Read Online Winter's Daughter by Kathleen Creighton - Free Book Online Page A

disparity between what she looked like at the moment and what he knew her to be was beginning to get to him.
    He didn’t know what to do with his hands. They were flat against her shoulder blades, not quite holding her but not fending her off either. He found it an awkward and ambiguous position, one he wasn’t accustomed to being in. Under the right circumstances, he wasn’t a man to deny an impulse as strong as the one he was experiencing now, which was to wrap his arms around this woman and see if that felt as good as he thought it might. But to add to his inner confusion, it had come belatedly to his notice that the two of them were attracting a good deal of attention from the lunch crowd in the park.
    A drunken brawl between two derelicts, it seemed, was a spectacle from which decent people gladly averted their eyes. A tender embrace between two derelicts was something else entirely.
    "Uh, Tannis," Dillon said, uneasily patting her back, "don’t you think this looks a little odd?"
    She drew back, wiping her eyes, then sniffed and looked around dazedly. "Oh."
    "Here—you’d better put this back on." He held up the piece of latex with a thumb and forefinger, controlling laughter only by keeping his voice stern and his features forbidding. "Let’s get out of this circus before we become the main attraction. Is there someplace we can go?"
    "I thought we were going to have lunch. I’m starving."
    "I brought lunch. At least, I had it with me when I arrived. I’m not sure what I did with it when you, uh—"
    "You brought lunch?"
    "Well, yeah. I figured we couldn’t go to a decent restaurant with me looking like this. Of course, I didn’t realize at the time we were going to be a matched set. I stopped by a deli and picked up a couple of subs. I hope that’s all right."
    Tannis sighed. "Sounds wonderful." And she smiled that radiant, sunshine smile.
    Dillon felt a familiar burst of warmth in his belly. He coughed and mumbled, "I think I probably dropped the sack back there with your coat."
    As he went jogging off to retrieve it, he was thinking incredulously,
I’m losing my mind. She looks like a molting pigeon. Can I possibly desire her?
    Amazingly the bag of submarine sandwiches and potato salad was still on the grass where he’d dropped it, with Tannis’s coat on top of it. He was inspecting the condition of the sandwiches, when she came up, shuffling again, since she’d stopped on the way to put on her shoes.
    "How are they?" She was looking at the sandwiches with undisguised hunger.
    "Bruised but edible," Dillon pronounced, grimacing as he looked around. "Do you know someplace where we can go? Someplace a little less public?"
    "I know a nice park bench." Tannis paused in the process of enveloping herself once more in her coat to give him an impish grin. "Nobody will pay any attention to us—bums are supposed to sit around on park benches."
    As she listened to Dillon’s chuckle of appreciation and watched the familiar grooves bracket his smile, Tannis felt a small explosion inside her, which wasn’t unusual since she experienced life as a series of explosions—explosions of anger, enthusiasm, grief, joy, love. But this one was different, something she’d never felt before—a sweet, gentle awakening, like a flower’s opening captured by the miracle of time–lapse photography.
    How did I miss it, she wondered, stealing glances at him as they walked.
How could I not have known who he was?
    She should have recognized him the moment she’d walked into his office. He had such strong, distinctive features—those eyes, that hooked nose and angular chin. And he hadn’t done anything to alter them, as she had her own with cheek pads and latex. He’d fooled her with nothing but a baseball cap, a quarter–inch of stubble—which she now noticed was only a shadow––a handkerchief, and some old clothes, while she, with all her makeup skills, hadn’t fooled him for a minute.
    "What?" he asked, catching her