McKettricks of Texas: Austin by Linda Lael Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

alone, that’s all.”
    Having said that, she left Garrett’s glam second-story apartment—one of three such spaces comprising that floor of the house and part of a third—and to theircredit, neither Julie nor Libby called her back or tried to follow.
    Downstairs, Paige crossed the main kitchen, retrieved her jacket and purse from the guest apartment and slipped out through the back door. It was dark, and stars glittered from horizon to horizon in great silvery splotches of faraway light.
    On the other side of the courtyard wall, the kids were laughing, the dogs were barking, while the men talked in quiet voices.
    Paige couldn’t make out their words, wouldn’t have tried. She needed quiet to collect her scattered thoughts, get some perspective. So she walked to her car—which she’d parked near the barn instead of in the garage as she usually did, flustered, at the time, because of Austin’s close proximity—got in and started the engine.
    She drove down the long driveway, through the open iron gates, and out onto the highway, headed for town. She switched on the radio, choosing a classical spot on the dial instead of her favorite country station. Paige felt too raw to listen to country music at the moment, and she was woman enough to admit it, by God.
    This last thought made her smile.
    Drive, she told herself. Don’t think about him.
    Between the soft piano concerto flowing out of the dashboard speakers and the semihypnotic effect of driving alone over a rural road, cosseted in purple twilight and under a canopy of stars, Paige was finally able to relax a little—and then a little more.
    It was as though Austin McKettrick possessed his own magnetic field; the farther she got from him, the easier it was to breathe, to reason. To simply be.
    Reaching the outskirts of town, Paige slowed down,drove automatically toward the house where she and Libby and Julie had grown up, with their dad. Libby had lived there, before and after Will Remington’s death from pancreatic cancer, with her dog, Hildie, and had run the Perk Up Coffee Shop to support herself.
    Now, thanks largely to their mother, Marva, and her questionable driving skills, the shop was gone, along with the mom-and-pop grocery store that had once stood beside it, the lot totally empty.
    Rumor had it that a bank would be built on the site, but as Paige bumped along the alley toward the detached garage behind the old house, she saw no signs of construction.
    After parking her car in the narrow space the garage afforded, Paige got out, walked to the back gate and let herself into the yard.
    Here, there were definitely signs of construction. The old cupboards, newly pulled away from the kitchen walls, stood near the porch, seeming to crouch under blue plastic tarps. The bathtub, so outdated that it was probably about to come back into style again, rested in one of the flowerbeds, with the matching green toilet perched inside it.
    Paige sighed as she let herself in through the back door and drew in the scents of sawdust and new drywall. She flipped on the overhead light and was gratified, and a little surprised, that it worked.
    The kitchen, twice its former size, boasted a new slate-tile floor and an alcove set into a semicircle of floor-to-ceiling windows, but it was a long way from usable.
    Paige shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and moved farther into the house.
    The living room was all new; the floors were hardwoodand the molding around the edges of the raised ceiling had been salvaged from an old mansion in Dallas. There was an elegant marble fireplace, with an antique mantel, and the windows, like the ones in the kitchen, stood taller than Paige did.
    Black against the night, the glass threw her reflection back at her—a trim woman in jeans, a T-shirt and a jacket, with dark, chin-length hair and the saddest eyes.
    A lot of changes had been made, but this was still the place—the very