By the Book by Mary Kay McComas Read Free Book Online Page B

tied to his face. But I appreciate your concern for him just the same.”
    Eugene frowned, stumped and hungry.
    “Well, when he wakes up—”
    “His head’ll be bigger than his belly,” she interjected. “He may not be able to eat for hours. Days maybe.”
    He was backing up to his apartment door. “Days ...?”
    “And when he’s feeling better, he’ll be hungry as a one-man army and eat everything that isn’t nailed down. He always does.”
    Plainly disgruntled, he retreated into his apartment and the door slowly swung closed. Ellen smiled. The little green book should have been printed in twenty-four-carat gold. Who knew it could be so easy to rid oneself of pesky pests, without actually being rude or unkind—or using a broom. She stepped back and closed her own door.
    “You know,” came a weak voice from down the hall, “I could eat something.”
    “Shut up, Felix. You can starve to death for all I care,” she said. “And don’t eat the leftover roast beef while I’m gone; I’m saving that for my lunches this week.”
    She cringed at the knock on the door. Eugene had heard leftover roast beef and had returned.
    The grimace on her face slowly brightened to a dazzle as she took in Jonah Blake dressed in dark slacks and a sport jacket, the pressed white oxford shirt making the whites of his eyes whiter and the mystic green greener, though the light in them was no mystery at all. She didn’t need to be someone with Vi’s expertise to recognize the look in his eyes. She didn’t need to be someone with an attitude or a little green book to know what he was thinking. She was born a woman and knew it instinctively.
    She went warm and soft and gooey inside.
    It pleased him, probably more than it should have, to see that she’d gone to no little effort to dress up for their date. He’d been in Quincey long enough to know the dress code was casual, and had debated long and hard over his decision to go one step further to impress her—now he was glad he had. Except ... well ... maybe he’d gone too far. She was staring at him. She was so beautiful and elegant ... and so completely silent. His hand went to the open collar of his shirt self-consciously, and he fought an urge to squirm. He thought about buttoning it, then shoved his hand in his pocket.
    “I decided to leave the cloak and dagger at home,” he said, hoping she’d equate his lack of a tie with some sort of effort to fit into his present surroundings, rather than with his dislike of them.
    “I’m glad,” she said, aiming for a breezy attitude, her heart fluttering wildly. “You look very nice.”
    “You’re beautiful.”
    A muffled groan from down the hall had him frowning. He pulled his gaze from hers and looked past her with some anxiety.
    “Thank you,” she said, reaching for the purse she’d set on a table near the door. “I’m also starving.”
    He looked confused and still concerned. “Didn’t you hear that?”
    “What?”
    “That noise? Like moaning?”
    “No.” Amazing. With the proper attitude, lying was easy. She suspected that with an altogether different attitude, murder would be the same. “Ready?”
    He nodded uncertainly, stepping aside to let her lock and close the door, then following her down the stairs. He wasn’t one to hear things that weren’t there or to forget small, inconsequential things readily. Details were his business, and as a rule, few escaped him. But her bare back and the sweep of her hair that left her throat exposed and vulnerable had a disturbing effect on his mind. Filled it, in fact, with nothing but thoughts of touching her, of pressing his lips to the warm nape of her neck, of drawing in the scent of her. ...
    “Any trouble getting here?” she asked, perturbed that Felix had dead-ended their discussion of her beauty—as if it were frequently debated, which it wasn’t.
    “No. None. In fact, I’d given myself a few extra minutes to get lost in, so I had to sit in the car for ten