The Heat Read Online Free Page B

and actresses perform drama by Mark Twain and Shakespeare. The playhouse had been situated in a strip mall that also contained a twenty-four hour café where LSU students stayed up all night eating beignets and drinking dark-brewed Louisiana coffee as they studied for upcoming finals. It had smelled like heaven.
    The mall and its beignets and coffee and fifteen-dollar plays was gone now. In its place stood a Wal-Mart.
    There were things in the city that seemed to have been untouched by time. A small secondhand store off of Burbank still stood in the same location that it had stood in for more than twenty years. Here Today Gone Tomorrow was where Lily had purchased all of her clothes while she’d been in high school. She remembered when it had dirt floors. And it was still there.
    Highland Park looked virtually the same as it had a decade before.
    Her parents’ apartment on GSRI was still standing, and it was still painted pink. Her parents were long gone, having moved to Oregon five years ago. But the apartment was still there.
    But so much had changed, and change was hard. There was comfort in recognition. In repetition. It was good for the soul to know that some things would never go away. When it turned out that they would go away after all, the soul had to adjust. And adjusting one’s soul was a little like learning how to swim by jumping into the deep end. The simple act of keeping your head above water was painful. And, at times, it was just plain hard to breathe.
    Again, Lily sighed. Not for the first time since her return, she wondered whether she was making the right move. She wasn’t a weak woman. She was raised by good parents. They loved each other, and their daughter, deeply. They knew the difference between right and wrong. And they’d instilled this knowledge – and the need to fight for it – within their little girl. Lily was one of those extremely rare, extremely lucky individuals whose parents encouraged bravery, but offered comfort when things didn’t go as planned.
    Lily wanted to help the people in her hometown when they needed help the most. From what she’d seen in the last few days, that time was now. Baton Rouge was inflating beyond its capacity, like a balloon threatening to pop. And Lily didn’t want its people to detonate right along with it.
    Lily blinked, realizing that she’d been staring at the same spot for several long minutes and that her eyes were burning. Then she sat up, grabbing the hardback book that was on the bedside table. Barefoot, she tiptoed to the door of the guest room and then quietly opened it. At one point, it creaked a little and she paused. When she heard no sounds coming from Tabitha’s room, she opened it the rest of the way and stepped out into the hall.
    She managed to make it to the stairs and then down to the first floor without any more creaks. When she was in the living room, she stole the throw off of the rocking chair and sat down on the plush couch, wrapping the fleece tightly around herself. Then she stared down at the cover of the book she’d set down beside herself.
    Intense green eyes gazed out at her from a black background. She knew whose eyes they were. They belonged to the man on the back cover – the author of the book, Malcolm Cole. He was an unbelievably handsome man. His hair was thick and dark brown and nearly as long as Daniel’s….
    Daniel….
    Tabitha’s big brother had been haunting her all night. She shook her head to clear it. She concentrated on the book again. Cole’s eyes were so emerald green that they almost seemed to glow. Lily had never seen another person with eyes like that. They were nearly unnatural. Maybe contacts? She doubted it. They seemed to fit in with the rest of him too well.
    He wrote mysteries and he was so good that Lily’d been hooked for years. She wasn’t the only one; he had a following that had made him a very wealthy and famous man. Once Lily started reading one of his books, she had a very hard