Free The Lioness by Mary Moriarty Page A

mentioned
Tiffany, though he hadn’t mentioned her name. Rose was too good to be told all
the details.
    He pulled her off to the side, under a tree, and held
her close. “She never meant what you do to me. I thought I had the woman of my
dreams. She turned out to be the woman of my nightmares. She was all surface.
She never was anything deeper than a minor scratch. You are perfect for me, my
soul mate, without trying to sound cliché, you really are. I don’t know what
I’d do without you. That’s why I came all this way to find you. I knew you were
real, knew that despite the fact that you have quite the little Irish temper,
you have a heart down there and I knew you cared. I also knew you were running
on no fuel. That wasn’t you who spoke back there in Banda Aceh, the woman I
cared for, loved.” He looked into her eyes and saw them get big and round. He
hadn’t said the love word yet. Saying it that way kinda shook her up, he could
see that.
    “You and I fit, everything about us, you me, our time
together, we fit together like two peas in a pod, like my mother would say.
It’s scary how well we get along, how well we match, right down to the
paintings we like.” He looked at the painting and then back at Rose.
    “So are we going to get a couple? So we’ll have them
for our place when we decide where we’re going to live.”
    Rose reached up and kissed him, right there, right on
the side of Street 178, for the whole world to see. “Mm, that’s why I love
being with you, you are so up front, so honest. You always let me know how you
feel, whether it be in song, or poetry or just talking.”
    She took his hand. “Let’s go pick some paintings and
etchings out for our place, our own place, our home.”
    “You’ve got that right baby.” He laughed as she led
him into the studio.

Chapter 6
    Rose sat in the candlelight waiting for Ty to come for
the night. They were trying to be discreet. Noori knew they were becoming close
but Hasina would have a cow if she knew what was going on. They read together,
did crossword puzzles together or typed at their laptops but they were
together. That’s what was important. They did little human interest stories but
in actuality it was the war, they were getting things that you didn’t get in
the everyday newspaper. It wasn’t front line war stories, it was the result of
the front lines. Lives that were forgotten, whether it be soldiers or the wives
and children they left behind. They dug and talked and interviewed and felt
like at the end of the day they had accomplished something. Rose was setting up
an NGO for widows and orphans of this war. She was having her parents start
things up so she could take over when she got back. Something needed to be done
for these women who for years had been oppressed by the Taliban. Some of them
didn’t have basic skills to find a way to eek out a living for their families.
She wanted a training center. If it succeeded then she would set one up in the
other bigger cities. Most couldn’t even read, but the few that could, she
wanted to help them, as well as the ones that couldn’t. She even found widows
who now were trying to get back into the world, some had been teachers or
worked at the hospitals. She needed them too. She was looking at a big project.
A training facility plus housing for the ones coming from the countryside. Ty
supported her and was tapping his own friends to find help. So she waited for
him to come to her tonight. She held his copy of Hafez, the translation by Bell
that she especially liked, and thumbed through it. She heard the gentle knock
and looking up looked into Ty’s beautiful eyes. God, they were beautiful and
when he smiled at her, her stomach did flip flops. She was going into meltdown
mode real fast. He did that to her every time when he smiled.
    “Busy?” He walked in and after closing and locking the
door he sat down on her bed.
    “No, just thinking what life would be like, a normal
life, back in