Free Passion Bites: Biting Love, Book 9 by Mary Hughes Page B

be pretty darn tough, like now.
    “You look awful.” She grabbed my wrist and dragged me inside. “Tea. Now.”
    Tea was a bad sign. It was her gentle, irresistible way of getting to the bottom of things. And with me, she knew exactly where to dig. All my secrets were vulnerable. My only hope was for her to fall asleep before I blurted every last detail.
    “Wine?” I said hopefully.
    “We drank it all after you zeroed your bank account to secure this place.”
    “Oh yeah. Beer?”
    Lizelle smiled. “This is Meiers Corners. Of course there’s beer.”
    “ Gott sei Dank .” Even if alcohol didn’t make her sleepy, it would make hemorrhaging my secrets less painful for me.
    She led the way. I dragged after her into the old kitchen with its cracked linoleum and vinyl wallpaper. She went straight to the chest-style freezer to get the beer glasses.
    While I squirted the lime juice we liked in the bottom of the glasses, she pulled cans from the slope-shouldered refrigerator that had once been white but, through decades of repeated scrubbings, was now a mottled gray. The Grand Plan called for buying institutional appliances and new furnishings when I actually owned the place, but until then we got Mr. Crahn’s basics from 1950. I’d talked him into letting us stay here when I put the earnest money down, unorthodox, but I’d sold him on the place being safer if not left empty—and then sweetened the deal by adding several thousand dollars for a security deposit. Not conventional, but nothing was in Meiers Corners, and a little extra cash never hurt. Anything to keep Lizelle from Umbras’s clutches.
    John Umbras. I snapped the cap back on the lime juice with more force than needed, thinking about the manipulative bastard. He could sweet-talk Lizelle into anything, including coaxing her within fist range. She needed a home away from his sphere of influence, and since he had tendrils throughout Chicago, the only place I knew she’d be safe was here.
    Lizelle was a strong, vital woman—except with him. The sooner she divorced him, the better. Though I’d managed to talk her into an order of protection, he kept calling her, saying he deserved to see his daughter. Anybody else she’d have told him to suck eggs and promptly called the cops to enforce the OOP, but he had a golden tongue and played all her insecurities like a Steinway. Hell, sometimes even I almost believed him. It was harder for her to deny him because he’d always paid the bills and never, ever laid a hand on his child.
    Which reminded me. “Where’s Una?” Una was Lizelle’s twelve-year-old daughter.
    “In bed. It’s after midnight. What kind of mom do you think I am?” She rested the cans on the thick oak table, popped them one at a time and poured, the glug-glug and hiss of carbonation waking my taste buds.
    I put a placating hand on her shoulder. “The best.”
    She accepted my tacit apology by handing me the first frosty glass. “Sit. Was it work, or whatever happened after work?”
    “How do you know something happened?” I slid into one of the comfortably worn matching oak chairs.
    She took the chair next to me, crossing her legs. She said the casual position helped people be more at ease, but I knew she did it to make me let my guard down.
    “You steamed into the yard with your power-walk, which you only do when you’re determined to act but have no idea what to do. Not only did you power-walk in, you look half-bewildered, half-riled, and half-mindblown—”
    “That’s too many halves.”
    “ I’m talking.” One chiding eyebrow rose, coolly admonishing me to silence. She could’ve sold that eyebrow as both a deterrent and an industrial lie detector. “In the ER, you’re the epitome of competence and calm. Everywhere else you’re hell on wheels with a plan. So when you blow in here an hour late, your cheeks glowing, your hair mussed and your eyes dreamy, then hard, then dreamy again, you’re not going to bed until I get the