Just a Kiss Away by Jill Barnett Read Free Book Online Page A

than native oaks in a gale wind. But her mouth was the clincher. She talked under her breath the whole time. He had a hunch that he’d experienced his last quiet moment, but then suddenly both the rustling and her muttering stopped cold.
    “Oh, my Gawd . . .”
    Sam looked at her stunned face and silently waited, counting, one . . . two . . .
    “What’s going on here?”
    Three seconds. “I suppose you could call it a revolution,” he said sarcastically. He rested his elbows on his bent knees, his bound hands dangling between, and he watched her face flash with every little thought: doubt, belief, fear, then worry. She looked around the hut as if she expected someone else to be there.
    Her voice barely above a whisper, she asked, “What’re they gonna do with us?”
    Sam shrugged, choosing not to tell her they’d probably not live out the week, if they were lucky.
    “Why do they want me?”
    “They want you because they think you’re involved with me. By golly remember the marketplace?” he said in a drawl.
    Her full lips tightened into a thin line. She didn’t like him mimicking her. He stored that knowledge for use later. She shifted her legs to one side, trying to get comfortable with all her frills. She looked him straight in the eye and as sweet as sugar asked, “Why would they ever think that you and I would be associated?”
    He just stared at her, didn’t move, didn’t blink. The little snob. He should have left her in the marketplace. He kept staring, trying to intimidate a little fear into her, or at least make her think about what she’d said. She still awaited his answer, a pure innocent look on her face.
    He shook his head and laughed to himself. Finally he said in a wry tone, “I guess they don’t know you’re not my type.”
    “Well, I should say so.” Her expression said she’d be about as likely to hitch her hooks into him as she would be to eat one of those three-inch-long cockroaches that had run around the edges of the hut last night.
    Leaning back farther into the corner, he watched her a moment. He could almost read her thoughts on her face.
    Ah, he thought, the lamp just lit. It had dawned on her what he’d said. She recovered nicely, once again making eye contact as she spoke. “You mean you’re not my type of beau. I understand.”
    When he didn’t say anything, she rambled on, “I’m from South Carolina. A LaRue of the Belvedere LaRues—you know, Hickory House, Calhoun Industries; my mother was a Calhoun, you see—and Beechtree Farms.”
    She pronounced the last word as far-ahms. She drawled on, reciting her pedigree like some prized filly. He’d met enough of her type in his thirty-odd years. Virginal little blue bloods with nothing between their fancy pearl earrings but air. Ladies—that breed of women who could barely think past their next party.
    Christ, but this one could talk. Now she’d gotten back about as far as the Revolutionary War—some great-great-grandparent on her father’s side who had signed the Declaration of Independence.
    Hell, Sam didn’t even know who his father was. He could still remember asking his mother once where he’d come from. His uncle had said to his stepfather—both of them drunk and laughing—that Sam had come from a long line his mother listened to. He’d been confused at the time, but a few years later he’d learned what his uncle meant.
    Growing up in a Chicago slum made a kid’s innocence a short-lived thing. The area he’d been born in was only a few blocks away from the Union Stockyards. They’d lived in a rat-infested one-room flat on the fifth floor of a crumbling old brick building where the stairs were rickety and half the railings broken away. Some of the tenants—a ginsotted woman and a couple of kids—had been killed falling from the open top landings. He could still remember the screams echoing a spine-raking, seemingly endless dirge up the stairwell only to finally cease with a dull thud and dead