At First Sight Read Online Free PDF Page B

maintain a serious expression, she nodded. “I think I can handle that.”
“And sometimes-just so you know-I stand in front of the refrigerator with the door open for a long time while I try to figure out what I want to eat. I know I’m letting the cold air out, but I can’t help it. It’s who I am.”
She nodded again, still amused. “I understand. Anything else?”
He shrugged. “I don’t eat broken cookies. If all that’s left in the bag are broken cookies, I just throw the bag out. I know it’s a waste, but I’ve always been that way. They taste different.”
“Mmm,” she said. “It’ll be tough, but I suppose I can live with that.”
He pursed his lips, wondering whether he should mention the toilet bowl seat. Knowing it was a hot-button issue with some women, he decided to pass for the time being.
“Are you okay with all this?”
“I suppose I have to be.”
“Really?”
“Positive.”
“What if I told you I cut my toenails in bed?”
“Don’t push it, buster.”
He grinned, pulling her closer. “You love me even if I’m not perfect?”
“Of course I do.”
Amazing, he thought.
As Lexie and Jeremy approached Boone Creek, just as the first stars were appearing in the sky, Jeremy’s first thought was that the place hadn’t changed a bit. Not that he’d expected it to; as far as he could tell, things around here hadn’t changed in the last hundred years. Or maybe three hundred, for that matter. Since they’d left the airport in Raleigh, the view on either side of the highway had been one long version of the movie Groundhog Day. Ramshackle farmhouses, barren fields, decaying tobacco barns, stands of trees . . . mile after mile. Sure, they’d passed through the occasional town, but even those had been indistinguishable, unless someone actually knew the difference between Hardee’s and Bojangles.
But hey, with Lexie beside him, the drive hadn’t been half-bad. She’d been in a good mood all day, and as they neared her home-change that, he thought suddenly: their home-she’d become even more cheerful. They’d spent the last couple of hours rehashing their trip to New York, but he couldn’t mistake her expression of contentment as they crossed the Pamlico River and reached the final leg of their journey.
The first time he’d been here, Jeremy remembered, he’d barely been able to find the place. The only turn leading toward downtown was located off the highway, so he’d missed the nearest exit and had to pull his car over to check the map. But once he’d turned onto Main Street, he’d been charmed.
In the car, Jeremy shook his head, revising his opinion. He was thinking of Lexie, not the town. The town, while quaint in the way that all small towns were, was anything but charming. At first glance, anyway. He remembered thinking on his first visit here that the town seemed to be slowly rusting away. Downtown occupied only a few short blocks on which too many businesses were boarded up, and decaying storefronts were slowly being stripped of their paint, no doubt helped by the gusts of moving vans headed out of town. Boone Creek, once a thriving town, had been struggling ever since the phosphorus mine and textile mill closed, and there were more than a few times when Jeremy wondered whether the town would survive.
The jury was still out on that one, he concluded. But if this was where Lexie wanted to be, then that was enough. Besides, once you got beyond the “soon to be a ghost town” feel of the place, the town was picturesque, in a southern, Spanish-moss-hanging-from-tree-limbs kind of way. At the confluence of Boone Creek and the Pamlico River was a boardwalk where one could watch the sailboats cruising along the water, and according to the Chamber of Commerce, in the spring the azaleas and dogwoods planted throughout the downtown “exploded in a cacophony of color that was rivaled only by the ocean sunset of autumn leaves come every October,” whatever that meant. Even so, it was