Everyday, Average Jones

Melody had to look away. His eyes were hypnotizing. If she didn’t look away, she’d do something stupid like leap into his arms and kiss him. She glanced out at the line of cars approaching them. Was it possible that Jones had cut the engine and stopped the plane so far away from the terminal in order to let them have these few moments of privacy?

He reached for her, taking her hands to help her down from the plane.

“What’s going to happen next?” she asked.

He pulled just a little too hard, and she fell forward, directly into his arms. He held her close, pressing her against his wide chest, and she held him just as tightly, encircling his waist with her arms and holding on as if she weren’t ever going to let go. His arms engulfed her, and she could feel him rest his cheek against the top of her head.

“Jones, will I see you again?” she asked. She needed to know. “Or will they take you away to be debriefed and then send you back to wherever it was you came from?”

She lifted her head to look up at him. The trucks were skidding to a stop. She was going to have to get into one of those trucks, and they would take her someplace, away from Harlan Jones, maybe forever….

Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely hear herself think. She could feel his heart, too, beating at an accelerated rate.

“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” he said, gazing into her eyes unsmilingly. “Second thing that’s going to happen is that they’re going to put you in one ambulance and me and H. in another. They’ll take us to the hospital, make sure we’re all right. Then we’ll go into a short debriefing—probably separately. After that’s done, you’ll be taken to whatever hotel they’re keeping the top brass in these days, and I’ll go into a more detailed debriefing. After we both get cleaned up, I’ll meet you back at the hotel for dinner—how’s that sound?”

Melody nodded. That sounded very good.

“But the first thing that’s going to happen,” he told her, his mouth curving up into that now familiar smile, “is this.”

He lowered his head and kissed her.

It was an amazing kiss, a powerful kiss, a no-holds-barred kind of kiss. It amplified all of the heat she’d seen in Harlan Jones’s bedroom eyes over the past forty-eight hours. God, had it only been forty-eight hours? She felt as if she’d known this man for at least a lifetime. She felt, too, as if she’d wanted him for every single second of that time.

He kissed her even harder, deeper, sweeping his tongue into her mouth. It was a kiss that was filled with a promise of ecstasy, of lovemaking the likes of which she’d never known. The entire earth dropped out from under her feet, and she clung to him, giddy and dizzy and happier than she’d ever been in her entire life, returning his kisses with equal abandon. He wanted her. This incredible man honestly, truly wanted her.

His lips were warm, his mouth almost hot. He tasted sweet, like one of those energy bars he’d shared with her. Melody realized that she was laughing, and when she pulled back to look at him, he was smiling, too.

And then, just as he’d said, she was tugged gently away from him toward one of the ambulances as he was led toward another.

He kept watching her, though, and she held his gaze right up until the moment that she was helped into the back of the emergency vehicle. But before she went in, she glanced at him one last time. He was still watching her, still smiling. And he mouthed a single word. “Tonight.”

Melody couldn’t wait.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_6e835da2-b13d-5f6b-9d03-3c77953af6c9)

Seven months later

Melody couldn’t wait.

She had to get home, and she had to get home now.

She looked both ways, then ran the red light at the intersection of Route 119 and Hollow Road. But even then, she knew she wasn’t going to make that last mile and a half up Potter’s Field Road.

Melody pulled over to the side and lost her lunch on the shoulder of the road, about half a mile south of the Webers’ mailbox.

This wasn’t supposed to be happening anymore. She was supposed to be done with this part of it. The next few months were supposed to be filled with glowing skin and a renewed sense of peace, and yeah, okay, maybe an occasional backache or twinge of a sciatic nerve.

The morning sickness was supposed to have stopped four months ago. Morning sickness. Hah! She didn’t have morning sickness—she had every-single-moment-of-the-day sickness.

She pulled herself back into her car and, after only stalling twice, slowly drove the rest of the way home. When she got there, she almost didn’t pull into the driveway. She almost turned around and headed back toward town.

There was a Glenzen Bros. truck parked out in front of the house. And Harry Glenzen—one of the original Glenzen brothers’ great-great-grandsons—was there with Barney Kingman. Together the two men were affixing a large piece of plywood to the dining-room window. Or rather to the frame of what used to be the dining-room window.

Melody had to push her seat all the way back to maneuver her girth out from behind the steering wheel.

