Free Wait for Me by Mary Kay McComas

time.”
    “But we can take on some stupid birds in South America?” he asked, vexed that when he’d finally found a worthy cause of his own, the funds in the foundation he’d been managing most of his adult life were already allocated elsewhere.
    “Don’t be silly, dear, you know as well as I do that we can’t use the foundation money on anything but people-related concerns. You don’t remember grandfather Edgar, of course, but he was adamant on the point. I think it had something to do with the time the dogcatcher came through and picked up three of his dogs and put them to sleep before he could bail them out. He was furious about that for years.”
    “So how are you supporting your birds?”
    “Oh, this is another group entirely, dear. I’m helping Marsha Levenson with this one, you know how she is...”
    She went on to tell him in detail, but he only half listened. Hell, he didn’t need a damned foundation to support the Paulson Clinic. He could do it himself. If they had more money, they could pay better wages and Holly could move to a nicer neighborhood... unless they spent the money on food and medical care.
    He was beginning to see that there was more to being charitable than simply writing a check.
    While Oliver had inherited the greater portion of his wealth, Holly had to work for hers. And while most of the Carey legacy was tied up in banking, Holly hated banks with a passion.
    Stopping for the mail she’d forgotten to pick up the day before, she pulled another overdrawn notice from her mailbox—her third in a week—and fought a sick, smothering feeling as she climbed the stairs to her apartment.
    Money. Why was it always money?
    She put the key in the lock and smiled as she recalled the art auction and the way she had kept raising Lena Vochec’s bid and glancing at her with a too-sweet smile to get her to top it. It was a good thing Lena hated to lose. It would have been terribly embarrassing to have to admit to several hundred people that her savings account was in even worse shape than her checking account. It had no shape at all, in fact.
    Well, she’d been bluffing people like Lena Vochec for years. Loan officers. Bank officials. Foundation directors. And she was good at it. No sense giving up something she excelled at just because it was a little dishonest, she thought, tossing the overdrawn notice into a drawer with the others.
    It was only money, after all, and there was no point in letting it get to her, when she’d be walking in the park with an eat-’em-alive hunk of a man in less than an hour. She smiled. It had started to rain already.
    Weekends were long anyway. People who were out looking for work during the week brought all their problems to the clinic on Saturday—and stood in line till Sunday, it seemed. But this had been an especially long two days for her.
    Oliver had been on her mind like a brain tumor. The sound of his laughter, the sudden catch in his voice, the tiny crescent-shaped scar on the back of his hand...
    There was a knock at her door.
    “You know, you’re pretty creepy yourself,” she said, pulling the door open without checking to see who it was first, knowing as well as she knew her own face that he’d be standing there. “I was just thinking about you.”
    “You were?” He was pleased. Well, more than pleased. He wanted to rip her clothes off and bury himself so deep inside her that parts of him would never know daylight again.
    “I was wondering if you’d bring an umbrella.”
    “Oh. No. I didn’t even think about it,” he said, at a loss. “I guess I should have. We can stop someplace and buy one.”
    “Absolutely not. Why go to the park when you know it’s going to rain, just to stand under an umbrella?”
    Why go at all? he wanted to know, but didn’t ask. He’d been so eager to see her, he’d arrived thirty minutes early. Another first. Maybe she wouldn’t notice.
    They teetered in the doorway, wanting to kiss hello, wondering if they