Read Online Ms. Simon Says by Mary McBride - Free Book Online

still looked pretty good in his imagination.
    Finally, after shaking hands with her happy little fan club and bidding them farewell, the famous Ms. Simon sauntered toward the car. “Oh, God. Those French fries smell so good,” she exclaimed, barely in the seat before she plunged into one of the paper sacks and came up with a handful of greasy shoestring potatoes.
    “Knock yourself out,” he said.
    She did. He’d have thought she hadn’t eaten in a month the way she attacked her Double Whammy, wholly oblivious to the Secret Sauce that was running down her chin, and all the while making little orgasmic mews of pleasure so distracting that Mick could hardly swallow his own burger and fries. When her tongue peeked out to catch an errant crumb in the corner of her mouth, he felt the unsettling turn of his appetite away from food in the direction of more visceral pleasures.
    He gulped three-fourths of his large soft drink to put out the sudden and unexpected flames, then finished his meal staring straight ahead out the windshield without a single sidelong glance at the woman in the passenger seat, tuning out her sensual little noises as best he could. When he was done, he pitched his empty cartons in the backseat and started the car.
    “Next stop—your folks’ place. What’s the name of the nearest town?” he asked, easing out of the parking lot and back toward the highway.
    “Shelbyville,” she said, licking the last of the salt from her fingers.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Shelbyville. That’s the name of the town nearest to Heart Lake.”
    “Shelbyville,” he repeated, thinking he’d heard her wrong. “Like your name?”
    “Yes,” she said somewhat defensively. “Just like my name. What’s wrong with that? The town was founded by my great-great-grandfather, Orvis Shelby.”
    “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it, did I?” He shook his head. “Hell, if a man wants to name a town for himself, more power to him. And if a family wants to recycle a dumb name, that’s okay, too.”
    Now she was more than defensive. She was indignant. “My name’s not dumb or recycled. It’s tradition, Callahan. Who were you named for? Mickey Mouse?”
    He laughed. Again. That made at least four or five times she’d managed to cut through his normal gloom in the space of a few hours. And that hadn’t happened to him in a long, long time.
    Shelby stared out the window, seemingly entranced by the beautiful autumn colors along the roadside while she was actually trying not to laugh out loud at the lieutenant’s earlier remark. It
was
a dumb name. Despite her protest to Callahan, she’d hated her name when she was a kid and not only considered it dumb but embarrassing to boot, especially when the local kids at Heart Lake, who attended school in nearby Shelbyville, teased her.
    For years she’d wished she’d been born second instead of first, and that her sister, Beth, had been graced with the family moniker. It was good she and Beth didn’t have a brother. The poor guy probably would’ve been saddled with Orvis.
    Still, she wasn’t about to admit those feelings to Callahan. Damn him. Where did he get off, anyway, criticizing her place of residence and then her name? The jerk.
    The only good thing at the moment, as far as Shelby could see, was that with every mile she was getting closer to Heart Lake, the place she loved more than any other in the world.
    It wasn’t the house itself that claimed her heart, although she knew and loved every square inch of the huge old Victorian mansion. And it wasn’t the lake itself with its ever-changing water, which could be cold and gray in the morning, but azure and warm by afternoon, or smooth as glass only to turn wild with whitecaps in a sudden wind. It wasn’t the trees she climbed or the frogs and butterflies she chased or the thousands of marshmallows she’d toasted over the years or her very first kiss under a full moon on a long-ago Fourth of July, or...
    It was all