A Love Beyond Words. Sherryl Woods

taking place a few houses away.

      “You going to see her again?” Tom asked as they began work on the recovery of a victim who had been less fortunate than Allie.

      “I wasn’t down there making a date,” Ricky retorted.

      “I was asking about your intentions.”

      Those blue, blue eyes came back to haunt him. He wondered if he might not have to see her again before he could get them out of his head.

      “I promised to take her dancing,” he admitted, earning a punch from Tom.

      “Next time there’s a pretty woman involved, I get first dibs,” Tom said. “There’s nothing like a little gratitude to get a relationship off to the right start.”

      “And what would you know about relationships, Mr. Love ’em and Leave ’em?”

      “More than you,” Tom said. “I was married.”

      “For about fifteen minutes.”

      “Three years,” his friend corrected.

      “And in that time you learned what?”

      “That women get all crazy once you put a ring on their finger.”

      Ricky chuckled. “Are you referring to the fact that Nikki thought you ought to stop dating other women after the wedding?”

      “Very funny. You know it wasn’t that. I might have looked, but I never went near another woman during that whole three years. Nikki just got all weird about the job. She knew what I did for a living when we met, but for some reason after we got married she seemed to think I’d give it up and go to work for her father.” He shuddered. “Me, behind a desk. Can you imagine it?”

      No more than he could imagine himself there, Ricky conceded. “Mama says Nikki still loves you.”

      “Not enough to give up that crazy idea,” Tom said, a hint of something that might have been sorrow in his eyes. But it was gone in a flash, replaced by an irrepressible glint of laughter. “That divorce was the best thing that ever happened. Women figure if I got married once, I might risk it again. You’d be amazed what a woman will do when she’s optimistic about your potential. You should consider it.”

      “What? Get married, just so I can divorce? Not me. If and when I ever take the plunge, it’s gonna have to be forever. Between Mama and the priest, my life wouldn’t be worth two cents if I even breathed the word divorce.”

      “Which is why you never date a woman for more than two Saturday nights running,” Tom concluded. His expression turned thoughtful. “I wonder if Allie Matthews could make you change your mind.”

      “Why would you even say something like that? I barely know the woman, and you didn’t exchange two words with her.”

      “I got a good look at her, though,” Tom said. “A man doesn’t soon forget a woman who looks that incredible even after being buried under a collapsed building. Besides, if her neighbor is right about what an angel she is, she’s nothing at all like your usual dates. Did you ever consider that you make the choices you do precisely because you know they’re not keepers?”

      Ricky scowled at the analysis of his love life. He had a hunch it was more accurate than he wanted to believe. “We’ve got more houses to check out,” he said, stalking away without answering Tom’s question. His friend’s hoot of knowing laughter followed him.

      What if he did protect himself from winding up married by dating women he would never, ever spend the rest of his life with? What was wrong with that? It wasn’t as if he led any of them on. As Tom said, Ricky rarely went out with the same woman more than once or twice, and he always put his cards on the table, explaining that in his line of work he was on the go way too much to get seriously involved.

      Maybe it was a pattern he’d developed to avoid commitment, but so what? It was his life. He liked living alone. He liked not being accountable to anyone. After spending his first eighteen years accountable to an overly protective mother, an iron-willed father and four sisters who thought his love life was their concern, he liked having his freedom. His nieces and nephews satisfied his desire for kids, at least for the moment. He got to play doting uncle, soccer coach and pal without any of the responsibility that went with being a dad.

      There wasn’t a woman on earth who could make him want to change the life he had.

      Satisfied that Tom was totally and absolutely wrong, he dismissed his taunt about Allie Matthews. He’d probably never even see her again, never make good on that promise to take her dancing. She wouldn’t even expect him to.

      He was still telling himself that the next day, but he couldn’t seem to shake the image of Allie’s cerulean gaze as it had clung to his. If what he’d seen in her eyes had been expectations, he might have run the other way, but that hadn’t been it. There had been gratitude, but underlying that there had been a vague hint of loneliness.

      He tried to imagine being rescued from the debris of his home, having only an elderly neighbor for support, rather than the huge, extended family he had. He couldn’t. He knew without a doubt that his hospital room would be crowded with people who cared whether he lived or died, people who would help him to rebuild his home and his life. Who would be there for Allie?

      He spent an hour telling himself that surely a woman described as an angel would have dozens of friends who would be there for her, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Allie might not.

      “Damn,” he muttered, slamming his coffee cup into the sink and grabbing his car keys.

      On the drive he told himself that if he got to the hospital and found that Allie had all the support she needed, he would just turn right around and leave. That would be that. End of story. End of being haunted by those big blue eyes.

      Unfortunately, something in his gut told him he was about to go down for the count.

      Chapter Three

      Allie hated the hospital. The antiseptic smell alone was enough to carry her straight back to another time and place when her life had been forever changed. This time she was an adult and her injuries weren’t either life-threatening or permanent, but the doctors still had no intention of releasing her until she could tell them she had both a place to go and someone to care for her.

      Unfortunately, there was no one. She knew only a few of her neighbors, and their lives and homes were in as much a shambles as her own. Her parents had offered to fly down immediately and stay with her, but the expense of paying for hotel accommodations for all three of them struck Allie as foolish. In addition she knew that they would hover just as they had years ago. She didn’t need that. She needed to get back into a familiar routine as soon as she was physically able to. She had promised to let them know if she couldn’t come up with another solution. There had to be one. It just hadn’t occurred to her yet.

      “What about that lovely young woman at the clinic?” Jane asked helpfully. She had been to visit the night before and was here again, taking a bus from her sister’s, where she had been staying since the storm.

      “Gina has a brand-new baby and a two-bedroom apartment. I couldn’t possibly impose on her and her husband,” Allie said, though her boss had indeed come by and issued the invitation.

      “I would insist that you come to Ruth’s with me, but she’s not in the best health herself and, to be perfectly honest, she’s a pain in the neck,” Jane said.

      Allie bit back a laugh. Jane’s opinion of her sister was something she had heard with great regularity since she’d moved in next door to the elderly woman. They barely spoke, because Jane thought Ruth spent way too much time concentrating on her own problems and not nearly enough thinking of others.

      “Old before her time,” Jane often declared. “She was a cranky old woman by the time she hit fifty. Dressed like one, too. I tried to talk her into a snazzy pair of red sneakers the other day. You would have thought I was trying