The Wonder of You by Susan May Warren Read Free Book Online Page B

something latent and sweet stirred inside him. Like he’d seen her before, perhaps, and tucked the memory deep inside only to be stirred like a remembered song.
    It pulled him to her side of the bridge as she took a few shots, adjusted her aperture exposure. And still he watched.
    Until her gaze turned to him, and he’d blurted out the crazy line about wishes and hopes and . . . felt like a fool.
    But she smiled and healed the urge to run. He gathered his wits, and his next words came out saner. “Did you know that afterthe sunset, in about twenty minutes, the sky will light up again? It’s even more brilliant the second time around.”
    She had green eyes. Eyes that could stop his heart, hold it, make him see himself and cringe.
    “Really?”
    “Indeed. Turn off your auto white balance and switch it to shade. You’ll draw all the gold tones into the picture.”
    He didn’t know when he’d become a professor of photography   —his own Nikon barely had a scuff on it. But that seemed to impress her, and she tried it.
    He wanted to train his camera on her, capture that smile.
    “I’ll bite   —who are you? The local photography bum?”
    He liked that. Because yes, it fit. Still, it came with too many explanations, so . . . “I just like the view. You?”
    “I’m enrolled in a photography program at Charles University. We’re also touring through Germany, Austria, and then over to Switzerland. I think we’re even spending the New Year in Paris.”
    She turned around, framed the setting sun, the trail of gold along the river southwest of the bridge.
    His brain, meanwhile, did the math. “Do you mean the course taught by Claude Dupré?”
    She lowered her camera. Nodded. “Do you know him?”
    Roark was sleeping on his sofa. Which meant, yes, he could probably talk his former schoolmate into letting him tag along.
    “Indeed. It seems we are taking the same class.”
    The first of too many white lies, the trailhead of secrets.
    The scream had shaken him out of his memory as he stood on the bridge above Cutaway Creek. He’d watched as the teenager grasped at rocks, tumbling into the current. Then, in horror, as his mother reached out to grab him and fell in too.
    Roark wanted to shout, already on his way down the embankment as the father released the hand of his daughter and headed into the froth.
    Roark reacted more out of instinct than training, but he had learned to swim in the choppy waters of the Sea of Japan and rowed for two years at Eton.
    Point of fact, he didn’t exactly remember hitting the water, just that he’d shucked off his jumper, down to his vest, torn off his trainers, and waded in, his eyes on the teenager, now frantic in the water.
    “Lie on your back! Put your legs out in front of you!” he yelled. “Ride the current until you can find a rock and brace yourself!” But the river gobbled his words. The icy water stole his breath as he worked his way to the teenager, grabbing at him, missing.
    The swell took the boy under the bridge. Roark did get a hand on the mother, however, his grip on a boulder scraping at his other hand.
    As his legs went numb in the frigid water, the woman clawed at him, fighting him. “My son!”
    Her husband half paddled, half twisted in the rapids, also disappearing under the bridge. Tempests of water would suck them under, relentless in their hunger.
    “Ma’am!”
    But she shook free of Roark’s grasp, kicking him in the gut as she fought. His breath heaved out.
    Before he could lunge again, she went under.
    The current took her body, sucked her down. Roark clung to the rock, waiting for her to surface.
    Waiting.
    He finally saw a hand   —just a glimmer   —peek from the surface in the middle of a cauldron on the far side of the river.
    Another man, older, had plunged into the water beside him.
    “She’s over there!” Roark pointed to the hole, then launched himself through the rapids toward her.
    His feet barely found purchase, pushing at