Glare Ice by Mary Logue Read Free Book Online Page A

guy.”
    “Just doing his job.”
    There was an easy way of finding out if this Stephanie was the Stephanie with the bruises. Go over to her house and see if she had the dog.

5
    R ICH woke up and turned over and looked at the glowing dial of the clock next to the bed. Three-twenty. Claire was almost three hours late getting home from work. Not good—it could only mean trouble. Usually the night shifts were very quiet, and she often got to leave early. She had surprised him on more than one occasion as he slept in the recliner chair in front of the TV.
    He flopped over and tried to go back to sleep. He counted sheep, then switched to pheasants, then turned on his back and counted his breaths. When he got to two hundred, he decided to get up.
    He could always call the station. They would be able to tell him where she was, what was going on, but he would feel like a worrywart if he did that. Claire had warned him about what her life was like. She had told him that it was a lot more normal now that she was working for a sheriff’s department, but she said that her hours were erratic and her time was not always her own.
    “We might plan to do something, and I’ll end up having to cancel. Or you’ll want to go to a movie, and I’ll have to catch up on some work. Or you’ll want to tell me about your day, and then I’ll need to tell you about mine, and it won’t always be fun listening.”
    Rich felt that in the beginning Claire had almost tried to scare him off. He knew a lot of that had been about her own fears—learning to trust someone again, learning that not everyone you loved would die on you—but some of it had been about her own indecision about being in a full-blown relationship.
    He was beyond ready to be with someone. He had waited a long time to find a woman like Claire, almost giving up hope that he ever would. It scared him that he felt as if he would do almost anything to keep her.
    Turning on the light next to the bed, he watched the shadows gather in the corners of the room. Slowly, trying to make no noise, he swung his legs out of bed. He had left an old flannel bathrobe at Claire’s, and he pulled it on and tied it around his waist. He walked softly out of the room and down the hallway, not wanting to wake up Meg. He had found her to be a light sleeper.
    Down in the kitchen, he filled the teakettle with water and then pulled open a drawer next to the stove. Postum with a little warm milk. That should send him back to sleep. He lifted the top off the cookie jar. Two Oreos left in the bottom. Perfect. He made his hot drink and brought his snack out to the full-season porch, where the TV sat perched on top of an orange crate.
    Claire had splurged this fall and bought a satellite dish, which he had installed. Satellite was the only way they could get decent TV reception down in the river valley. Since then he had become slightly addicted to the Weather Channel.
    He sat down in the recliner and set his hot drink on the window ledge next to him, the two cookies piled up next to his cup.
    His mom would meet Claire in a few days. He wondered how that would go. His mother had not cared for his first wife; she called her a little tart, in no nice sense of the word. He hadn’t felt like explaining to his mother that he liked the slightly overt sense of sexuality that Tina had displayed. And unfortunately his mother had been right in the end; maybe Tina had been a little bit too much of a hot tamale for him.
    Claire, too, could be quite sexual, but it was more controlled. And this sense of restraint in her was all the more appealing to Rich. When he touched her and got her warmed up, he felt as if he was seeing a part of her that few men had ever seen. He felt very lucky.
    But he wondered if his mother would pick up on that. She had a kind of radar for a willing woman.
    The other thing he worried about was how strong both of the women in his life were. They were independent, opinionated, mouthy women. They