“He wasn’t interested in me.”
“How can you tell?”
“Uh, he didn’t ask for my last name or my number.” Not that she’d expected him to. She dropped onto the seat, slid her bag on the floor and banged the door shut. “This is the last time I’m going on a blind date.”
“Be careful. You’ve said those words before.” Brandi turned over the ignition and gave the truck gas, hoping the engine would catch. It rolled over and over. “Blind dates aren’t so bad.”
“How can you say that? They’re terrible. Look at tonight. Disaster.”
“Sure, but it could have been worse.”
“How, exactly?”
“Uh, the building could have caught fire?” The engine finally caught and roughly idled. Brandi twisted in her seat to back out of the spot with a squeak of brakes and a whine from the transmission. “At least you met a nice guy. Okay, so he didn’t want to date you, but at least you know nice guys are out there.”
“As rare as hen’s teeth, but they exist.” Bree frowned, remembering how Max had made her feel. Small and dainty and utterly feminine, and incredibly, wonderfully safe. That was exactly how the right man ought to affect her.
Now, she simply had to find the right man for her. No easy task. “I mean it, I’m done with blind dates. Notice how you don’t go on any?”
“Sure, because I’m not looking for Mr. Right. Believe me, I’m in no hurry to find out he doesn’t exist.”
Yikes, that was exactly what she was afraid of down deep. Beneath her optimistic thinking and her stubborn faith, that in the end, there would be no Mr. Right and no happiness. She sighed, pushing away the dark shadows from her childhood. “Although a girl has to have hope.”
“Yes, and you keep holding on to it,” her sister agreed. “And I will try to somehow. Despite my totally pessimistic attitude.”
“Hey, careful. That’s an attitude I’m trying not to catch.”
“Which is why I’m keeping my opinions to myself.”
Bree grinned. She could always count on her sister to be supportive, even if she didn’t agree. Their family was broken and scattered, and she had half brothers and half sisters she hadn’t seen in years. Mom had never been exactly what you could call reliable, and Dad, well, he’d been in and out of prison most of her life. Not exactly model parents or the kind a girl could ever depend on, which made her sister a double blessing.
The lights of Bozeman flashed by as they drove along in companionable silence. Despite the theft of her car and her no-show date, the evening didn’t feel like a loss. She smiled, snuggled safely into the car’s bucket seat, thinking about Max. Not that she would ever see him again—what were the chances?—but it didn’t hurt to hold the memory of meeting him close, like her own little handful of a dream.
The headlights spotlighted their rented duplex, and the truck squeaked to a stop on the concrete driveway. As they pulled into the carport, reality set in. They were home. Tonight she had a lot to be thankful for—that the only thing taken from her was her car. Tomorrow there would be the insurance agent to call and transportation to figure out.
But as she opened the car door, she thought of Max and how he had offered her his coat. Memories of his kindness warmed her as she followed her sister inside, where the heater clicked on and she felt safe.
It was well past midnight, and he still couldn’t get the young woman out of his mind. Max hit the garage door button, sorting through his keys while the door cranked shut. He unlocked his door, thinking of how she had looked standing alone in the light of sunset with his coat too big on her delicate frame.
Bree was an image of goodness and loveliness he wanted to believe in. But could he? He didn’t like to admit it, but he’d lost his ability to believe in people. He was struggling to believe in a lot of things. The lock tumbled, he opened the door and stalked into his kitchen.
A single light over the sink shone, casting an amber glow across the marble countertops. Looked like his kid brother, whom he was raising, had done the dishes and cleaned up. Good kid. Marcus was in bed asleep, and the place felt empty.
The town house was something he’d picked up because it beat paying rent. He’d been here nine months and had yet to feel as if he’d come home. Maybe it was because he’d learned that nothing was permanent. He knew from on-the-job training that life could change in a blink; he didn’t count on much lasting these days. He took one day at a time.
He pulled a can out of the refrigerator and popped the top. The lemony ice tea ran down his throat like comfort. He’d worked hard tonight. It felt good to mosey over into the living room, put his boots up on the coffee table and sit in the dark.
He was too wound up from his work to go up to bed; he wasn’t in the mood for TV. He took another long swig of tea and tried to blot out the ugliness of the night. He couldn’t forget the broken-down excuse for a house near the railroad tracks, children’s chunky plastic toys scattered around the filthy floor where a gun had been discharged. He couldn’t forget the father who was too high to realize where his toddler had wandered off to. They had found him playing on the tracks. It was a blessing no trains had ambled through. Social Services had been called, and now he would have another file of heartache on his desk.
The man who’d been arrested was the brother-in-law to the backdoor burglar, as fate would have it. Or, he believed more strongly, God.
Max set down his can with a clink in the stillness. It was the quietest time of night, when no traffic rolled by and it felt as if even the shadows slept. His feet hit the floor and he launched himself out of the chair, haunted by the image of Brianna when he’d first laid eyes on her. She had big violet eyes and the sweetest face. His chest tightened. He wanted to think it was only curiosity and nothing else that drove him upstairs past Marcus’s room, where he opened the door a crack—yep, the kid was asleep. He wandered into the second bedroom and saw his computer glowing in the corner.
Sure, maybe it was more than a little curiosity, he conceded as he logged in and found the local newspaper’s Web site. He typed in his password, remembering when he’d first approached Brianna’s table and how she’d smiled up at him. He punched a few keys and hit Search, waiting, recalling how hard he’d been hoping that the nice-looking blonde could possibly be his blind date. And praying equally as hard she wasn’t.
And why? Going out to meet Alice hadn’t been his idea. After six months of pressure, he’d finally caved. That was all there was to it. He wasn’t a blind-date kind of guy. He’d gone to shut his buddies up, that was it.
Okay, maybe there was still a little bit of hope alive in him somewhere that he would find the right woman. That there would be that click, and life could turn for the better.
The screen changed, offering him several links to articles. He hit the last headline and waited. Several grainy black-and-white images crowded the screen with a long front-page article on the holdup. Two kitchen workers and a cook dead, and a waitress taken by medevac to Seattle’s Harborview Hospital. Brianna.
With his heart thundering, he scrolled down the screen and skimmed the article. He wanted to see the specifics of the case again in black-and-white. His eyes caught the phrase “…waitress in critical condition. Charles Lintle, the restaurant’s dishwasher,
