Holding Hands Read Online Free Page B

and
sighed. “It’s too late for a real meal,” he agreed.
    No familiar golden arches loomed ahead on the
road. She passed a couple of seafood restaurants, several bars and
a forlorn pizzeria, its parking lot empty. “Pizza,” Scott said.
    Meredith hadn’t eaten a slice of pizza since
she’d decided to lose weight. She didn’t dare eat a slice of pizza
now. She and Scott dashed through the rain to the door of the
eatery and inside. The smell of hot oil and melted cheese did
nothing to stir her appetite.
    “ Who orders a take-out salad
at a pizza place?” Scott asked fifteen minutes later, when they
were back in the car, a box containing a few slices of pizza and a
plastic tub of limp greens and cherry tomatoes perched on his
lap.
    Women who are trying to keep
from regaining the weight they lost, she
almost retorted. She was weary, aching with fatigue. And she still
had to find Cindy’s inn.
    What stupidity had led her to think this was
a good idea? Driving through a cloudburst toward a deeply uncertain
destiny. Trying to rejuvenate her marriage to a man who thought she
was foolish for eating salads instead of pizza, when she was doing
so in order to look sexy for him. A marriage to a man who’d rather
be home, working. Or at the university, meeting with students.
Anywhere but here, with anyone but Meredith.
    The car’s GPS steered her off the main road
onto a narrow lane as dark as midnight. She could barely make out
the shadowed shapes of cottages lining the road on both sides, the
gnarled dwarf pines, the spiky grass and scruffy shrubs. The
buildings were all dark. If the road was lined with street lamps,
they were dark, too. She edged the car cautiously along, hunched
forward, her fingers wrapped tight around the steering wheel.
“Looks like they’ve had a power outage,” she said, stating the
obvious.
    Scott’s comment was a succinct curse.
    If not for the GPS, Meredith would have
driven right past Cindy’s inn. She steered up the unpaved driveway,
bumping over twigs and pine cones, splashing dark water as the
driver’s side tires dipped into a rut. Eventually she reached a
looming, shingled building. Through one of the windows she noticed
a small, moving light. A flashlight, she guessed.
    “ If you want to wait in the
car, I’ll see what’s going on,” she offered.
    “ If you’re getting wet, I’ll
get wet, too,” Scott said. His chivalry failed to reassure
her.
    The front door swung open before they reached
it, and the flashlight bearer filled the doorway. As best Meredith
could tell through the wind-spun rain and the relentless dark, the
woman was petite, dressed in a rain slicker, holding the flashlight
in one hand and a narrow object in the other.
    A second flashlight. “Meredith? Hi, I’m
Cindy,” she said, sounding far more cheerful than the situation
warranted. “I guess this rain slowed you down. I was expecting you
folks much earlier. Well, as you can see, we’ve got no electricity
at the moment, but I can walk you to your cabin. We’ll check you in
officially tomorrow. No sense doing it in the dark. A tree went
down one block over, took all the wires down with it. Gotta love a
good nor’easter...” and on and on she went, handing Scott the
second flashlight and popping open an umbrella which arced over her
and about half of Scott.
    Chilly rain dripped inside Meredith’s collar,
flattened her hair and seeped through the stitching in her shoes as
they walked back to the car. Meredith slung Scott’s laptop bag over
her shoulder and gathered the pizza and salad; Scott took their
suitcases, and the three of them made their slow way along a path
of crushed seashells that led to what could charitably be called a
cluster of hovels.
    “ Unfortunately, I can’t
allow candles in the cabins,” Cindy rattled on, her voice
splintered by the wind and rain. “Fire hazard. You’ll have to make
do with this flashlight. I wish I could spare more, but I’ve got to
parcel them out to my