Free Baby, Drive South by Stephanie Bond Page A

glorious if you were allergic to freshly mowed grass and attracted mosquitoes. “God bless you.” He stopped and balanced himself to fish a clean handkerchief from his back pocket, then handed it to her.
    “Thank you,” she said, giving her nose a wipe. “Why do Southerners say that?”
    “Say what?”
    “‘God bless you’ after someone sneezes.”
    He laughed. “Is that a Southern thing?” Then he shrugged. “I never thought about it. Didn’t mean to offend.”
    “You didn’t offend me. I just think it’s curious how different people are, and how different the customs are in different parts of the country.”
    She sounded so clinical, as if she were conducting a study. Little lady doc sounded…lonely. “Do you have family back in Broadway?”
    “No.”
    “Another part of the country?”
    “No.”
    An orphan. “I’m sorry.”
    “It’s not your fault,” she murmured. “I was an only child. My father passed away when I was very young, and my mother died when I was in high school. But I was loved.”
    Loved. Past tense. Porter’s chest tightened. And she’d pulled herself through college and medical school—impressive. “As much as my brothers and I butt heads, I couldn’t imagine a world without them in it.”
    “You’re lucky to have each other. Are your parents still living?”
    “Pop has been gone for a while now. But Mom is as feisty as ever—she lives just north of Atlanta.”
    “Is that where you grew up?”
    Porter stopped and blinked at her in the semi-darkness. “You don’t know?”
    She stopped, too. “Know what?”
    “Sweetness is where my brothers and I grew up. A tornado destroyed the town ten years ago.”
    The moonlight caught her face as those amazing eyes widened. “So that’s why you’re rebuilding this town—it’s…it’s your home .”
    Something about the tone of her voice—she sounded awestruck…and almost envious. Unbidden, a lump formed in his throat, catching him completely off guard. “Th-that’s right.”
    “I only decided at the last minute to come with the rest of the group. I guess I didn’t read the fine print.”
    As they started back down the path, Porter tucked away that nugget of information. Dr. Salinger did not seem like the kind of woman to make a last-minute decision. Something had forced her hand. A lost job, a foreclosed home…a bad breakup?
    I was loved .
    A hasty departure would also explain why most of the women had come with trunks and trailers of personal possessions, and Dr. Salinger had arrived with only two small suitcases. Lucky for him she’d been more concerned about packing her portable X-ray machine than her extra case of high-heeled shoes.
    Not that she seemed like the type to own a closetful of high-heeled shoes.
    He pursed his mouth. And consequently—not his type at all. He liked the trappings of femininity—heels, hosiery, skirts, cleavage, long hair, perfume, painted fingernails, jewelry—
    “The materials used in the rooming house were recovered from tornado debris?”
    Dr. Salinger’s question jarred him out of his musings. “Right. We want to build the town’s economy on recycling. There are still piles of debris all over this mountain, and we plan to reclaim as many things as we can.”
    She didn’t respond, seemed to turn inward.
    “This path is lined with rubber mulch from recycled tires,” he added, driven by a sudden compulsion to impress her. “These fixtures along the path are solar lights. And the road you drove in on was paved with recycled materials. There’s something rewarding about rebuilding this town with little pieces of its own history.”
    Porter caught himself—he hadn’t meant to wax poetic. Dr. Salinger made a thoughtful noise, but he had the feeling she was bored. It occurred to him that she probably didn’t care about the Armstrong brothers’ master plan for the town of Sweetness because she was planning to leave first thing tomorrow.
    They topped a tree-lined rise and the