Winter's Daughter Read Online Free Page B

hovering. "Nothing your self–defense classes haven’t prepared you for. And if the guy’s been arrested—"
    "I know." Tannis dropped the brush onto the table–top and turned to face her sister. "I know. There was just something about this guy that got to me." She doubled one hand into a fist and pressed it against the towel, just under her breasts. "I felt it—in here. And it’s funny, because at first, when I saw him, there was something about him that really attracted me. I even gave him an orange, and then he gave me a flower." She touched her hair and smiled, remembering. "And then—" she hugged herself and shrugged "—I don’t know what happened. All of a sudden I just wanted to run away."
    "Understandable," Lisa said dryly. "I’d want to run away all the time if I were doing what you’re doing, living on the street, with those—" She broke off, shuddering.
    "But that’s just it, Lisa; I’ve never been afraid on the streets before. I don’t think I realized, when I decided to do this for my doctoral project, that I was going to find such—
rapport
with those people. For one thing, they’re not ’those people’—not anymore. One thing I found out right away was how little difference there is between most of them and any one of us."
    "There but for the grace of God—?"
    "Exactly. They’re people just like you and me, but they’ve had a little bad luck. For some of them, having no money, no job, and no home is the problem; for others it’s a symptom of the problem—mental illness, mostly. And for a few, it’s a way of life. Those are the ones that really fascinate me, they’re the ones I want to do my study on—the ones who live on the streets because they choose to, for whatever reasons. The ones who actually prefer it to living in permanent homes."
    Her voice had deepened, gone husky with emotion the way it always did when she talked about things that interested her. It had that passionate intensity most of the time, she realized, simply because she was interested in nearly everything.
    "I want to know why, what makes them tick. And I need more time, dammit. I can’t afford to come running home just because some
bum
gives me a case of the jitters!"
    "So you’re going back?"
    "Yes," Tannis said firmly. "Tomorrow."
    "Well," Lisa said, getting up with a sigh, "I suppose you have to. I know nothing I or anybody else can say is going to stop you. But at least you know this guy’s in jail."

    "Dillon, for cryin’ out loud, what are you trying to do to me?"
    Dillon nursed one eye open and squinted up at the Los Padres chief of police. He muttered sourly, "Took you long enough. Where the hell have you been?" There was a dangerous light in Logan Russell’s eyes.
    "I was in Santa Monica." he said with exaggerated precision, showing his teeth, "at a meeting with the President’s Task Force on organized crime. Naturally when they yanked me out of a roomful of the top names in law enforcement in the entire state to tell me two of my own officers had just arrested a skid–row bum claiming to be my best friend, the newly elected city councilman, Dillon James, I dropped everything to come a–runnin’!" His voice, mild to begin with, had escalated to a roar that was only partly mitigated by a strong New Orleans accent.
    When Logan paused, swearing, to drag a hand through his thinning blond hair, Dillon asked incredulously, "And you believed a story like that?"
    Logan gave a disgusted snort. "It sounded just like something you’d do." He stood aside and gestured for the uniformed guard beside him to open the cell—reluctantly, Dillon thought.
    "You know, Logan, this is all your fault," he said as he slipped through the gate.
    Logan jerked his head back as if something unpleasant had hit him in the face. "My Lord—what have you been wallowing in?"
    "About a pint of cheap whiskey. Listen, if you hadn’t talked me into coming back here and running for public office after I got out of law