Free If Winter Comes by Diana Palmer

accused gently.
     
    He glanced down at her,
cocking his hat at an angle over his pale brow. “Who, me?”
     
    “Yes, you, you lovely
man.”
     
    He grinned at her.
“Like to adopt me?”
     
    “No. You’re too tall.”
     
    He squatted down a
little. “How about now?”
     
    “Lose a hundred pounds,
and we’ll talk about it,” she assured him.
     
    The conference room was
crowded, but she didn’t spend one second looking around for Bryan Moreland. She
took a seat beside Peck in the back section and lowered her eyes to her camera,
keeping them down resolutely while she pretended to fiddle with light settings.
     
    “You don’t think you’re
going to get me a shot from here, do you?” Peck asked as he sat down beside
her.
     
    “I’ll use the
telescopic lens,” she said under her breath. All around them, news people were
milling around. A couple of them, radio reporters whom she recognized from
other stories, called to her, and she managed a frozen smile and a tiny wave of
her hand in response.
     
    “What in hell is the
matter with you?” Peck asked. “You look like you’re trying to get smaller.”
     
    “Will you please shut
up?” she begged. His voice was loud, and it carried. “Please sit down and
pretend we aren’t acquainted.”
     
    “But we work for the
same paper,” he argued.
     
    “Not for long, if you
keep this up,” she whispered back.
     
    “You are scared
of him!”
     
    “Shut up,” she said
through her teeth, making a prayer of it as Bryan Moreland’s big, husky form
came into view. He swept the room with his dark, cutting gaze, and she felt the
impact of it like a physical blow when his eyes stopped on her averted face.
She stared straight ahead, ignoring him, while her heart felt as if it were
going to jump out of her body.
     
    She didn’t look at him
again until he was at the podium, with the City Council and the City Planning
Commission gathered around the conference table with him. She recognized Edward
King and Tom Green immediately.
     
    “What’s this all
about?” she asked Peck in a muted whisper.
     
    “The airport,” he
replied with a grin. “You made somebody take notice with that run-in with King,
didn’t you?”
     
    She shifted restlessly
and forced herself to listen to Moreland’s deep curt voice describing plans for
the new airport and the expansion of services it would mean by national
airlines. For the first time, the city would have an international airport; a
tribute to its rapid growth.
     
    But when he finished,
the land purchase still hadn’t been discussed, and she noticed that the mayor
didn’t throw the floor open for questions, as he usually did at the end of a
press conference.
     
    She got her things
together and started to dart out the side door, but Bill Peck left her, calling
back that he had to talk to Tom Green, and Carla got trapped between the nest
of chairs and a group of news people passing tidbits of information back and
forth. The next thing she knew, she was looking up into Bryan Moreland’s dark,
quiet eyes.
     
    Her heart dropped, and
she could feel her knees trembling. She let her gaze fall to his burgundy tie.
     
    “Good morning, your
honor,” she said with a pitiful attempt at lightness.
     
    “Five days, two hours,
twenty-six minutes,” he said quietly.
     
    She looked up, feeling
all the dark clouds vanish, all the color come back into her colorless world as
she realized the meaning behind the statement.
     
    “And forty-five
seconds,” she whispered unsteadily.
     
    He drew in a hard, deep
breath, and she noticed for the first time how haggard he looked, how tired.
“Oh, God, I’ve missed you,” he said in a voice just loud enough to carry to her
ears and no further. “I wanted a hundred times to call you and explain…I know
what you must have thought, and you couldn’t have been further off base. But I
got busy…Oh, hell have supper with me. I’ll try to put it into words.”
     
    The need to say