Waiting for Your Love (Echoes of the Heart) Read Online Free Page B

minute.
    Muddy meadow.
    Pouring summer rain.
    Fireworks shared with a less-than-commiserating doggy companion…
    She tried to stop her thoughts from surfacing. But behind her closed eyes, images replayed of a certain pampered canine abandoning Clair to her stormy musings, and taking shelter beneath Bethany Darling’s truck.
    “No,” Clair complained. “Don’t wake up. I—”
    She jolted back to reality, her elbow most definitely being slobbered on. Matilda, not Conrad, who was giving Clair puppy love.
    Her neck felt fused at an awkward angle that might never straighten itself out. There was something warm and pleasantly musky-smelling beneath her cheek. She jerked her head away from its perch, groaned, and wiped at the drool that had pooled from the corner of her mouth onto Conrad’s shirt.
    Conrad’s shirt?
    “Oh, my God!” She’d been all but lying on top of him. She scrambled back into her seat and peered through the windshield of his Jeep. “It’s morning. Conrad?” She shook him. “What are we doing here? What time is it?” She punched his shoulder. “Conrad!”
    “Huhmph…” He slumped against his door and crossed his arms, still out of it. “Taste so good… Trust me, Clair.”
    She touched her fingers to her tingling lips. They had been kissing in their sleep, she realized. At some point, not everything had been a dream. She could still taste him.
    Matilda whined a high-pitched warning that an even louder ruckus was looming. Her elbow adulations intensified. Clair liberated her arm. As best she could from the front seat, she patted the doberman’s head in consolation, trying to keep her happy.
    “Shh,” she stage-whispered. “Give me just a minute.”
    She reached a hand toward Conrad, desperate to know in real life what it felt like to have him want her.
    Matilda barked.
    Harper stirred, waking enough to sense that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.
    “Daddy?” His eyes opened. His gaze locked with Clair’s. “Daddy?!”
    Conrad started awake at the sound of his son’s cry. His spine shot ramrod straight. He wiped his eyes with his fists. Then he stilled, blinking his surroundings into focus. His attention pivoted to Clair.
    His jaw dropped. “What the—”
    “Daddy.” Harper kicked his feet, still strapped into his car seat. “Gotta pee.”
    Matilda added her two cents with a barrage of eardrum-bursting barks.
    Conrad checked his watch. “It’s morning already?”
    “Were we…” Clair didn’t finish. She wouldn’t let herself finish. She had no business finishing.
    But she couldn’t stop staring at his mouth.
    “We were kissing?” he asked.
    She nodded, flushing beneath his stare. “I was dreaming that we were—”
    “Me, too. But did we… I mean, at some point, did we actually—”
    “Yeah,” she conceded, sparing them both the mortification of his finishing his sentence. “I think we might have.”
    They fumbled with their door handles and spilled onto the curb outside her house. The world was morning quiet, except for Matilda’s complaints. The doberman’s bark spiked through Clair’s hangover as she yanked open the back passenger door. Conrad did the same on his side.
    Before she could grab for Matilda’s collar, the dog slipped around her and raced to do her business—across the quiet, empty street and smack-dab into the middle of Mrs. Riley’s prized azalea bed.
    “Daddy, pee…” Harper wriggled and strained as Conrad struggled to make sense of the car-seat straps. “Gotta go.”
    Conrad shook his head as if to kick-start whatever gray matter wouldn’t engage. “I’m on it, buddy.”
    “Let me.” Clair—who should be seeing to Matilda and never should have let the dog get by her in the first place—shooed her friend’s fingers away.
    Their skin brushed for the scantest of seconds.
    Conrad jerked as if he’d been shocked. He wiped a hand over his dawn’s growth of beard. His thumb rubbed across his bottom lip and tortured her with