Enchanted Again Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t even occur to him to wonder if her exuberant smile and starry expression was for anyone other than himself.
    Pansy tried to appear unperturbed, but her mind had difficulty staying on what she was doing. Tom and his friends noticed this only so far as the inconvenience they felt that their sandwiches were all mixed up. Pansy merely laughed when they pointed out her mistakes. But in a sudden instant her laughter died and her face went slack. The men around her did not even notice the alteration in her, preoccupied as they were with getting their lunches in order.
    Pansy’s gaze landed on a photo lying on Tom’s desk. Jack’s face stared up at her. A strange sense of unreality came over her. Random thoughts flitted through her mind as she struggled to achieve a blank expression. After several moments she attempted to speak.
    “Who’s that?” she asked no one in particular, pointing at the picture of Jack.
    “That’s him,” Tom replied with his mouth full of food. A clump of something greenish in color flew from his mouth and landed on Jack’s face. “That’s John Foreman, the wife killer.”
    “Oh,” Pansy said. Of course it is, she thought. She had a strange urge to throw her head back and laugh hysterically.
    “Tried to make it look like an accident, but I have no doubt he killed her,” her husband continued. As she looked at her husband she distracted herself by wondering why he always began a new sentence after taking a huge bite of food. She looked again at the picture of Jack. The green glob on his cheek made him seem rather pitiable. Thoughts raced through her mind. One carried the realization that it was not coincidence that brought her and Jack together. And yet, her heart rejected this.
    Still, the more serious issue was that Jack was accused of murder. She wondered why this wasn’t her primary concern. If it were anyone else but Tom accusing Jack perhaps it would bother her more, but knowing Tom as she did, it was hard to give the accusation credence.
    She was less than an hour away from her meeting with Jack. What if Tom was actually right for once? What if Jack really was a killer? Was it even safe for her to meet him alone in a hotel room? No one else in the world would know where she was. Thoughts kept pouring through her mind in frantic disarray. Always uppermost among them was the question of why Jack had pursued her to begin with. Had he approached her because she was the wife of his accuser? What did he ultimately want from her? This, more than anything else—even the potential danger she was in—filled her with an overwhelming sense of despair. She sat down in a nearby chair, suddenly weary. All of the energy and happiness of only moments before had vanished.
    Tom and his companions had continued talking, oblivious of any change whatsoever in Pansy.
    “He’s a clever one,” Tom was saying. “I’ll give him that. Always covers his tracks.”
    “You’ll get the bastard,” one of the others chirped in.
    Pansy only half listened, concentrating all her efforts on breathing evenly. It was a struggle to remain composed. She tried to soothe herself out of the overwhelming confusion. Why should she care what Jack’s motives were in seeing her anyway? What was he to her? But an all-consuming sense of hopelessness enveloped her. Nothing good ever came to her. Everything was suspect. She looked at Tom with perverse loathing. Everything associated with him brought her anguish, she thought unreasonably. She wished fervently that he was dead. As was her habit during these crucially unhappy moments of her life, she distracted herself by pondering her husband’s existence, finding comfort in conjuring up reasons why Tom might in all likelihood die an early death. It seemed not only probable, but inevitable. There were so many factors in favor of it, and it gave her hope to go over them, methodically and analytically. Why, his very position as a police officer was purported to put his life