The Kindness of Strangers (Skip Langdon Mystery #6) (The Skip Langdon Series) Read Online Free Page A

painful.
    “It’s taking so long.”
    Oh, God, why can’t I put a bandage on them or something?
    “Want to come back Wednesday? We could do twice a week for a while.”
    Skip nodded, looking pathetically grateful, this large woman, so defeated in her triumph. If a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do, she had—and now she was flat as a busted balloon.
    Boo thought: We never know what life will bring us.
    When Skip had gone, she realized how much the other woman had affected her. She had ways of closing herself off from her clients’ pain—all therapists do—but there was something about this one, something like seeing a wounded lion.
    She went to find her daughter. She had ten minutes before the next one.

Chapter Three
    THEY WENT TO the burger King on Canal Street because Noel thought nobody else would be there. Torian had heard her mother say that if you didn’t want to be overheard by the people you were talking about, you had to go to Hooters. Burger King was good if you didn’t want to be seen.
    Anyway, she preferred it to PJ’s or the Croissant D’Or because she wanted a Coke instead of coffee.
    Noel said, “I brought you the poem. May I read it to you?”
    Asking her permission.
    He was so diffident, so shy with her. She didn’t really know how to respond—nothing had prepared her for this—but she thought it best to accept the role he assigned to her, that of lady receiving her troubadour.
    It felt odd. It felt downright absurd.
    She was just Torian Gernhard, who had the worst clothes in the class and got tongue-tied when a cool boy spoke to her, and here she was with Noel Treadaway. That in itself didn’t make any sense, but the way he treated her was madness—like a queen, yes, but not the way a king treats a queen, the way a servant does.
    Of course it made her uncomfortable, because it was too weird and too unlikely and made her feel like she was in a dream. But in a strange way, it also seemed her due. Usually, she felt rattled, but there were moments when she felt she brought it off pretty well.
    She was about to say that of course he could read the poem when he said, “You have no idea how cute you are with those glasses on.”
    She felt her cheeks flush and her right hand tear them from her face. She’d forgotten she was wearing them.
    “No, leave them on.”
    “I’ll put them on later. If you ask me real nice.”
    She leaned forward a little, seductively, she hoped, though she hadn’t had much practice at this sort of thing.
    He laughed. “What a grande dame.”
    How many of her friends even knew that phrase? Her heart swelled with gratitude that this was happening, that he’d noticed her.
    She made her neck and spine long and looked haughtily down her nose. “You may read the poem now.”
    His hair was gold in the sun, his blue eyes kind right now, but sometimes she thought they would burn a hole through her.
    We are the opposites that attract, she thought. Light and dark, tall and short, thick and thin.
    Sunny and sad.
    But she wasn’t nearly so sad when he was with her. Sometimes she thought he’d been sent from heaven to save her, to give meaning to her life.
    They’d known each other four months now, but this magic, this love between them, was new, now going into its fourth week—its twenty-second day, to be exact.
    She had wanted him from the first, but that was nothing. She got hardly anything she wanted, unless you counted the occasional Coke.
    She had written poems about him. He liked poetry. She’d never in her life met a soul who did, not even Sheila.
    Poetry and classical music. It was too much to ask.
    “Are you sure you’re ready?”
    She nodded slowly, grandly.
    Tears stood in her eyes when he had finished. The images were so crystalline, so pure and clean she felt her body tingle, as if she had dived into a mountain stream. They made her wish she lived in a place where there wassnow, wish she could have her own house with her own bowl, in which there