Emily and the Stranger by Beverly Barton Read Free Book Online Page A

beachfront cottage on Scenic Highway 98 that she had inherited from her grandmother. And with a partner, she had opened an art supply store called the Paint Box in the nearby town of Fairhope .
    "You were close to your grandmother?" Mitch asked.
    "My grandmother raised me. At least for the most part." Emily had loved Hannah McLain more dearly than either of her own parents. "My father was killed in an accident when I was twelve, and my mother remarried shortly afterward. I chose to live with Grammy."
    "How long have you lived in your grandmother's cottage?"
    "For a couple of months. But this—" she spread out her arms in a loving gesture as if she could encompass the house, the beach, the bay and the sky in her arms "—has always seemed like home to me for as long as I can remember."
    "I've never felt like that about a place. I haven't had a real home since I was a kid." He leaned back, propping himself up with his elbows. "I've spent the last five years bumming around the country."
    "And before that?" She looked at him and couldn't help noticing that his eyes were the coldest, palest blue she'd ever seen.
    He didn't reply at first, only stared at her. He was incredibly good-looking and almost too masculine. His height and powerful build gave him an air of rugged strength. His clothes fit his body with a snug casualness, his shirt outlining every well-developed muscle in his chest and shoulders. For some odd reason, Emily had the strangest urge to reach out and run her hands over his broad shoulders.
    "Before I started bumming around, I had a steady job." He didn't want to tell this woman anything about his past—not yet. She probably held him responsible for her husband's death; and he didn't blame her. Even if when he told her who he was she didn't run away, how would he ever be able to convince her of his innocence, when in his very soul he felt guilty?
    Emily flipped over a page in her pad, picked up her charcoal and began drawing.
    "Do you live alone?" he asked, trying to think of something to say to keep himself from taking her face in his hands and bringing her mouth close enough to kiss. Dear God, she was a sweet temptation, a temptation to which he could never surrender.
    "Yes." She knew by the way he was looking at her that he wanted to kiss her, and oddly enough the thought of his lips on hers didn't frighten her. "You're living alone, too, aren't you?"
    "Quite alone."
    "No family? Wife? Children?"
    "No." He finished the last drops of apple juice and set the empty bottle next to the cooler.
    "You must get lonely." She instinctively felt that this man was unbearably lonely.
    "What about you—are you lonely? Or is there someone in your life?" He wanted her to say that she wasn't lonely, that she was happy and her life was good.
    "There isn't a special man, if that's what you're asking, but my life is filled with people. A special uncle, a dear friend and my art students."
    "You're a teacher?"
    "An art teacher," she said. "I own an art supply store in Fairhope. And I teach art classes. Mostly to children, but I do have some adult pupils."
    "You must like children if you can endure teaching them."
    "I love children." If only she hadn't lost her baby the night Stuart died, her child would be nearly five years old. "Don't you like children?"
    "Kids don't fit into my life in any way." He'd grown up in a household overrun with children—crying, fighting, hungry brothers and sisters with bare feet and hand-me-down clothes and
Mississippi
red clay under their fingernails.
    "You don't plan to have children of your own someday?" She didn't think about how personal the question was until she'd already blurted out. "Oh, forgive me for asking. It's certainly none of my business."
    "No, I don't plan to have any children. I helped raise several younger brothers and sisters. That pretty much got the fathering instinct out of my system." When he'd been climbing the ladder of success and he and Randy had been raking in the big