No Longer Mine Read Online Free Page A

to the roots of his hair and he had no idea where those words had come from.
    “I bet he is,” came her soft whisper.
    And looking over, he saw the beginning of a smile on her face.
    The words, wherever they had come from, had been the right ones.

    Before Nikki got out of her truck she donned a dark pair of sunglasses and forced her unruly hair into a stubby ponytail. She hadn’t really thought she would be recognized when she had decided to use her own name on her books. She really hadn’t thought that far ahead. She had only wanted them to sell.
    They had sold though, and she hadn’t exactly been in the best frame of mind when she was dealing with the contract negotiations. If she had thought things through, if she had listened to the agent she’d signed with, she would have gone with a pen name. She would have done something to have some modicum of privacy.
    Now it was a little too late.
    Besides, in a town the size of Monticello, everybody knew everybody else’s business. The hat and the sunglasses wouldn’t fool many people, but if it helped a little she was all for it. If she lived in a larger town she’d have more anonymity than she had in Monticello. In the past few years it had come to where she couldn’t go much anywhere without somebody hailing her down to talk about books.
    18
    www.samhainpublishing.com

    No Longer Mine
    My little girl wrote this. Isn’t that something…
    I got a book. Can you help me…
    And lately, total strangers who were just in town to fish were recognizing her. Nikki wasn’t ever going to let another picture be taken of her, and her webmaster had taken down the one they’d conned her into putting up. Now if she could just get it off the back of the books…
    For a while she hadn’t minded the attention too much, but as time passed she started to crave solitude.
    People and questions were coming to grate on her nerves something bad. It was just a sign of her worsening depression, she suspected, and if she were smart, she’d just make the drive to Somerset where she was less likely to be noticed, but she didn’t have the energy.
    She made it all the way through the store without any problems and was finishing up in the dairy section. She just might make it out of the store, she realized. It even had her mood climbing up a few notches—instead of toxic, it was just slightly hazardous.
    She added a carton of yogurt and some cream cheese. As she went to turn the cart around she promptly ran into somebody else’s.
    “Damn it,” she muttered, but her voice was lost under the sound of baskets crashing together and groceries tumbling to the floor.
    A sheepish smile crossed her face and she said, “Sorry about that.” She would hit somebody whose cart was beyond full. Kneeling, she picked up a carton of cookies and Donald Duck orange juice. She placed them in the basket before stepping away.
    The guy had knelt in front of a dark child of four or five, his face hidden as he scooped up items from the floor.
    “No problem,” he said, although his voice belied his words. He sounded a tad—okay, he sounded a lot irritated.
    Nikki was about to make a quick getaway, but then he stood. And revealed his face.
    A very familiar face, one that haunted her dreams on a regular basis. His hair was shorter, cut at his nape, and his face had thinned out just a bit, the dimples at the corners of his mouth now slashes in his lean cheeks. But the eyes were the same, deep bottomless pools of brown velvet.
    “Wade,” she whispered. Her eyes, stricken, then landed on the child’s face. A little girl, a little mirror of her father.
    And of Nikki’s son. She wore a red T-shirt decorated on the front with a sketch of a bright-eyed puppy. A baseball cap in that same candy-apple red sat on top of thick black hair that fell razor-straight to her tiny shoulders. She held a stuffed cocker spaniel, a mirror image of the way Jason had carried his precious Mouse.
    A knife slowly embedded itself in