The Comeback Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

that Margie knew the Sullivan sisters—everyone did. “She was always so bright and pretty.”
    Pretty? That was one thing about her that hadn’t changed. “Our Kris is fair, fey and sweet as a sugar cookie,” her aunt once had said in Donnie’s presence. The description had stuck with him, even though he’d had to look up the meaning of fey.
    He picked up his car keys and left the office. His Toyota Forerunner sat at the far end of the lot behind the sheriff’s office.
    As he drove through town, Donnie thought about the night of the triplets’ eighteenth birthday party. Late February. Chilly enough to keep two burn barrels busy in the backyard of the old bordello. Although he and Kris had formally broken up three months earlier, Donnie knew she wasn’t seeing anyone, and he’d expected to find her there. Alone. Maybe missing him.
    Donnie had enjoyed playing big man on campus for a while, but the glamour had worn off. And he’d found himself looking forward to seeing Kristin. He’d hoped they could make up. Get back together.
    Only, she wasn’t there. She’d gone off somewhere with Tyler Harrison. A guy Donnie couldn’t stand.
    Donnie had had a couple of run-ins with Harrison the previous July. To fulfill a community-service obligation after some prank he’d pulled on the last day of school, Tyler had been assigned to the Search and Rescue team Donnie led each summer. Tyler’s belligerent attitude and smart mouth had left Donnie itching to teach him a lesson.
    Fired up with beer, Donnie and a couple of his buddies had set out to find Kristin. And they did—in the back seat of her great-aunt’s Cadillac. Half-naked. Flushed with passion or embarrassment. Donnie hadn’t bothered to determine which. A blind rage had come over him—a fury so great he might have killed Tyler if his friends hadn’t pulled him off. The incident had earned him a formal reprimand from the sheriff, three months in an anger-management course and the friendship and respect of the girl he loved.
    He saw Kristin only twice in the weeks that followed. Once when he’d pleaded with her to support his version of the story—that Tyler had raped her—and second, at a meeting with the sheriff when she’d stated quite clearly that she and Ty had been engaged in consensual sex when Donnie attacked them.
    At the time, he’d felt blindsided by her “betrayal.” It wasn’t until he found out about Sandy’sextramarital affair that Donnie had understood what a true breach of faith was all about.
    He owed Kristin an apology. And he needed to get it off his chest before he left to begin his new life as an air marshal.
     
    K RISTIN RESTED her elbow on the counter and plopped her free ear into her cupped palm. Her head ached and the conversation with her former landlord wasn’t helping in the least.
    “He put what where?” she croaked into the phone. “I’ll kill him.”
    The last came out as an impotent threat—at least in her mind. But the uniformed man entering the antique store might take it differently, she thought.
    “I’ll take the cleanup costs out of Zach’s allowance for the next twenty-five years, Mr. Baxter,” she amended loudly as Donnie Grimaldo approached the desk. “I was sure I scrubbed every inch of his room, but it never occurred to me to look on the ceiling of his closet.”
    She listened to the retired air force pilot explain in detail about her son’s fertile imagination. Apparently the graffiti included some explicit drawings of her landlord’s anatomy and included a ditty about the man’s ability to please his wife—and donkeys—in bed. Her face went from mildly burning to chili-pepper hot.
    “I promise this will not go unpunished,” she vowed. “You’ll be receiving a letter of apology in the mail from Zach, and please feel free to keep mydeposit. I’m sure it will take several coats of paint and maybe even therapy to remedy this.”
    Kris kowtowed another few minutes before hanging up. Instead of