Summer's Freedom by Ruth Wind, Barbara Samuel Read Free Book Online Page B

bad.
    The rest of the week, however, had left much to be desired. Samantha’s moods had swung even more wildly than usual in response to her frustration at her restriction. One minute, she was the sweet, obedient child Maggie had raised, who did her chores without complaint. The next moment, she slumped from couch to kitchen to backyard, sulkily saying nothing.
    In addition to the trouble on the home front, Maggie was swamped with work. Two members of her small staff had come down with colds, leaving Maggie, Sharon and three high-school interns to piece the paper together.
    To further complicate matters, the newspaper offices had been flooded with letters about Proud Fox, both pro and con. Maggie had run an entire page of letters in this week’s edition, along with an editorial she had written Saturday afternoon, urging peace.
    Occasionally, she’d glimpsed Joel going or coming, and she often heard his movements through the walls. There had been little time in her week beyond the press of work and family, but his presence nagged her like a half-remembered song.
    She had learned that he awakened in the morning to the sound of marches on the radio, at the same time she woke up. As she lay in her bed, steeling herself for the grim process of opening her eyes, she listened to those marches and imagined him jumping up and dressing to the blood-tingling notes of the drums and fifes. It led her to believe Joel Summer was a man of energy and movement.
    Through the years, she’d grown used to the noises of neighbors in apartments and the oddly intimate knowledge one gained sharing walls with strangers. Like most people, she’d learned to shut all the distractions out, trusting others to do the same.
    But she’d never had a neighbor like him. As she dabbed Vitamin E oil on the puckery scar on her eyebrow, she could hear him moving around just beyond the wall and tried to ignore it. When, a moment later, she heard his shower go on, Maggie felt her mouth go instantly dry. Not ten feet away, that perfectly formed body was dripping wet and bare. The knowledge sent a rush of heat through her middle, and for the most fleeting of seconds, she let herself imagine a torrid scene in which her body was pressed against his, their slippery, wet flesh sharing the running water.
    Reality snatched the sultry vision away. She glimpsed her unadorned and decidedly unfeminine face in the mirror; her hair pulled back severely, the scar pink and angry over her eye. She shook her head in disgust at herself. Bad enough to have suddenly turned into a sneaky voyeur, ignoring the unwritten but precise rules of apartment living; she now had the nerve to contemplate passionate liaisons with a man who was definitely out of her class. She imagined Joel with a confident professional woman, a lawyer or doctor, perhaps—not an overly tall and less than graceful reporter.
    She flicked the light off and hurried out of the bathroom. In the peaceful sanctuary of her bedroom, she shook her head, mortified. He wasn’t a stripper or a photograph in a beefcake calendar, designed for ogling. It shamed her that she continued to think in that way about him—after all, hadn’t women been complaining about it for years?
    Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions, she thought as she climbed into bed and punched down her pillow. What did she really know about Joel Summer, anyway, except that he liked birds and ought to have considered a career as a movie star? A good reporter wouldn’t be jumping to so many conclusions.
    In the bedroom beyond the wall, she heard a sound. Covering her head, she groaned as another vision of him assailed her.
    Maybe, she thought, it was impossible to completely eradicate the sensual part of one’s nature. Maybe she was fighting too hard to ignore him. He was an undeniably handsome man, and beauty, as she’d told Samantha, was a very important part of life.
    She settled in more comfortably, her mind somewhat eased. After all, she could never get