Kisses From Heaven Read Free Page A

relaxing. “Gramps’s ancestry is English and French. We’re only Irish on Friday afternoons.”
    She swung out of the driveway and faced a steady stream of Friday Livernois traffic. Detroit traffic had a distinctive personality, particularly on the expressway headed toward the northern suburbs. It was kill or be killed, with no one particularly interested in the outcome. Too preoccupied to concentrate on her driving, Loren heard a horn blare behind her as she rapidly switched lanes; but by the time she glanced in the rearview mirror, it was to check on Gramps rather than the irate driver. A semi truck loomed ahead of her, and she swerved again, passing on the right this time, trusting that the rest of the cars behind her would understand. “I do appreciate your stopping to help,” she told the man beside her. “Most people wouldn’t have.” She paused. “My sister will be home…and the housekeeper. As soon as we get to the house, I’ll phone a taxi for you.”
    “If we get there in one piece.”
    “Pardon?” Her eyebrows lifted pertly in inquiry.
    He motioned her eyes rapidly back to the road. “You can either pass that car ahead or hit him.”
    He needn’t sound so critical. Crossly, she speeded up and passed the turtle-slow car. “Better?” she said stiffly.
    “My mother used to tell me that we’re all on earth on borrowed time, but I had a little longer rental in mind. How did you ever pass driver’s training?”
    “Gramps bribed the cop,” she said smoothly.
    It shut him up quite nicely, but she couldn’t miss that slash of a smile. He really wasn’t a brawler type at all when he smiled. In fact, with those beautiful eyes… He was staring at her so intently that she flushed and quickly riveted her gaze on the highway, deciding she had imagined that certain kind of interest in his eyes. It was impossible. She didn’t need a mirror to know she undoubtedly looked as though she’d just come very close to unraveling—which she had. “As I said,” Loren repeated, “we have a live-in housekeeper. She does have a bad back, though, and if you wouldn’t mind helping me get Gramps into the house…”
    “I heard you the first time. There’ll be an audience, so I should stop thinking about robbery and rape. Immediately.”
    She lapsed back into brooding silence. Very funny. But the man was not what he seemed. Out of work, perhaps; but he spoke in educated accents and was too damned quick on the uptake for comfort. This association wasn’t going to be a long one. She carried few scars from her short-term marriage seven years ago, but there was a lingering wariness when she couldn’t place a man. And since placing men was her job, the enigmatic Buck was beginning to get under her skin. She put on her professional voice as she turned off the expressway. “It’s a rough economy for everyone these days,” she said with impersonal sympathy. “Have you been out of work long?”
    Those bushy eyebrows lifted. “What makes you think I’m out of work?”
    She shrugged, stopped for a red light and reached down to turn off the heater. “In that bar in the middle of a Friday afternoon? Construction?” she guessed.
    “I—At times.” He hesitated, and she could feel his eyes on her, a little too shrewd for comfort. “I was in the bar to meet an old friend I went to school with. When we were teenagers, it was a different kind of place. Not better, just different. I hadn’t been back there in so long…”
    “Of course,” she said smoothly. She believed part of his story. She could visualize him as a black-leather-jacketed teenager with a fake ID, busy being tough. But the rest of what he was trying to convey, that he was not normally in a bar on a Friday afternoon…well.
    “Somehow I had the feeling you weren’t going to believe me,” he murmured wryly.
    “I never said that!”
    “You didn’t have to.” He paused. “Could you try to believe I haven’t been in a brawl since I was