Read Online When You Dance With The Devil (Dafina Contemporary Romance) by Gwynne Forster - Free Book Online Page B

and if she reacted to him, she hid it. “Would it be an imposition to ask if you would do both?”
    “None whatever. I’m glad to help.”
    Her aplomb apparently restored, she leaned back in her chair, signaling that she was in command of the meeting. “It’s too late for career guidance this year, because school closes in a couple of weeks, but we could schedule the clinic for the beginning of the next term. We’ve needed this from someone who knows what isn’t in the textbooks, who has experienced success in his chosen field, and knows what kind of information our children need. Mr. Walker, you can’t know what a favor you’ve done us by introducing us to Mr. Peterson.”
    “He’s a good man, and that’s what we need around here. Well, we’d better be going. You can reach us over at the boarding house,” said Judd.
    She glanced at Richard as if to ask, “You too?” And he’d have given anything to know whether she wanted the information for personal or for business purposes. “Thank you so much, Mr. Peterson,” she said. “I look forward to working with you.”
    He extended his hand, and her reluctance to take it did not escape him. “I’m glad to have met you, Ms. Marin, or is it Dr. Marin?”
    “Dr. Marin,” she said and refused to let her gaze connect with his.
    “Let’s stop over here in the park for a spell,” Judd said as they left the school. “I love to sit here among the flowers and shrubs. My Enid loved flowers, and she kept our garden and our home filled with them. By the way, what kind of message were you sending Miss Marin? For a minute there, I thought you were hitting on her.”
    Richard stretched his long legs out in front of him, picked up a short stick and threw it into a bush. “I was only reacting to the look she gave me, but when I caught myself doing it, I nipped it in the bud. I’m not going to start something with a white woman in this tiny Southern town. She didn’t look that good.”
    Judd rubbed his chin a few times and then leaned forward. “I just figured out something about you, Richard. You’re a player. A natural born player. How’d you manage to go so far in life without getting into trouble? I mean serious trouble?”
    “Damned if I know. Luck. Maybe. But as I told you before: that’s behind me.”
    Judd nodded his head. “Maybe.”
    There was a time, as recently as six months earlier, that when a woman showed as much interest in him, and especially extemporaneously, as Dr. Marin did, his libido heated up, and he didn’t rest until he got her. With one exception, getting the woman had neither taxed his imagination nor his energy. That exception was Estelle Mitchell. He had thought that his interest in her was of no greater moment than what he’d experienced for any of the dozen or so other women he’d slept with and forgotten. But Miss Mitchell had let him know that she required substance in a relationship and found it in the person of John Lucas, a man he had dismissed as unworthy of consideration as his competition. Too late, he discovered that the man had won Estelle’s heart.
    He pulled himself out of his reminiscence, back from the past that still pained and depressed him. He meant to get a handle on it, and he’d start by making himself busy and keeping his penis in his pants.
    “I see you don’t believe me,” he said to Judd, “but somehow I don’t have an urge to convince you. Is there a library here in Pike Hill?” He had to do something while he waited for school to open, and writing his memoirs hadn’t yet engaged his interest sufficiently to make him knuckle down and do it.
    “Library’s on M. L. King Jr. Avenue, facing the Baptist church.”
    “Thanks.” He opened his cell phone and called Fannie. “I won’t be in for lunch today.”
    To his disgust, the library had only one old and outmoded computer. He’d have to buy his own, although he didn’t want to encumber himself with possessions, for he didn’t know how long he