Chapters (43)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Epilogue
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- Readers Guide
- QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
God, he was a failure. His mama was lying sick and alone, thousands of miles away, and he’d left the woman he loved crying over him in a damned barn. Not to mention he was about to wave goodbye to the career he’d hoped all his life for, because no way did he have enough time to go to the house and plead for time off from Bill, who was itching to fire his ass anyway.
LJ threw himself into the truck and cranked the ignition. He’d call and beg every kind of forgiveness later, but for now, his family needed him.
Twenty-one
“Asafetida.” Andra wasn’t sure if it was her voice that sounded funny or the word itself. Tapping the little plastic spice container with one fingernail, she said it again. “Asafetida.” She bent a little more forward, the beer bottle in her hand clinking against the counter. LJ’s spices were a foreign language, smells and shapes and colors gathered into shakers with labels she wasn’t sure how to pronounce.
She ran her finger down a container of coriander, so softly that she could feel the seam where the plastic had been melded together. She wished she could feel LJ’s fingerprints on it, too. Before she had cleaned his apartment, she should have thought of all the marks of him she was wiping away. Andra wondered if his fingerprints were still on her skin. After six days of sweat and showers, probably not. If the FBI dusted for signs of his presence, they would be all over this apartment and her cottage, too, but she would be clean. It didn’t seem right, didn’t seem possible that he could have disappeared from her life so completely.
Tipping the bottle against her lips, she took a drink, wincing at the burn of the carbonation in the beer. It had been years since she’d had a drink. She’d barely made it through the neck of the small bottle, and already her head felt light, the lines of everything in LJ’s apartment a little more vivid than they had been. Until she’d cleaned out his fridge, she hadn’t realized LJ even liked beer. He’d never drunk one in front of her, but there were two beers on the shelf of his fridge, the other four to the six-pack missing. He must think she was terribly fragile, that he couldn’t even have a beer when she was around. The thought had made her angry, and she’d cracked one open for herself.