Quiet Walks the Tiger Read Free

for you, a Mr. Jordan.”
    “And?” Sloan prompted her sister casually, then held her breath as she waited for her answer. Mr. Jordan was with a professional dance company in Philadelphia.
    “He said the job was yours,” Cassie told her with troubled eyes. Then Sloan began to understand her hesitance.
    “The salary?” she asked, holding her features in composure.
    Cassie named a figure, and Sloan’s heart sank. She couldn’t accept the job. She sighed as she realized she would probably be with the college dance department for years to come—she couldn’t afford to quit. Not that she didn’t like her job; she did. It was just that she so dearly longed to dance professionally again!
    “Well then,” Sloan said briskly with a forced smile. “That’s that, I guess.”
    Cassie looked as if she were about to cry. “If only you hadn’t had so many children!” she exclaimed miserably. Then she hastily added, “Oh, Sloan! I didn’t mean that. I love the kids. But it’s so hard for you alone.”
    “Well,” Sloan said wryly, curling her lips a shade so that Cassie would know her words had been understood. “When Terry and I planned the children, we didn’t intend that one of us would be raising them alone.”
    Terry had been a dreamer, and she had dreamed right along with him. They seemed perfectly mated, a dancer and an artist. In their first years they had struggled. Then, while Terry had been making his name as a painter, Sloan had gotten a terrific job with an ensemble in Boston. Luck followed the dreamers. When Sloan became pregnant with Jamie, Terry’s oils caught on with the flurry of a storm. They lived happily. Terry was established; Sloan was able to combine her professional dancing with motherhood. They planned Laura and the baby, Terence, for his father.
    But Terry didn’t live to see his namesake. He was killed when his flight home from Knoxville in a friend’s small Cessna failed to clear the Blue Ridge Mountains. It took searchers three weeks to find his body, and when they did, Sloan was in the hospital, in labor two months early due to shock.
    Dreamers never think to buy life insurance, and artists have no benefits. Sloan was snapped out of her grief by desperation—she had to support herself and her family. The baby, so premature, ate up any savings as he clung to life in his incubator. Terry’s last pieces drew large sums as their value increased, ironically, with his death, but even that money did little but help Sloan return home to Gettysburg where her only comfort, Cassie, awaited.
    Sloan buried the young dreamer she had been along with Terry’s mutilated remains. In the first year she had mourned her happy-go-lucky husband with a yearning sickness that left her awake long nights in her lonely bed. She had gone through all the normal courses of grief, including anger. How could he have died and left her like he did? Resignation and bitter sadness followed her anger, and now she lived day to day, finding happiness in simple things. But she had closed in. The vivacious and beautiful woman whom people met was a cloak that concealed her true personality. She had toughened, and reality and necessity were the codes she lived by. She was friendly, sometimes flirtatious, but when anyone looked beyond those bounds, he would find a door slammed immediately in his face.
    “Lord, I almost forgot to tell you!” Cassie exclaimed suddenly, sensing her sister’s depression and trying to cheerfully dispel her gloom. “Guess who is in Gettysburg?”
    Sloan chuckled. “You’ve got me. Who?”
    “Wesley Adams.”
    “Who?” Sloan frowned her puzzlement. The name was vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t picture a face.
    “Wesley Adams! The quiet quarterback, remember? He’s a couple of years older than I am, but the whole town knew him. He graduated from Penn State after high school, then went on to play professional ball. About four years ago he retired because of a knee injury and disappeared