Here With Me Read Online Free Page B

at waiting. He was a man of action and he didn’t
need any damn wind telling him what was the right thing to do. “You
said yesterday that you were looking for a husband.”
    She cocked her head to the left. “What?”
    “You said that you told your grandmother that
you had a husband and she’s expecting you to bring him home. That’s
what you said, right?”
    She chewed on the corner of her bottom lip.
“That’s what I said.”
    “I’ve been a husband. It wouldn’t be like
starting from scratch.”
    Keeping her head tilted, she patted the side
of her head with the palm of her hand. Then she made a production
of leaning her head to the other side and repeating the motion
before sitting up very straight. "I must have water in my ears
still.”
    Now that he’d decided, he wouldn’t be put
off. “You need a husband. I’ve got a little time on my hands. We’d
be helping each other out.”
    Her cheeks showed bright spots of color. “Oh,
good grief. You don’t know what you’d be getting yourself into.
You’ve got to have better things to do.”
    What was there to do when a person was a
round peg in a square hole? “My offer stands,” he said.
    “I’d be asking too much. Look, this isn’t a
weekend trip home. I don’t know how long I’m staying.”
    That made two of them. He just needed to stay
prepared, to be ready when the footprints back appeared. “If I need
to leave, if something comes up suddenly,” he said, “you can always
give them an excuse. By then, they’ll believe I’m the real
thing.”
    She stood up, her movements less graceful
than before. She started walking, making small circles around him.
“This is nutty,” she muttered, waving her delicate hands. “It’ll
never work.” Another circle. “It’s too much for me to expect.”
Another circle.
    Christ, he was getting dizzy. But he couldn’t
stop watching her. The wind blew across the ocean, making her hair
fly and pushing her loose shirt tight up against her frame, and he
saw the slight evidence of her child.
    She stopped walking. “What’s in it for you?”
she asked.
    A sense of purpose, perhaps. He’d had that
when he was sheriff and had the responsibility of taking care of a
whole town. Had certainly had it when he’d been chasing after
Hannah’s killers. He’d been spurred on by the need for vengeance.
But now, a hundred plus years later, he had no town that needed
him. And the one remaining man of the three who had hurt his
Hannah, was certainly long dead. He had no reason for continuing on
other than to help Melody Song.
    But she had every reason for questioning his
offer. After all, by what she’d shared, there had already been one
man who’d charmed her into his bed, only later to desert her. This
was a woman who would be on guard, who would question a man’s
motives.
    “My pockets are empty and I’ve got no job and
no place to live,” he said.
    She nodded. “I would definitely pay you,” she
said.
    He’d never cared all that much about money.
“We’ll work something out,” he said. He looked down at his clothes.
“I guess I’m not really dressed to go calling on family.”
    “That’s easy to fix,” she assured him. She
played with the hem of her blouse. Then she did some more circles
in the sand. Finally, she lifted her eyes to the blue sky and he
saw her lips move in what he figured was silent prayer. As long as
she wasn’t asking God for another big wave to wash him away, it
probably couldn’t hurt.
    It took her another minute before she looked
at him. “Well, what do you say?” he asked.
    She gave him a wobbly sort of smile, stuck
out her hand, and said, “I think we just got married.”
    ***
    On the way to her car, Melody examined her
new husband. His shirt and pants, which had been wet and clinging
to his body last night, had dried stiff. His dark brown hair, which
was well over the edge of his shirt collar, was matted down in a
combination of salt and sand. He wore cowboy boots with a