Free Run To You by Rachel Gibson Page B

lines at the corners of her eyes. Eyes that were a warm brown instead of cold gray like her son’s. She reached out and took Stella’s hand in a soft cool grasp, and Stella felt her shoulders relax. “You must be Beau’s friend. I’m his mother, Naomi Crandall.”
    Friend? She wouldn’t call him a friend . Although she didn’t know what to call him. Uptight hard-ass, maybe. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Crandall.”
    “Naomi.” She gave Stella’s hand a little squeeze, then dropped her own to her side. “Goodness, you’re a pretty little thing.”
    “Jesus,” Beau muttered.
    “Don’t curse, son. You know I don’t put up with cursing in my home.”
    Stella cast a glance at the grouch by her side, then back at his much more pleasant mother. “You have a lovely home, Naomi.”
    “Oh, it’s a museum.” She waved aside the compliment. “But we entertain Mike’s hospital associates and host charity events here.”
    Stella had never been to a charity event, although she did stuff money in the Salvation Army kettles at Christmas.
    “Are you hungry?” Naomi asked Stella as she took a step back.
    Beau picked up Stella’s duffel. “I’m starving.”
    “You were born starving.” She turned, and they followed her through a room with Grecian-inspired columns and a massive stone fireplace. “I had a wonderful shrimp and avocado salad, crab ceviche, and chilled salmon with dill sauce prepared for you.”
    Sounded yummy to Stella. She loved ceviche. Crab or cucumber, it didn’t matter.
    “Cold fish?” Beau complained. “Anything else?”
    “Of course. A beautiful flatbread and a sprouted wheat.”
    He grumbled something that sounded suspiciously like cursing again. “This isn’t one of your do-gooder meetings, and I’m not one of your Lean Cuisine friends.”
    “It’s heart healthy.”
    “My heart is healthy enough.”
    “Your heart can never be too healthy.” She opened a set of glass doors and stepped onto a veranda overlooking a stunning view of the gulf beyond. “Just last week, a thirty-year-old man came into St. Joseph’s presenting left main coronary artery stenosis.”
    Stella breathed in the breeze of the gulf. She didn’t know anyone who lived like this. She doubted even Sadie with all her money lived like this.
    “My heart is fine and I want red meat.” He dropped their bags just outside the door. “Rare.”
    Naomi moved toward a table set with bright red serving plates and baskets of bread and pretended not to hear her son. “I read an article published in Mike’s American Heart Association Journal that people who have type A, B, or AB blood have an increased risk of heart disease. You and your brother have type A. Like William.”
    “Last time I talked to Dad, he sounded healthy.” Beau picked up a dinner plate and loaded it up with food.
    “The ceviche is fabulous,” she told Stella as Stella picked up a plate. Then she turned her attention back to her son. “Everyone sounds healthy until they are hit with the ‘widow maker.’ ” She reached for bottle of wine chilling in a silver ice bucket. “Pinot?”
    “Yes, please,” Stella said as she put a spoonful of shrimp and avocado salad on her plate. Her elbow bumped Beau’s forearm, and she felt him tense beside her like she’d done something wrong. Displeasure tightened the corners of his mouth. “This looks wonderful, Naomi.” She took a healthy mound of ceviche and a piece of fish and decided not to even try and figure him out. She grabbed a hunk of bread, then followed Beau to a small glass-and-wrought-iron table set with cloth napkins and silver flatware. A striped umbrella shaded the table, and Stella sat in the shade across from the man who’d changed her life with one punch to Ricky’s jaw. She’d known Beau less than twenty-four hours, yet here she sat, on the veranda of a multimillion-dollar mansion with him and his mother and feeling surprisingly at ease. Oh, she felt out of place, to be sure, but