playground. In one corner, a group was practicing tai chi. At the concrete tables, older people were perusing newspapers. A handful of mothers trailed toddlers through the sand between swings and slides.
It shouldn't be too difficult to locate Caroline in the small crowd. Duncan's parents had a photo of her - of the two of them, actually. When Hannah had dropped by their house, three blocks from where she'd grown up, to return the heirloom engagement ring, she'd seen it atop the piano. If his mother had remembered it was there, Hannah felt sure she would have hidden it away, but her unexpected arrival had flustered both of his parents. She'd always known them, always loved them, so she'd pretended not to notice the framed shot.
Until they'd left her alone as they went for coffee and the ever-present Kleenex. Dry-eyed and maybe clear-headed for the first time in her life, Hannah had used the minutes alone to examine the fuzzy photo. And sow the seed that led her to this moment.
Hauling in a last deep breath, she reminded herself that she needed to do this. She needed to do this for herself and maybe for every woman in the world whose man and whose future she'd depended upon had been stolen.
At the crosswalk on the corner she pressed the button to wait for the light. The vehicle traffic was heavy - no wonder those cars had honked a few blocks back - and she waited for the little stick man to come to life and send her on her way.
A rotund senior citizen wearing Easter egg colors came to wait beside her. He smiled, tipping his compact umbrella at her in friendly greeting. "My knees are telling me it's going to be a gully-washer," he confided. "You'd better get indoors before the clouds start crying."
Hannah smiled. "It never rains in Southern California," she said for the second time that morning, her gaze shifting upward just as a fat drop fell - splat! - onto her nose. Her jaw dropped and another landed square on her tongue.
In the next second it was as if someone had overturned a giant watering can. Cold, fat raindrops landed on her shoulders and the top of her head. Between one breath and the next, car tires were hissing on dark pavement that was turning even blacker with the wet.
She smelled that distinctive mix of rain and petroleum products and tamped down the unpleasant memories it evoked.
Her companion unfurled his umbrella, and as the light turned green for them, he offered to share his little island of dry as they crossed the street. Glancing ahead, Hannah groaned out loud.
"Are you all right?" her friendly man asked.
"I'm fine." Frustrated. Out of luck. The visitors in the park were already scattered, running down the street and into cars. By the time she made it to the other sidewalk, they'd all be gone. "But I won't be crossing after all. Thanks, anyway."
With a little shrug he left her high and dry (well, wet, of course). Drenched, actually. And she experienced again that creepy sense that someone was watching.
It made her jump back when an old but pristine Mercedes sedan pulled up to the curb in front of her, though too late to prevent a rooster tail of gutter water from spraying over the top of her borrowed black boots. Then the passenger window rolled down to frame a familiar face on the driver's side.
"Hey, little girl," Tanner said. "Can you help me find my lost puppy?"
Chapter 11
The lost puppy was him, Tanner thought later. Lost, sick, out of his stinkin' mind. Because he was thinking about sex while sitting in a molded plastic chair at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
He didn't want to be thinking about sex. That whole "every seven seconds" thing was a stupid, lousy magazine-article myth, and he knew this because he'd been able to not think about sex for eleven freak in' months.
He'd considered it the best way to keep his dumb ass out of trouble, and he'd been right. Look what happened the instant he let down his guard. He'd gotten himself tangled up with the most dangerous female in his galaxy.
Maybe he should take Desiree up on the marriage offer after all. Then he could get himself a camel from one of her al-Maddah uncles or cousins and set off into the desert, a lone nomad for the rest of his life.
He was really feeling sorry for himself, he realized, but he intended