Free Jodi Thomas by A Husband for Holly Page B

few moments he knew the doctor was still there. He felt her pushing his hair away from his forehead like Lori Anne used to do. He could almost see Lori Anne smiling at him, saying she wanted to see his beautiful blue eyes better. She’d claimed she could measure his love for her in his eyes, and he’d never doubted she could.
    Lori Anne’s face faded and he dropped away into blackness.

Chapter 3
    Reagan Truman watched the constant coming and going from the emergency room below her uncle’s window on the third floor. Her world had become one hospital room, and even watching the drunks stumble out seemed interesting tonight. Part of her wished she were out on a date with Noah McAllen, parked somewhere along a back road where they could talk and cuddle, but tonight, this was where she belonged.
    She glanced over at her uncle’s bed. The room was lined with machines that moved and beeped and marked time, but for the old man resting, time seemed to have stood still. He drifted between life and death, swinging like a rusty pendulum from one to the other.
    If Reagan could see death coming for him, she’d fight with every ounce of her energy to stop it from taking Jeremiah Truman. After five years of living in Harmony, she felt like she had a wide circle of friends, but when she’d arrived, a runaway with little hope of finding anywhere to belong, Jeremiah had taken her in as his family.
    Reagan remembered how she told him once that all she ever did was reverse wishing. She was afraid of even hoping for something. It seemed easier to just wish bad things wouldn’t happen. Now, at twenty-one, she wished for a world of things, but the top of the list was that he’d never leave her.
    “Reagan?” Brandon Biggs poked his head in the door. “You still awake?”
    She stepped from the window into the milky light surrounding her uncle’s bed. “I’m here, Big.” Sometime over the summer she’d begun calling him what all his construction friends called him. She had no idea if the nickname was simply a short version of his last name or an adjective of description. Both fit, and the name seemed to stick. Brandon Biggs was simply Big to all who met him now.
    “Did you eat any supper?” He tried to slip his big frame into the room, as if opening the door wider might set off some alarm. The muscular thug who’d bullied her when she’d first tried to fit in at Harmony High was gone, replaced by a mountain of a friend.
    “I don’t think I’ve eaten anything today except a doughnut the nurse gave me,” she answered, knowing that he’d probably already guessed, for he held a bag in each hand.
    At six-feet-seven and almost three hundred pounds, Big never slipped anywhere, but he tried his best to tiptoe in his work boots toward her. He set the bags down in the big windowsill designed to hold flowers and cards. Then, without a word, he circled her waist with his hands and lifted her up onto the ledge.
    They would have made an odd couple if they dated, him so big and her so small. He was a construction foreman and she ran her uncle’s tiny apple orchard business while finishing her degree from an online college, but somehow they worked as friends. Maybe because they’d both been knocked around as kids, but they believed in each other. She saw the good in him, and he saw the strength in her.
    Reagan crossed her legs and smiled as he handed her a cheeseburger. “You got these from Buffalo’s bar, I’m guessing. What would you have done if I’d already had dinner?”
    “I’d eat them both. And of course I got them at Buffalo’s. It’s the only place open this late that makes a burger worth eating, but right after I turned my order in, you wouldn’t believe the fight that broke out.”
    Reagan unwrapped her food and asked, “You get involved?” Big was made of muscle. Someone in a fight might get hurt just running into him by accident.
    He shook his head. “I was just there to look after Beau and Border. They were