Deal to Die For Read Free Page B

an underlying edge, a character that only intensified her beauty.
Here is a woman who might be great-looking but has never let it get in her way
, he thought. He was still a bit in awe of that.
    And in awe of what she’d overcome. Two years since the fire that had destroyed their home and nearly claimed her life. Two years of painful surgery to soften the scars and restore the flesh the flames had stolen from her. It made his own skin feel taut and fiery just to think about it. And yet, looking at her now, it seemed almost as if it hadn’t happened. There were places below the line of her jaw where the grafts below showed lighter, some telltale scarring if you were looking for it, but makeup could very nearly erase those traces. It was, in fact, a miracle.
    “You remember the first time we came here?” he said.
    She looked up from the paper, her eyes seemingly unfocused. “What?”
    “The first time we were here,” he said. “I was just thinking about that.”
    She stared at him, her gaze coming into focus. It was as if he could see her thoughts rearranging themselves, leaving whatever had held her in the paper and moving to a consideration of him.
    “You always think about
that
,” she said.
    He wasn’t sure if she was joking. “Not just the sex,” he said, trying to protest. “I was thinking about all of it, what a great place this is. In fact,” he added, “I think we probably owe our relationship to the fact we started out, more or less, I mean, right here, right in the middle of all this. Just look at it. It
looks
like a place for beginnings, right?”
    He swung his arm enthusiastically out into space, over the vast expanse of sawgrass below, where a breeze they hadn’t felt cut a sinuous pattern of waving green off toward the horizon. It was as if a huge, invisible hand were smoothing the nap on a giant rug.
    She gave him an odd stare. “That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”
    He nodded, a little deflated. That was Janice, all right. You couldn’t count on her to lock up with your own train of thought. She was probably still thinking about whatever it was she’d been reading about, was only giving him the appearance of her attention, even now.
    That was something she’d been better about, though, especially since Isabel had come along, being
here
, in the world. In their first years together, there were times when she would drift away so completely, become so self-contained, that he worried she would never come back. More properly, he worried that she would not need him in the same way he needed her.
    But that was silly, she assured him. She did need him, he had no idea how much. “You come from one of those touchy-feely Walton kind of families, Deal,” that’s what she told him once, laughing. “Popcorn on the Christmas tree, everybody kissing under the mistletoe, all that. My mother’s idea of affection was a handshake.” She claimed never to have seen her parents kiss, could not fathom the very intercourse that had brought her into existence. “I guess they tried it at least once,” she’d said, shaking her head. “But they couldn’t have enjoyed it much.”
    Janice herself had no such reservations, though. They’d both been oozing blood from their concrete-raw knees and elbows the night of their first ride back through the Everglades, and that aspect of their relationship had never cooled. Still, there had been times, even after the most stunning, exhausting sex, when he’d sensed her slipping away, drifting off to that place where he could never go, even though he’d hold her as tightly as he could.
    Although he assumed the episodes had something to do with growing up in such a frigid household, Deal had no way of knowing how accurately Janice had described her parents’ shortcomings. Long before he’d met her, they’d both died, killed in an automobile accident, a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer on an icy Ohio two-lane while Janice was away at college. And that was