Swept Away Read Online Free Page B

hair. It looked as if someone had colored her hair badly—and then cut it badly. How different could she be? And what could she do to become invisible and utterly unrecognizable?
    She thought about it for a moment and then she shaved her head. After brief consideration, the eyebrows that she’d spent a fortune having professionally colored and waxed into a curvaceous arch also went. If she remembered correctly, her original brows were black, bushy, shapeless and met over the bridge of her nose.
    Then, despite her determination to be stronger than her circumstances, she cried in a bed with a lumpy mattress and a thin sheet. What had she been thinking, getting involved with a man like Nick? With any of the rich older men she’d attracted? It had only served to isolate her from the world. Had she really thought she was so smart, so immune to having her heart broken? This was proof positive that you didn’t have to be in love to have your heart broken. She was in a crappy motel in a tiny desert town outside Las Vegas with nothing. With no one. Even worse, now she was in actual peril. Talk about a plan gone awry.
    The month was March and she awoke the following morning to chilly air and leaden skies, and the sound of rain. The heater in the room didn’t work and everything seemed inevitable.
    The morning sky was just painting the dark clouds gray when she couldn’t take the cold, dank hotel room another second. She bundled up in a khaki-green windbreaker, her scarf wrapped around her neck and her baseball cap covering her bald head. All her worldly goods were tucked into a canvas backpack. The motel office was still closed; no one there to get the heater going in her room. So she set out to see if there was more to this place than a junkyard and train tracks.
    A few blocks away the road forked—the highway went left and she went right. Another few blocks revealed a small town, a street lined with cafés and shops not yet open. She counted three restaurants, all apparently of the no-tablecloth variety. It was an old street with worn sidewalks, but some trendy shops and eateries were peppered amid the older ones, perhaps recent additions to snag the visitors to Hoover Dam, and travelers en route to the Grand Canyon as they passed by the town. The manager of Starbucks was just unlocking the door. A clock in the window of a gift shop read six-thirty. There was a small corner market that looked no bigger than a convenience store, but it displayed a large variety of fresh fruits and vegetables in the window, and a sign that boasted a sale on ground sirloin.
    A big white hotel with signs that advertised Underground Dancing and a Dam Museum stood down the street. Across the parking lot was a small brick building painted pink—a dance studio.
    She took a left, getting off the main street, and a few blocks later found a park, library, theater and an old residential neighborhood full of tiny, multicolored houses nestled amid tall, full trees. They looked like playhouses, street after street of them. There were obviously no neighborhood-association rules about conformity in this part of the world, as interspersed with well-maintained houses and manicured lawns were battered-looking homes inside cyclone fences that surrounded dirt and weeds. The houses, however, were almost all the same shape. Except one at the end of the street, a square two-story, with a huge peace sign painted on a tall tree stump and flowered sheets covering the windows. It looked like a throwback from the sixties.
    Around the corner she saw the post office and wondered if this was the center of town. It didn’t even resemble anything close to a desert here in Boulder City; the foliage was thick, and most of the trees had retained their leaves through winter while others showed the promise of new buds on bare branches. Shrubs were dense; grass was green.
    She passed a yarn shop, a used-book store and a health-food store. A sign stuck