From inside the house, she could hear the unmistakable roar of the vacuum cleaner. Andy Marshall, she thought. Had to be. Brittany was going to be mad as a hornet.

“Hiya, Mel,” Harry called cheerfully. “How about this heat wave we’re having, huh? We’ve got a real Indian summer this year. If it keeps up, the kids’ll be able to go trick-or-treating without their jackets on.”

“Hey, Harry.” Melody tried not to sound unenthusiastic, but this heat was killing her. She’d suffered all the way through July and August and the first part of September. But it was October now, and October in New England was supposed to be filled with crisp autumn days. There was nothing about today that could be called even remotely crisp.

She dragged herself up the front steps of the enormous Victorian house both she and her sister had grown up in. Melody had moved back in after college, intending to live rent free for a year until she decided what she wanted to do with her life, where she wanted to go. But then her mom had met a man. A very nice man. A very nice, wealthy man. Before Melody could even blink, her mother had remarried, packed up her things and moved to Florida, leaving Mel to take care of the sale of the house.

It wasn’t long after that that Brittany filed for divorce. After years of marriage, she and her husband, Quentin, had called it quits and Britt moved in with Melody.

Melody never did get around to putting the house on the market. And Mom didn’t mind. She was happier than Melody had ever seen her, returning to the Northeast for a month each summer and inviting her two daughters down to Sarasota each winter.

They were just two sisters, living together. Melody could imagine them in their nineties, still living in the same house, the old Evans girls, still unmarried, eccentric as hell, the stuff of which town legends were made.

But soon there would be three of them living together in this big old house, breaking with that particular town spinsters tradition. The baby was due just in time for Christmas. Maybe by then the temperature would have finally dropped below eighty degrees.

Melody opened the front door. As she lugged her briefcase into the house, she heard the vacuum cleaner shut off.

“Mel, is that you?”

“It’s me.” Melody looked longingly toward the stairs that led to her bedroom. All she wanted to do was lie down. Instead, she took a deep breath and headed for the kitchen. “What happened?”

“Andy Marshall happened, that’s what happened,” Britt fumed, coming into the cheery yellow room through the door that connected to the dining room. “The little juvenile delinquent threw a baseball through the dining-room window. We have to special order the replacement glass because the damn thing’s not standard-sized. The little creep claimed the ball slipped out of his hand. He says it was an accident.”

Mel set her briefcase on the kitchen table and sank into one of the chairs. “Maybe it was.”

Britt gave her such a dark look, Melody had to laugh. “It’s not funny,” Brittany said. “Ever since the Romanellas took that kid in, it’s been chaos. Andy Marshall has a great big Behavior Problem, capital B, capital P.”

“Even kids with behavior problems have accidents,” Melody pointed out mildly, resting her forehead in the palm of her hand. God, she was tired.

Her sister’s eyes softened. “Oh, hell. Another bad day?”

Melody nodded. “The entire town is getting used to seeing my car pulled over to the side of the road. Nobody stops to see if I’m okay anymore. It’s just, ‘Oh, there’s Melody Evans hurling again.’ Honk, honk, ‘Hey, Mel!’ and then they’re gone. I feel like a victim of the boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. One of these days, I’m going to be pulled to the side of the road in hard labor, giving birth to this baby, and no one’s going to stop to help me.”

Brittany took a glass down from the cabinet, filling it with a mixture of soda water and ginger ale. “Push those fluids. Replace what you’ve lost,” she said, Andy Marshall finally forgotten. “In this weather, your number-one goal should be to keep yourself from becoming dehydrated.”

Melody took the glass her sister was pressing on her. Her stomach was still rolling and queasy, so she only took a small sip before she set it down on the table. “Why don’t you go upstairs and change out of your nurse’s uniform before you forget you’re not at work any longer and try to give me a sponge bath or something?” she suggested.

Britt didn’t smile at her pitiful attempt at a joke. “Only if you promise to lie down and let me take care of dinner.” Melody’s sister had to be the only person in the world who could make an offer to cook dinner sound like a dire threat.

“I will,” Melody promised, pushing herself out of the chair. “And thank you. I just want to check the answering machine. I ordered the latest Robert B. Parker book from the library and Mrs. B. thought it might be back in today. I want to see if she called.” She started toward the den.

“My, my, you do have quite a wild and crazy lifestyle. Spending Friday night at home with a book again. Honestly, Mel, it’s something of a miracle that you managed to get pregnant in the first place.”