At First Sight Read Free Page B

college.
As Alvin had implied, there really was a lot about her that he didn’t know. But at the same time, there was a great deal he did know. An only child, she’d been raised in Boone Creek, North Carolina. Her parents had been killed in an automobile accident when she was young, and she had been raised by her maternal grandparents, Doris and . . . and . . . He decided he’d have to ask about that. Anyway, she’d gone to college at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, been in love with a guy named Avery, and had actually lived in New York City for a year, where she’d interned at the NYU library. Avery ended up cheating on her, and she went back home and became the head librarian in Boone Creek, as her mother had been before she’d passed away. Some time later, she’d fallen for someone she referred to vaguely as Mr. Renaissance, but he’d left town without looking back. Since then she’d led a quiet life, dating the local deputy sheriff now and then, until Jeremy came along. And oh yeah: Doris-who owned a restaurant in Boone Creek-also claimed to have psychic powers, including the ability to predict the sex of babies, which was how Lexie knew their baby would be a girl.
All of which, he admitted, everyone in Boone Creek also knew. But did they also know that she tucked her hair behind her ears whenever she got nervous? Or that she was a wonderful cook? Or that when she needed a break, she liked to retreat to a cottage near the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, where her parents had been married? Or that in addition to being both intelligent and beautiful, with violet eyes, a slightly exotic, oval face, and dark hair, she had seen right through his ham-fisted attempts to charm her into the bedroom? He liked the fact that Lexie didn’t let him get away with anything, spoke her mind, and stood up to him when she thought he was in error. Somehow, she was able to do those things while still projecting a charm and femininity that was underscored by a sultry southern accent. Add in the fact that she was downright stunning in tight jeans, and Jeremy had fallen head over heels.
And as for him? What could she say she knew about Jeremy? Most of the basics, he thought. That he’d grown up in Queens as the youngest of six in an Irish-Italian family and that he’d once intended to become a professor of mathematics but realized he had a knack for writing and ended up becoming a columnist for Scientific American, where he often debunked the allegedly supernatural. That he’d been married years earlier to a woman named Maria, who eventually left him after they’d made numerous trips to a fertility clinic and were finally told by a doctor that Jeremy was medically unable to father a child. That he’d spent too many years afterward trolling the bars and dating countless women, trying to avoid serious relationships, as if subconsciously knowing he couldn’t be a good husband. That at the age of thirty-seven, he’d gone to Boone Creek to investigate the regular appearance of ghostly lights in the town cemetery in the hope of landing a guest commentator gig on Good Morning America but found that he spent most of his time thinking about Lexie. They’d spent four enchanting days together followed by a heated argument, and though he’d headed back to New York, he’d realized that he couldn’t imagine a life without her and had returned to prove it to her. In exchange, she had placed his hand on her belly, and he finally became a true believer-at least when it came to the miracle of pregnancy and a chance at fatherhood, something he’d never considered possible.
He smiled, thinking it was a pretty good story. Maybe even good enough for a novel.
The point was, as much as she’d tried to resist his charms, she’d fallen for him, too. Glancing over at her, he wondered why. Not that he considered himself repulsive, but what was it that drew two people together? In the past, he’d written numerous columns about the principle