kill, Sam would have been knocking on the pearly gates before he said hello.

You have nothing to worry about, Claudia, she thought as she pulled into her driveway. Now that he's fixed the front door and cleaned out the truck, there won't be any reason for him to stop by unless he's hoping to catch me butt naked in the tub again.

Fat chance of that. He was probably installing blackout curtains on his front windows so he wouldn't run the risk of seeing her without her clothes on. The poor man was probably still reeling from the sight. He probably thought she was some needy pathetic widow who couldn't add two plus two without a man to help her. Cheap champagne. Candles around the tub. A silk robe nobody but the cats had ever seen her wear. She wouldn't be surprised if he'd called Warren and told him the whole story, right down to her hangover.

If that thought wasn't enough to snap her back to reality, nothing was.

In less than twenty-four hours, her new neighbor had seen her disheveled, exhausted, exasperated, dead drunk, butt naked, unconscious, without makeup, hung over, and stuffing her face with DeeDee's Donuts. So what if there had been some inexplicable pull of attraction between them? They were human, weren't they? A man and a woman caught in an intimate situation couldn't help striking a few sparks. Of course their hormones would dust themselves off and take a quick spin around the block. It couldn't be helped. Blame human nature.

Better still, blame the champagne.

She was a serious, thoughtful woman, not the tipsy bird brain he'd pulled out of the bathtub. She was the one people turned to when they had a problem. She was the one you could trust, the one who knew how to hold your secrets close to her heart.

Of course he had no way of knowing that about her. All he knew was that she liked to sip champagne and set fire to her bathrobe. And how could she forget that he also knew that she had cellulite, two tiny stretch marks, and a birthmark only her husband and gynecologist had ever seen.

So if he's not interested, why did he ask if you were seeing Hall?

Because he was nosy, that's why. Sam was new in town and he was trying to figure out the connections between the various players. Hall showed up – acting quite proprietary, come to think of it – and two seconds later Annie was saying yes to dinner at Cappy's. He was just more direct in his curiosity than most people she knew.

That still doesn't explain the way you almost melted into the sidewalk this afternoon, does it?

"I'm an idiot, that's why," she said as she pulled into her driveway. She knew as much about men as sixteen-year-old Jennifer and Jen's giggly girlfriends. She'd heard them talking about boyfriends this afternoon while they worked on the flowers. Jen was less than half Annie's age and she already had twice the experience. Annie had fallen in love with her first and only boyfriend and married him three years later. She was already part of his family; loving the favorite son just made the whole thing that much sweeter.

When it came to men, she was stuck somewhere back in the 1980s with big hair and shoulder pads. She'd learned everything she would ever know about dating and courtship by the time she was sixteen which left her thirty-eight year old self pretty well in the dark when it came to being single.

So what if she and Sam Butler had shared a few donuts on her front porch. People did that all the time. So what if they'd shared a chaste and sugary kiss. How else would you thank someone for saving your life? And it wasn't like he kissed her back. Their lips met and then it was over. Case closed. There was a rational, logical reason for every single thing they did and said and not one of those reasons came embroidered with red hearts and pink flowers.

And then she opened her front door and found out just how wrong she was. Where there had been empty space, there now was furniture.

Lots of it.

A reading lamp on a dark pine end table. An upholstered rocker big enough to get lost in. A small maple table with two chairs that exactly fit the tiny space allotted for a dining area. A pitcher of wild-picked daisies graced the center of the table top. George and Gracie had already claimed the upholstered cat condo by the living room window.

She'd always wanted to buy one of those silly things but could never rationalize the cost. Who on earth would do such a thing for her? Warren, of course, but he would have

furnished the entire house and he knew that would make her very angry. Claudia certainly didn't have the money. Neither did Susan or any of the others. Besides, they were all way too practical to risk such an expensive surprise.

She ran her hand across the weathered surface of the maple table, relishing each bump and gouge. She remembered sitting at a table just like this once upon a time, writing up a list for Santa Claus on a lined tablet with a big fat No. 2 pencil. Warren's sister Ellie was baby-sitting for her parents and –

She was out the door in a flash.

#

Sam heard Annie's truck long before he saw it. The crunch of tires on the sandy road, the