Free Sooner or Later by Debbie Macomber Page A

Letty sagged with relief. The straps from the backpack dug into her shoulders, and her calves ached from walking at Murphy’s killing pace.
    “Wait here,” Murphy ordered in the imperious tone he used with her. He guided her under the protection of a large tree.
    “Where are you going?” she asked.
    “I can’t and won’t explain my motives everytime I ask you to do something,” he snapped. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
    She opened her mouth to argue and knew it would be useless.
    Carlos had already told them his cousin would see to their needs. If it had been up to her, she would have walked up to the farmer’s front door, knocked politely, and explained who she was. But not Murphy. He apparently felt it was necessary to break in like a criminal.
    Unfortunately the moonlight wasn’t bright enough for her to see where he’d gone. The man all but disappeared into the shadows. Either that or she’d viewed too many James Bond movies.
    With her back braced against the tree trunk, Letty sat. She must have drifted off to sleep, because the next thing she knew, Murphy had returned.
    “We’ll spend the night in the barn,” he whispered.
    She rubbed the sleep from her face and nodded. Anything with the word “sleep” in it appealed to her.
    “There’s a small catch.”
    She raised questioning eyes to him.
    “We stay together.”
    She frowned, not understanding the problem since she thought that was why she’d hired him.
    “In other words, we sleep next to each other.”

9
    Men baffled and exasperated Marcie Alexander. She stood in the room in the back of her beauty shop and mulled over her life to this point.
    For her first thirty-one years the only place she found herself capable of communicating with the opposite sex was in bed. Well, she was finished with that, finished with having her friends marry and start a family while she waited on the sidelines, and for what? To get passed over again and again.
    She’d never had a problem attracting a man. At certain times in her life she’d dated three or four at a time. But instead of feeling wanted and charmed, she felt more like an air traffic controller.
    Finding men had always been a snap, especially the needy kind. From the time she was sixteen and lost her virginity in the backseat of a car at a drive-in movie during Raging Bull , she’d maintained steadyrelationships with the opposite sex. Unfortunately her relationships rarely lasted more than a month or two at a stretch.
    As the years progressed, Marcie had learned a painful lesson. Men flattered her, courted her, borrowed money from her—which they seldom repaid—and then promptly deserted her. The pattern rarely changed. She’d fallen in and out of love so often, it had all become a revolving door.
    Men flocked to her. Mostly penniless ones with problems for her to solve. She specialized in rescue operations. For years she was convinced that all these poor, misunderstood men really needed was the love of a good woman.
    In her search for a husband, Marcie had gone so far as to take out a loan in order for Danny, the man of the hour, to hire an attorney so he could get a divorce. It was understood that once he was free from his battle-ax of a wife, he’d marry her. It took Marcie two months to learn he’d never been married. The money had paid for a weekend in Vegas with another woman. It had taken her sixteen months to pay back the bank.
    What hurt most was that a couple of her beauty school friends had been married twice. They’d already started families with two different men while Marcie had yet to snag even one husband.
    Every time she saw another one of her friends with a baby and a doting husband, her heart ached. She wanted it all. A husband, a gentle, kind man who would love her to distraction. One man enough to keep her satisfied in life and in bed.
    Heaven would testify that she’d done her best toland herself a lifetime mate. But in her long, often tumultuous search, Marcie had