Firefly Island Read Free Page A

lounge, wearing a long, filmy negligee. The feather-edged sleeve floated diaphanous and light on the breeze as she playfully slapped his hand away. Laughing, she let her head fall against the cushion, her gaze rising into the starry night.
    She never saw him coming. Without warning, he scooped her off the chair and carried her across the patio as she protested, squealed, and told him what she’d do to him if he ruined her new loungewear. He ignored her completely and swept her straight down the steps and into the water, deep blue under the smoky patio lights. The hem of her nightgownfloated to the surface, her body and his disappearing into the darkness below as he kissed her.
    I’d never seen my parents behave in such a fashion, never even considered whether they kissed or hugged or got romantic like the Bradys did on afternoon cable reruns. But after watching them in the pool, I knew that love really could be the way it was in the movies. From that night on, I believed in the possibility. Even if I’d never been lucky enough to find the right guy, I clung to a yearning that made me want that kind of intensity. All of my life a still, small voice had been whispering in my ear, If it can happen to Mom, it can happen to anyone.
    My mother was about as stiff, proper, and practical as a woman could get. If she could be swept off her feet, anybody could.
    I was off my feet almost from the moment I met Daniel Webster Everson. Both in the literal sense and the figurative sense. I twisted an ankle running for a subway train the day after the spilled-bill incident, and I was wearing a walking cast later that week when I hobbled into the office of James V. Faber, honorable congressman from Arkansas. Two steps in the door, and I found myself once again face to face with the startling green eyes I remembered from the rotunda.
    Congressman Faber’s home district was big in poultry production and processing. Daniel was a biochemist working for the USDA, visiting The Hill at Faber’s request to discuss some particulars in a pork-barrel (or in this case poultry-barrel) rider to a bill working its way through committee. I’d dropped by Faber’s office to personally pick up a LOI—Letter of Intent—that would make Faber a cosponsor for my boss’s Clean Energy Bill.
    Suffice to say that a freakish alignment of legislation brought me together with Daniel Everson for a second time.
    Or perhaps it was the Irish legend.
    Choose to believe as suits you, but God does create soul mates, and Daniel Webster Everson was mine. I knew it from the first time I saw him, and by the second time, I knew I knew it.
    I limped into his life once again carrying an armload of papers. Daniel glanced up from the leather sofa in Faber’s receiving area and noticed my uneven walk and the cast, attractively embellished with Sharpie drawings by office coworkers and the Gymies.
    â€œLooks like things haven’t quite taken that upturn yet,” he observed. Very astute of him. Then he laughed softly and smiled, and I forgave him for making light of my unfashionable situation.
    I noticed those boyishly thick lashes again. And his smile. If I had to feed Kaylyn’s romance novel habit for a year, or ten, I had to know who he was.
    â€œIt’s been that kind of week,” I admitted. “Month, actually.”
    There was a flash of something in his eyes, as quickly as a car passing at the other end of an alley, but I saw it. A look that said, Yeah, me too. That kind of week . . . month . . . year.
    I shifted the stack of papers onto my hip and tried to look as though one arm wasn’t slowly growing longer than the other. My foot was hurting. I needed to get off it. The doctor had prescribed limited walking for a couple weeks while the ankle healed. You can’t limit your walking on The Hill, not and be in the know. It’s a big place. My position as a legislative assistant put me about