The Homecoming Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

of flowers fell, forgotten, into the dancing stream around her feet.
    â€œNo,” she said again, but she obviously wasn’t distressed about the flowers. She was frightened. She was blanched and frozen, as if she’d seen a ghost.
    And the ghost was Patrick.

CHAPTER THREE
    L IFE WAS BEAUTIFUL , especially in a ghost town.
    Celia had a skirt full of flowers, and the brook was cool and clear as it slipped around her toes. She decided she might never go home. She might just go into the roofless old boardinghouse, make herself a pallet of wildflowers and sleep under the starry sky.
    Actually, she was one of the few people who truly wouldn’t be afraid to do such a thing. She had grown up on ghost stories of Teague Ellis. In Enchantment, no giggling sleepover was complete without a spooky tale of how, if you were daring enough to go to Silverton at night, you would hear the rumble of Teague Ellis’s motorcycle as it invisibly prowled the deserted streets.
    Some said he walked the corridors of the high school, listening for the sound of a baby crying. Through the years, half a dozen hysterical girls had sworn they’d seen him at the Homecoming dance, a dark, angry, handsome face in the crowd, searching for Angelina.
    Celia had always laughed at the stories. Useful for boys who wanted their dates to shiver and cling to their strong, protective arms, but pure fantasy, ofcourse. She never felt the slightest bit skittish in Silverton, though Teague’s poor body had been found there only two years after his disappearance. She’d never heard the ghostly motorcycle, or the moans that were said to waft up through the planks of the boarded-over mine shafts.
    Celia was very levelheaded. She did not believe in ghosts.
    But this…this was different.
    As she stared at the stranger who had materialized there, just ten feet away, a primal fear rippled along her nerves, as if an unseen hand played them like the strings of a harp.
    He…he looked exactly like Teague Ellis. How could it be? And yet…
    She’d seen pictures of Teague often enough. The sexy, bad-tempered mouth, the wavy black hair that fell into deep-set, deep-blue eyes. She’d never forget the scruffy animal glamour—like James Dean, she’d thought. James Dean drawn in a palette of devil-black and bedroom-blue.
    And oh, those eyes…those eyes said the boy had known pain and would know, in turn, how to inflict it.
    But, in the space of a couple of seconds, she came to her senses. The man in front of her smiled, and the hypnotic vision shifted to something more prosaic. An eerie, but coincidental, resemblance. Similar height, similar coloring…and the rest was the product of overactive nerves and the haunting power of this place.
    â€œI’m sorry,” the man said. His voice was cultured and deep. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
    He moved toward the pebbled edge of the stream. As he bent over to help retrieve the wildflowers she’d dropped, he looked up at her and smiled, the sun beaming straight into his amazing blue eyes. “I walked in just now. My car broke down a little way down the road, and I was looking for a telephone.”
    She smiled back, feeling finally returning to her fingertips. Not Teague, of course not. How could she have been so idiotic?
    For one thing, Teague had been nineteen the night he disappeared. This man must be nearly thirty, though that sexy mouth and brooding eyes certainly gave his looks the gut-kick virility of a hot-blooded teenager.
    â€œYou didn’t startle me,” she lied, hurrying to pick up the rest of her flowers before the stream carried them away. “Or rather, it’s just that I thought I was alone.”
    â€œYes.” He turned and scanned the dusty, broken buildings. “This place could make you feel you were all alone in the whole world, couldn’t it? I could tell right away I wasn’t going to find a phone, but I