Free The Seven-Day Target by Natalie Charles

each day.”
    “I’m not judging.” He grinned and held his palms up. His smile crinkled his eyes and made Cassie feel warm.
    She glanced from the bags at her feet to the large man in her living room. He got the hint. “I’ll get those for you.” He lifted the large duffel bag as easily as if it had been stuffed with feathers. He carried the diaper bags with his other arm. “I’ll put them in your car.”
    “Thanks.” She gave him a sweet smile and threw in a couple bats of her eyelashes.
    Then she paced the living room, waiting for him to return. She paused in front of a framed still life photograph and checked her reflection in the glass. Her feminist mother might have scolded her for raking her fingers through her hair and swiping her lips with strawberry-flavored gloss. Chill out, Mom.
    No one could accuse Cassie of not being a strong, independent woman. She was raising a baby on her own and so far, surviving. But she’d spent her pregnancy in sweatpants and baggy shirts, and these days she struggled to find time to shower. She’d recently stopped flinching at the gobs of baby spit-up that landed on her shoulder. Some days she wondered if she’d ever care about feeling beautiful again. Maybe when her maternity leave ended and she’d returned to her glamorous job as a receptionist for an accounting firm? She doubted it.
    Dom reentered the house with a smile and gestured to the car seat. “I assume you’re taking him with you?”
    Cassie grinned. “Yeah, I’ll take him along for the ride.”
    And just like that, she cared about feeling beautiful.
    * * *
    Nick stacked Libby’s suitcases beside the door to the guest bedroom in his parents’ house. He’d stayed there all weekend and the house still smelled stale. He flung open the bedroom windows.
    “Make yourself at home. I’m going to go through the cabinets to see what I can make for dinner. Macaroni and cheese is good forever, right?” His hands fell uselessly at his sides as he looked at her. He felt as if his entire body had been starched and ironed stiff. “Why is this so formal? I feel like a butler.”
    “I can call you Lurch if that would make you feel better.” Libby dragged a suitcase over to the guest bed and unzipped it. “But I’m not hungry. In fact, I’ve felt a little sick all day, so don’t worry about dinner for me.”
    That suited him just fine, and he wasn’t about to beg her to eat, or to take a list of acceptable ingredients so that he could construct a suitable meal. When they’d been dating he’d had a difficult enough time keeping track of her strange food habits. One day she was counting calories, the next day she was eating whatever she wanted as long as it didn’t include wheat, the day after that she’d gone vegan and had donated all of her leather shoes to charity. He couldn’t keep up with her dietary moods.
    She lifted her shoulders wordlessly and then stopped. “Do you think it’s okay in here? With the window over the roof like that? Couldn’t someone climb in?”
    She was pointing to the window leading out to the pitch roof. Nick had climbed that roof many times himself when he was younger, always at night, and never for any respectable reason. “The windows lock and my parents have an alarm. But Libby, he doesn’t know you’re here. No one followed us, and I was checking the entire way over.” He paused. “Would you feel safer in a different room? You can sleep anywhere you feel safe.”
    The way she hesitated, she seemed on the verge of saying something, but then she simply returned to her suitcase. She was picking her clothes out, one item at a time, refolding each article before stacking it on the bed. All of the seams had to align, of course; her ratty college T-shirts needed those fresh-from-the-retail-chain creases on each side, just in case anyone suspected they were fifteen years old. Fifteen years old—who kept T-shirts for that long? But she folded each one with a near fondness as if