I snort loudly, startling Waffle from her sleep. She eyeballs me, her nose and whiskers twitching before deciding that no, I don’t have a treat and apparently woke her up for no good reason, and curls up into her cozy little ball beside me again.
“Sorry,” I tell her. “Just thinking about the absolute lunacy of me flirting with a guy. Sticking my A cups in his face, no less.”
Yes, I’ve officially become that woman. The one who lives alone and talks to her cat.
With a little scratch on the top of her head, I settle back against the couch cushions and re-tuck my hand-knit throw around my legs. As I stare blankly at the flames licking the logs in the fireplace, I let my mind wander back to the Hop-less Horseman and seeing Mike again.
Moving back to Sleepy Hollow, I knew it was inevitable that I’d run into him. And judging from the few photos he’s been tagged in online, I knew he was still as handsome as he was when we dated.
Dated. That’s too simple of a word. We were together for eight years. He was my first everything. And I thought he was the one I’d spend the rest of my life with.
He might have been, if not for?—
No. I don’t want to think about those dark days. Not now.
Closing my eyes, I allow myself the guilty pleasure of conjuring up Mike in my mind again. Not as I saw him in a few group photos, but in person, so close I could have touched him if I wanted.
I wanted to. Badly.
I wanted to touch his angular features, his strong jaw and brow, his nose with the tiny bump from when he broke it playing football in his junior year.
I wanted to run my fingers through his dark brown hair, now dusted with strands of silver, and find out if it was still as soft as I remember.
Oh, and I wanted so badly to hug him. Feel his broad chest against mine, let his furnace-like warmth seep into me, and sink into his embrace as he wrapped his muscular arms—I couldn’t miss the way the fabric of his sweater clung to them—around me.
I don’t blame Allison for flirting with him. But I still wanted to smack her for trying.
“How am I going to deal with seeing him?” I ask Waffle.
Having determined that I am not the harbinger of treats, her only response is a rumbling purr.
HowamI? When I decided to leave California and move back here, the practicality of it superceded everything. I needed to get away from Alex, away from his phone calls and letters and unwelcome visits; from his insults and claims that I should go back to him because I’d never find another man who’d accept me.
“You know I love you,”he liked to say,“but you know you’re not… normal. And most guys, they don’t like that. If you don’t come back to me, you’ll die alone and end up eaten by one of your ten cats.”
I didn’t have ten cats. Just one. And Iamnormal. Just because?—
A loud crash breaks the silence.
My heart stutters.
I know that sound.
It’s one I heard enough times living here, every time a car would take the turn too fast and go flying off the road.
It’s a dangerous curve on the best of days, and tonight, with the snow still falling steadily? An accident could be deadly.
Jumping up, I rush to the window overlooking the front lawn and the road beyond it. At first, I can’t see anything through the billowing clouds of white. But a second later, a flash of tail lights break through it.
Tail lights notonthe road, but off it.
Crap.
Heart racing, I leap up from the couch and race over to the closet, yanking out my warmest winter coat and shoving it on. Then over to the front door and the table beside it, where I rummage through the little knick-nack bowl trying to find the flashlight I keep inside it.
At the door, it’s a struggle to get my boots on, made worse by the urgency pulsing through me.
Terrible possibilities come at me, each one worse than the other. Broken bones. Head injuries. Blood everywhere. Death.
