Murfey's Law Read Online Free PDF Page A

she'd been sitting.
    Back in the garden and puffing from the return climb Lori paused to catch her breath. She took a seat in the chair she'd admired earlier and although wooden, it was surprisingly comfortable. It took a while for her breathing to return to normal, during which time Lori swore to herself she would get on and do something about how unfit she had become in the last decade. She wasn't athletic and had never set foot in a gym, the thought of physical pain and sweating from places a girl shouldn't sweat from made Lori shudder, so she would need to come up with some sort of exercise regime that didn't involve wearing Lycra, and avoided any chance of feeling intimidated by perky women with boobs and butts like pieces of fruit.
    Someone entered the shop.
    Hearing the screen door bang, Lori turned around and squinted through one of the uncovered windows at the back of the house. Against the reflected glare of the morning sun, she could just make out a male figure helping himself to an ice lolly from the freezer before moving to the counter. Pulling open the back door, she stepped into the shade and went to go and serve him.
    It was the surfer she had just been watching. He was even more mesmerizing close up, though had nothing of the classic blonde 'dude look' normally associated with a beach boy. His hair was cropped close to his head, every little ridge and dip was visible under a layer of short brown fuzz. A huge tattoo, Lori couldn't quite depict what of, stretched across the top of his back from one shoulder to the other. His tan was so deep it was difficult to tell, in the dim light of the shop, where the ink ended and his skin begun. Long wet board shorts clung to clearly muscular thighs, and thin rivulets of water snaked down his legs, leaving little pools on the old wooden floor around his feet. His presence was ridiculously masculine, he even smelt like the sea - a salty scent filled the room making Lori's nerve endings fizzle and pop.
    Not hearing her come in behind him he was about to head out the front door.
    ‘Excuse me! You can't just take things without paying for them. That's stealing.’ She may not have been enamoured with her surprise inheritance but that didn't mean she had lost her sense of right and wrong. Lori tried, with difficulty, to appear indignant as he turned to look at her.
    ‘Maybe you should call the police?’ He raised an amused eyebrow, creating little crinkles in the corners of his face.
    He had the darkest eyes Lori had ever seen, almost black. There was something of an air of menace about him she decided, but that didn't stop her staring. She could feel herself blushing as she briefly glanced over his beautiful face, across his chest and down to the waistband of his shorts. Her insides tripped and tumbled as her eyes fell on the tops of a strong V line disappearing into the wet fabric. Woah! Lori mentally gave herself a good shake and snapped back to the now.
    ‘Maybe I will.’ She stepped forward then hesitated.
    ‘Good, you go ahead and do that,’ he added childishly with a smirk. He leant confidently back against the counter where he'd been fiddling with a pen when she'd walked in, and gestured with the ice-lolly for her to walk past. Stalemate. He wasn't going to move, and she wasn't going to call the police as that would involve having to squeeze through the tiny gap between him and the newspaper rack to get around the back of the counter to where she could see the phone on the wall. She strongly doubted her nerve endings would hold up. Besides, he might set his dog on her if she went for the phone, even if it did look harmless.
    Through the screen door she could see it sat faithfully waiting in the little piece of shade provided by his surfboard. He had left it stood upright against the side fence that separated Jenny's manicured front garden and the part dead grass part sandy area to the front of the shop.
    For what felt like an era he stared at her face, his gaze