Line of Scrimmage Read Free Page B

waiting for you upstairs, darlin’,” Ryan said as he started up the stairs.
    “Sanderson!” Henry called. “If you lay one finger on her, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me?”
    “You’d have to catch me first,” Ryan said with a snicker.
    Susannah stopped Henry from replying. “Let it go,”
    she said softly. “He’s all talk.”
    “I mean it, Susannah,” Henry said, holding her tight against him. “If he touches you, I’ll kill him.”
    “He won’t get the chance.”
    “See that he doesn’t.”
    Susannah took a step back from him. “I don’t care for the insinuation.”
    “And I don’t care for your ex-husband showing up less than a month before our wedding and staking his claim on you like a cowboy
     from a cheesy western.”
    “I think you’d better go now, before one of us says something we’ll regret.”
    “ Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s already causing trouble between us.”
    “He can only cause trouble between us if we let him.”
    Susannah leaned in to kiss him. What she intended to be a quick goodbye kiss became much more when Henry hauled her to him
     and left her with a thorough, possessive kiss.
    “Call me if you need me.” He looked up to the top of the stairs. “If anything happens—”
    “It won’t.”
    With great reluctance, he nodded and left.
    As Susannah watched him walk to his Toyota sedan, she saw him pause to study the brand new black Cadillac Escalade in the
     driveway. Apparently, Ryan had been named Super Bowl MVP—again. She touched her fingers to lips that still tingled from the
     most passionate kiss she’d ever received from Henry. Long after he drove away, Susannah rested her forehead against the cool
     glass of the storm door. Ten days alone with Ryan Sanderson. I’ll never survive it. I barely survived the first go-round with him. What in the world am I going to do?
    Susannah took her time cleaning up the dining room and kitchen. She washed and dried the crystal, returned the flatware to
     its mahogany box, and hand-washed Grandma Sally’s china. When there was nothing left to wash, dry, or polish, she wiped her
     hands on a dishtowel and hung it up. She locked the back door and turned off the lights before she crept up the stairs to
     find the light on in the master bedroom. Oh, he has some nerve!
    As she stood in the hallway working up the fortitude to face him again, she heard him sneeze three times in rapid succession.
     He cried out in pain, and Susannah rushed into the room. His eyes were closed, his skin sallow and flushed, and he was gasping
     for air.
    “Oh, God, Ryan,” she sighed. “You should be in the hospital.”
    “I’m okay,” he said between shallow breaths. “It’s the goddamned allergies. Something in New Orleans stirred them up.”
    Susannah went into the bathroom and returned with two Claritin pills, which she handed to him.
    “Still keep that stuff in the house?”
    “They’re yours,” she said with a shrug. “I never threw them out.” She picked up his glass of water from the bedside table
     and handed it to him.
    “Thanks.” He gave the glass back to her and closed his eyes.
    “What are you doing here, Ryan? Really?”
    “I told you,” he said with a weak sigh.
    “Were you expecting a warm welcome home?”
    “Not particularly. All I know for sure is I still love you, and I think maybe you still love me.”
    Susannah was bent in half picking up his jeans from the floor. She straightened and looked at him in amazement. “I don’t,”
     she said, folding the pants and setting them on the foot of the bed.
    Ryan sneezed again and wrapped his arms around his middle to defend against the pain.
    “I’ll get you some ice,” she said, anxious to get away from the sight of him suffering. The Ryan she knew was never this helpless.
     Even when he had torn his ACL, he had been up and about the day after he’d had surgery to fix it. She hadn’t ever seen him
     flattened like this and was unnerved by it. When