Trouble Comes Knocking (Entangled Embrace) Read Online Free PDF Page B

he said, the two might not be connected at all, but if they were I’d be a part of something big. Important. I’d be Rudolph on that first snowy sleigh ride.
    I knew before I heard his car drive away that the answer would be yes. Still, was this me selling out? I thought about my parents, how disappointed my dad would be to find out I was working for the police. Suddenly my yes didn’t seem so assured.

    My parents and I lived in a seventies-style, split-level house eleven miles up a mountain. We moved there after my third birthday and did everything off the grid, or as much as possible. My dad welded metal sculptures and sold them to galleries for cash, or traded them for supplies. We paid for our rented house, which included all the utilities, in cash, which I only knew because of the many late-night lectures my father gave about the dangers of living under society’s thumb.
    I grew up believing my mother had been a fine arts professor in Fort Worth before my family moved to rural Arkansas. She taught me from home. Gave me dreams, hopes, books—tons of books. I had a simple, good life, and I didn’t know a life separate from that existed. I’d go with my dad to pick up supplies a few times a month and would do my best to not be too curious about the other kids I saw.
    I knew they wondered about me, too, but not knowing our ways were so different helped a lot. These other kids acted rude with their gawking. I felt no self-consciousness for being unordinary. I had no idea why it mattered so much to them.
    Moving to Fort Worth at sixteen made me feel like a foreigner: all the traffic, the constant chatter, people rushing everywhere, and no one taking time to just enjoy a moment. I’d yet to fully recover.
    When I woke up from my nap, I found a note from Aunt Dolores on the kitchen counter telling me to eat the soup when it cooled and to rest while I could. I scooped a cupful and had just sat down to read a book when someone knocked on the door. John.
    “What are you doing here?” I asked, peeved he thought I would want to see him after he left me to fend for myself. Between John and Eli it felt as if the douche Olympics had come to town and my house was their sports arena.
    He held out my purse in a peace-offering gesture. “I went through it, not snooping, but I needed your address.”
    I didn’t say a word.
    “Last night was crazy, right?”
    “Totally.”
    “Never been through something like that before.”
    “Not this year, at least,” I said, still standing at the doorway, no intention of asking him in.
    “So…” he started, purse still dangling between us.
    “So?”
    “I had a good time before all that.”
    “Me, too,” I said. “Right up until you left me at a crime scene, and I had to walk three miles home in the rain.” I took the purse and dropped it onto the hallway table.
    His face fell. “Why’d you walk home? I called a taxi for you.”
    “What taxi?”
    “Ben was supposed to come get you when the taxi showed up. I ran home because I forgot my badge.”
    Feeling guilty for having wished his balls would shrivel and fall off, I motioned him in. “You should have found me and told me yourself. Ben never said anything. All I was told was that you went home.”
    He stopped me in the hallway and pressed his hands against either side of my face. “Lucy, I’m sorry. I would never intentionally do that to you.”
    My anger melted into a pool of gooey, girly feelings. The kind I usually mock my best friend, Ana, for. “Would you like some soup?”
    Dee came home to find us tucked into each other watching Some Like it Hot on the movie channel. She smiled as she walked into the room, and I sucked in my cheeks anticipating what she might say.
    I’d had one serious relationship. One heart-breaking, tear-my-world-apart relationship, which left me so swollen with hurt that I chopped off my once-long hair and changed my entire look from Little Bo Peep to GI Jane. It was because of what I went