Take the Long Way Home Read Free Page A

possibility made him want to confront
her, to assure her he had changed. Except, of course, that she
might not be thinking anything of the kind. She might just be
staring at him because he had bird shit on his shoulder.
    He glanced at his shoulder, just to be sure.
Just a few wet spots where the rain had caught him on the way from
the car into the tavern.
    “Quinn, pay attention,” Ashley said, rapping
her knuckles against the table as if it were a door and she
demanded entry. “I went through a lot of effort to make this
happen. I want Saturday to go smoothly. They’re giving us as much
of halftime as we want, and—”
    The song was winding down, fading out. As if
released from a spell, the woman started moving, resuming her
stroll toward the exit, averting her gaze as if she could no longer
bear to look at Quinn. He sprang to his feet.
    “Quinn!”
    “I’ll be right back,” he told Ashley,
ignoring the indignation in her tone. Several long, quick strides
brought him to the door one step ahead of the woman. Before she
could pull the door open, he touched her wrist. “I’m sorry, but—do
I know you?”
    She raised her eyes to him. She looked
bewildered and uncomfortable. “How should I know if you know
me?”
    “You look familiar, that’s all.” That wasn’t
all. She had shared that song with him somehow, the song about
taking the long way home.
    “We were classmates in high school,” she
said.
    “I thought that might be it.” He extended
his hand. “Quinn Connor.”
    “I know who you are.” But she let him shake
her hand. Her fingers were cool and delicate, so slender his hand
seemed to swallow hers.
    Of course she knew who he
was. Back then, everyone had known who he was. “I know you, too,”
he said, feeling guilty that he really didn’t know who she was. “But I’m
sorry, I can’t remember your name.”
    “You never knew my name,” she said, not
sounding terribly judgmental about that. “Maeve Nolan.”
    Maeve
Nolan . He did know her name. She’d
been…God, she’d been a head case in high school. A cop’s daughter.
Everyone had been afraid to break any laws around her—no drinking
beer in her presence, no lighting up a joint—and she hadn’t seemed
to mind. She’d dressed in black a lot. Rumor had it she’d sometimes
walk out of a classroom in the middle of a lecture; Quinn hadn’t
had any classes with her, so he had no idea if that was true. Rumor
had it she would sometimes hide in one of the girls’ bathrooms and
cry; Quinn had never been in a girls’ bathroom, so he had no idea
if that was true, either. But yes, he’d known who Maeve Nolan was:
a sad, gloomy loner.
    He’d never looked closely at her in high
school—he’d been blind to anyone outside his inner circle—but damn,
she was pretty. A lot prettier than a whack-job loner ought to be.
Maybe she hadn’t been that pretty in high school. More likely, he’d
been too much of a jerk to notice.
    He noticed now. Her skin was pale, and it
looked as soft as freshly fallen snow. Her golden-brown lashes were
astonishingly long. Her lips were a dusky pink. There was
naturalness about her, something clean and fresh, and a spark of
determination in her wide hazel eyes. If he had to describe her
now, sad and gloomy would not be the words he chose.
    Wistful, maybe. Apprehensive, yet
curious.
    And damn, really, really pretty.
    “So…you still live here?” he asked.
    It didn’t seem like a difficult question,
but she took a minute to mull over her answer. Finally, she said,
“I recently moved back.”
    “Yeah. Me, too—well, not exactly. I’m in
Boston.” He tilted his head slightly in the city’s direction, as if
Boston were one town over and not thirty miles south of Brogan’s
Point. “I don’t know if you remember Ashley Wright from our class—”
he tilted his head again, this time toward the booth where Ashley
waited for him, visibly seething because he’d abandoned her to talk
to Maeve “—but she’s