Seducing The Proper Miss Miller

The elders hadn’t specified what hours he was to work, but Thad knew the office opened at eight-thirty. And that meant Chloe Miller would be sliding out of that tiny car again this morning, pushing her skirt modestly down over her shapely legs and blushing when she saw him watching.

He wouldn’t miss it for the world.

She was very pretty beneath all that sedate courtesy, was Miss Church Secretary, though she didn’t appear to be aware of it. She must have been a few years behind him in school, but he didn’t remember her. Of course, if she hadn’t hung out at parties with a beer in her hand, waiting for a ride with any guy who had an itch to scratch, he doubted their paths had crossed.

He hadn’t paid much attention to the good girls.

Until Jean.

His hands stilled for a moment over the chisels he was selecting, then resumed their work. His mind, however, wasn’t so easily managed. It wandered back eight years in time, back to the day Jean had come banging into his kitchen, where he used to keep his business in the early days.

“I’m pregnant, Thad,” she’d announced, red hair flying in agitation. “My father’s going to kill me.”

Jean had indeed died, he thought sadly, but it hadn’t been at the hands of her disapproving father. Thad still visited her grave occasionally, though the headstone her family had chosen, with its depiction of a woman cradling an infant in her arms was almost more than he could take. It was still startling to see “Jean Lawman Shippen” inscribed on the stone.

So what was he doing, lusting after this prim little church secretary? he asked himself. He was poison, with a woman’s life on his conscience. Not to mention an unborn baby, who had never even had a chance to draw breath.

He didn’t allow himself to watch as Chloe walked into the church a few minutes later, and he was working industriously when the Reverend Miller came out a while later and drove away in his gray sedan. Around ten, he could feel his fingers getting stiff, and he decided to take a short break, maybe walk down to Main Street for a cup of coffee.

He was still climbing down the ladder when Chloe banged open the front door of the church, racing over to him in a way that seemed most unlike her. As she got close, he realized that her face was white, and the wide golden-brown eyes he thought so pretty were huge and strained.

“I smell gas,” she said breathlessly. “Get away from the church and call 911.” He instinctively put out a hand but she shrugged it off and turned, running back into the church before he could get out a single word.

“Damn!” Suddenly his heart was thumping a hundred miles a minute. He sprinted to the street and grabbed the first man he saw on the corner. “Get to a phone and call 911,” he shouted into the fellow’s startled face. “There’s a gas leak in the church and there are still people inside.”

As the man nodded, Thad turned and ran back to the church. Yanking open the door, he plunged into the main hallway. The odor of natural gas hit him full in the face, and his pulse racheted up another notch. Sprinting down the hallway toward the office, he nearly knocked Chloe and an elderly woman to the floor as they came out of an adjacent room. Chloe gave him a brilliant smile of relief when she saw him.

“Help me get her out of here.”

“Is there anyone else inside?”

“No.”

Satisfied, Thad hustled the older woman out the door. As he turned to see if Chloe was all right, he realized with a sick feeling of shock that she wasn’t behind him.

Dammit, she was still in the church!

Frantic now, he ran back again. The gas smell was even stronger. He sure as hell hoped she was right, that there was nobody else in the church. Any number of tiny electrical functions could ignite gas, not to mention a match or a cigarette. He saw her immediately through the glass window in the office, grabbing computer disks and files and everything else she could find, stuffing them into a large canvas bag. He nearly pulled the door off its hinges getting in.

“Come on, we’ve got to get out of here!” It was a command, but she didn’t even look up.

“I’ll be done in a minute. You go.”

“You’re done now.” He grabbed the bag from her and seized Chloe around the waist, dragging her toward the door. She struggled for a moment, then began to run with him. They cleared the office and ran down the hallway hand in hand. He kicked open the front door, and they raced through it and down the stone steps, out across the wide lawn. At the far edge of the street, policemen were pushing back the crowd of onlookers who had gathered.

Thank God, he thought, meaning it—

Behind them an immense blast shook the world. Instantaneously, what felt like a huge fist slammed into him from behind, tearing Chloe’s hand from his, tossing him forward like a rag doll and rolling him across the ground. His head banged across a tree root, but he staggered to his feet, looking wildly around for Chloe.

She lay a few feet to his left, crumpled at the base of an old oak tree. Leaves and debris rained down around them, and as a stinging sensation penetrated his dazed senses, he realized that the tree was burning above them.

Dropping to Chloe’s side, he shielded her body with his, feeling tiny bites across the back of his neck from the rain of fire. She had a bleeding gash at one temple, where he guessed she hit the tree, but he got a pulse in her neck. He had no choice; he had to move her.

Lifting her carefully into his arms, Thad staggered away from the tree, on toward the street and the knots of shocked people watching him approach. He could hear sirens shrieking, careering closer. Two men darted forward. One reached out and took Chloe from him, the other put a supporting shoulder beneath his arm. “C’mon, buddy, you’re almost there.”

But he couldn’t. His knees wouldn’t lock, wouldn’t hold him up. As he slowly sank to the ground, his body twisted. The last thing he saw was a giant bonfire as the church was engulfed in flames.

He heard the technicians talking; before he opened his eyes he knew he was in an ambulance. One look confirmed it. He knew why, and he knew what he needed to know before he could relax. “Is Chloe okay?”

“Welcome back,” said a woman in a blue medical technician’s uniform. “Is Chloe the woman who was with you?”

He nodded, then was sorry as everything whirled around him.

“She’s coming to the hospital with another unit,” the woman said. “She wasn’t conscious when we loaded you, so I can’t tell you anything else.”

Then they were at the hospital. To his annoyance, they carried him in on a gurney like he was severely injured, and he was poked, prodded and X-rayed about four hundred times. He was given an ice pack for his head, and some sadistic nurse cleaned and bandaged an assortment of bums and cuts he couldn’t remember receiving.

He asked about Chloe at least a hundred times but nobody would tell him anything. Finally, after yet another nurse had backed out of his cubicle with a vague promise to check on Miss Miller’s condition, he got off the uncomfortable bed and eased his way into the burned and bloody T-shirt they’d taken off him, then started for the door.

“Whoa, fella, where are you going?” One of his nurses, with a build and a grip like a fullback, snagged his arm.

He jerked himself free and glared at her. “I’m going to find somebody in this damned place who will tell me how Chloe Miller is doing.”

The fullback scowled back. “We’re checking for you. You have to be patient, Mr. Shippen.”

“I’ve been patient,” he snarled. “And now I’m done. So just scratch me off your little list, lady, because I’m getting out of here.”

“Mr. Shippen?” Another nurse came toward them, but he was in a stare-down with the fullback. Finally, with narrowed eyes and a sniff, she looked away first.

Ridiculously pleased at the small victory, he was a little happier when he turned to the second nurse. “What?”

“Miss Miller is undergoing some tests. She’s been admitted to the Critical Care Unit, room 338. That’s the—”

“Tests for what?”

“Routine tests for head injury. She suffered quite a blow to the head, apparently.”

“When she hit the tree,” he said, mostly to himself.

The nurse looked sympathetic. “It could be hours before she is allowed to have visitors other than family. Is there someone who can take you home after you’re released?”

Thad didn’t bother to answer her as he turned and started toward what he hoped was the exit from the Emergency Department into the rest of the hospital.

“Wait, Mr. Shippen!” The nurse’s voice was a panicked squeak. “You haven’t been discharged yet.”

“Tough.” He didn’t look back.

The nurse scurried along beside him, waving a clipboard under his nose. “You’ll get me in big trouble if you leave here without being discharged.”