Strangers by Mary Anna Evans Read Free Book Online

Glynis’ rebellion. He was outraged.
    “Sweetheart…the preservationists can get along without you just this one night. I just want to look at your pretty face over the dinner table, and I want to watch old movies while we hold hands. Like we used to do.”
    Why wasn’t Faye picturing a happy couple, hand in hand? Why was she picturing a big angry man holding both Glynis’ dainty hands in one of his huge ones? What did this guy look like, anyway?
    Faye edged closer to the open archway separating the atrium from the dining room. The arguing man and woman were standing on either end of a serving table. They were looking at each other, not at her, but the painting above the serving table was looking at her. The dark-eyed woman in the image looked just as unsettled as fair-haired Glynis sounded. Actually, she looked terrified. Faye remembered why she wasn’t such a big fan of expressionist art.
    Interesting…the man wasn’t as big as he sounded. He was several inches taller than Glynis, who was not a short woman, but he had the kind of slender build that looked good in a suit. He was fair-haired, and his tanned features were cleanly sculpted. She caught only this glimpse before Glynis delivered her final word.
    She said, “I’ll be home by nine. If you’d enjoy a quiet dinner together, then have it cooked when I get home.” Then she showed him the door.
    Faye backed into the shadow of the staircase, so as not to detract from Glynis’ sweeping dismissal of her idiot boyfriend, but she wanted to give her a standing ovation.
    ***
    Joe watched Faye trudge into their shabby room. She was five feet tall in her sock feet and, until eight months ago, she’d tipped the scales at a hundred pounds. Joe, on the other hand, was never allowed to forget that he was six-and-a-half feet tall, since he spent his days stooping down to hear the conversation of normal people and tiny folk like Faye.
    There was a very real possibility that Joe’s baby would be just too big for Faye to carry.
    They didn’t talk about it. They couldn’t talk about it, because that would require Faye to admit there might be something in this world that she simply couldn’t do.
    It would also require her to admit that she was forty years old. Joe was only thirty-one, but he could already feel time making a difference in his strength and endurance. They were both still prodigious, but there was a difference.
    When Faye was twenty-five, maybe she could have carried and delivered this baby easily. Now, he could see the toll her pregnancy was taking. She groaned when she rolled over in her sleep, because her hips pained her. She rubbed her aching back all the damn time. She wasn’t eating as well as she should. And he was frankly scared to keep shoving prenatal vitamins her way, because one day she was going to bite off the hand holding them.
    He’d wanted this baby so badly, and so had she. She’d gotten pregnant as soon as they said, “I do,” because they wanted more than one kid and they thought there might just be enough time for that.
    Now he was wondering. Maybe this should be it. He’d been an only child, and so had Faye. They’d both turned out okay. Yeah, he liked the idea of listening to two kids laughing and playing all over the wild island where he and Faye lived, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to take another big risk with the health of the woman he loved. If Faye came out of this pregnancy with a ruined back or wrecked hips, she’d live with the consequences for the rest of her life. And there were worse things that could happen.
    He knew this, because he’d bought every pregnancy manual on the bookstore’s shelves. For a man who’d spent his first quarter-century running from books as if they were bears, Joe had found that knowledge had a pacifying effect. When he was worried about Faye, he could find a book to tell him that most women came through childbirth just fine, even women who’d waited till they were forty to find the