Free RUNAWAY by Christie Ridgway

then had not even gone on to discuss the next step—an annulment—since she’d moved into Owen’s condominium. Of course, they’d been pretty much keepingto their corners these days. Though she knew Owen was going stir-crazy, she hadn’t felt much like being his entertainment or distraction. That box of books that Emily had delivered seemed to sit on Izzy’s shoulders, weighing her down. It was good to have Owen’s brother here to give them both another focus.
    “Did you hear that, Isabella?”
    She started, directing her attention toward Bryce again. “What?”
    “I was saying that you two have a reprieve from the Marston machine even when the ‘rents get back from their cruise. Right after, Mom’s on tap for a benefit she’s organizing and she’s roped Dad into helping her with the last-minute details.”
    Izzy thought of the elegant older woman. “Something for the symphony, I suppose?”
    “Nah,” Bryce answered. “She abhors the symphony.”
    Owen smiled, and Izzy instantly noticed. He hadn’t been doing much of that lately, and it looked good on him. He had strong white teeth and the smile crinkled the corners of his eyes.
    “Mom has the pearls and the blue blood, but to give her credit, she’s no snob,” he said. “She really abhors the symphony just as much as she loves the opera, Springsteen and the Stones.” He looked over at Bryce.
    “She’s a piece of work,” they said together, then laughed.

    “Dad’s favorite phrase,” Owen explained.
    The brothers shared a smile that forced Izzy to stare down at her plate and swallow a sigh. There was a wealth of family memories and familial closeness in the way Owen and Bryce spoke to each other and spoke about their parents. It made her want to grab a book and escape like she’d done so many times as a child. Inside the pages of a story, she wasn’t the outsider, the charity case, the person others felt sorry for.
    Even if the book was about an orphan like Rose of Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, the character wasn’t left to fend for herself. In books, Izzy had always found her happy ending right along with the protagonist.
    “By the way, I thought of another one,” Owen said, reaching across the table to touch her arm with his hand.
    She looked up. “Another one?” His gaze was trained on her face and she wondered if that was concern she saw in his eyes. It made her skin feel hot and she was suddenly aware of his fingertips on her wrist. Each pad sent an individual streamer of sensation up her arm that then ribboned around her body. Her now-tight lungs struggled to bring in a breath. “Another one what?”
    A little smile playing at his mouth, he sang softly, to the tune of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” “You’ll go down and hit a tree.”

    “Hey,” Bryce said, frowning. “Are you making fun of me?”
    Owen grinned. “Just how you mangled the words to your favorite Christmas carol. And remember this other immortal line of the same song you misheard—not to mention mis-sang? ‘Olive, the other reindeer.’”
    “Oh, yeah. For years, I never could figure out why Olive didn’t make it into the movie.”
    Owen shook his head. “Olive the reindeer, lost on the cutting room floor. No wonder I’ve always been considered the brainy brother in the family.”
    “Hah!” Bryce said, but he looked stymied for a comeback.
    Izzy had to laugh, her low mood rising. Was that what Owen had been after? Was he attuned to her that closely? She rallied, trying to fit in with the lighthearted conversation.
    It was what she’d done from childhood, after all—making a small place for herself where none was before. “They’re called Mondegreens, you know,” she told the two men.
    “What?” Bryce asked.
    “Misheard lyrics. In 1954, a woman named Sylvia Wright wrote a magazine article confessing that she’d misheard the lyric of a folk song about an unlucky earl, ‘and laid him on the green,’ as ‘and Lady