Read Online The Quiet Seduction by Dixie Browning - Free Book Online

than impulsiveness.
    For the first time since he’d erupted into her life—or she into his—he watched her visibly relax. It was like seeing a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis and flex its newfound wings.
    And if that was a clue that he was some kind of poet, then he must be pretty damned good at it to afford the kind of clothes he’d been wearing.
    Clearing his throat, Storm wrenched his mind back into line and asked, “How far are we from the state prison?”
    Ellen blinked those remarkable green eyes. “The prison? Several miles, I think. I’ve never had occasion to go there. Why?”
    He shrugged. “No real reason. Just a feeling I had. Probably something I heard on the news, I don’t know.” He smiled at her then, the kind of smile that invited a like response. For several long moments he basked in the spell of her rare answering smile before turning away, oddly affected without knowing why. “Just grasping at straws, I guess.”

Four
    L ong after he left the room, his step only slightly uneven as he favored his left leg, Ellen stared after him, thinking. Wondering. Struggling with feelings that veered from gratitude to suspicion to guilt—to something she would prefer not to examine too closely. The kind of tingling awareness she hadn’t felt in years. Whoever and whatever he was, anything of that nature was out of the question. She owed him more than she could ever repay, but she really didn’t know him.
    He’d mentioned the prison. There had been prison gangs out cleaning up after the devastation, she’d heard that on the news—but that was after the tornado, not before. Besides, he would hardly have been a member of a road gang, dressed the way he’d been dressed. Still, he’d had no identification on him, and there hadn’t been time to get rid of it. What kind of man traveled without identification?
    What kind of woman living alone with her child, with no close neighbors, would bring home a stranger with no identification, one who claimed to have lost his memory? And then, based on instinct alone, turned away two men who might have identified him?
    The answer, of course, was a gullible fool. One who had been severely overprotected to the point that she’d grown up feeling like a bird in a gilded cage.
    After the only son of a friend had been kidnappedfor ransom, Leonard Summerlin had insisted that Howard, his chauffeur who doubled as a bodyguard, drive Ellen back and forth to school. All her friends had had to be vetted before she could even play with them. Having to bring her boyfriends home to be interrogated by her father had been so embarrassing it was a wonder she’d had had any social life at all.
    How she had hated all that. It might even be the reason she had escaped the way she had—by eloping with a man she’d met at the mall when he’d been trying to pick out a birthday gift for a friend’s three-year-old daughter. She had slipped her leash to go shopping that April afternoon and literally run headlong into a handsome young soldier who was standing outside a toy store window, trying to decide between a Barbie doll and a toy makeup kit. When he’d seen her staring at him—in a tight-fitting uniform with those shiny brown boots, he’d been well worth a second look—he had asked her what she thought a three-year-old girl would like better, the doll or the makeup kit. That had led to a discussion of baby dolls versus grown-up dolls and she had eventually helped him select a gift more suitable for the child.
    After that, she’d done a lot of shopping. Howard would wait at the food court while she sallied forth in the mall. Jake, back in the States on leave, would meet her at the bookstore, which lent itself to leisurely browsing. Once inside, they would study the covers of all the paperbacks and Jake would make up outrageous stories to fit each one. She’d fallen in love with