Alpha Me Not Read Online Free Page B

college stuff she’d always dreamed about: sororities, football games, and intellectual challenges. Okay, she was older than most of the other students, but not by decades. This was her chance to spread her wings, to seek out new experiences, to push herself to the max, to throw out all the nasty small-town restrictions she’d dealt with for twenty-five years.
    It wasn’t supposed to begin with a fire.
    Everything she owned was in there.
    The five hundred dollars she’d withdrawn from the bank to shop for groceries and other household items. She’d left the money in the drawer in the laundry room.
    Maybe the back was better than the front.
    Susie took off.
    She hadn’t run far before Joe corralled her, crossed his arms around her, and hauled her tight against his chest. “Where in hell do you think you’re going?”
    She elbowed him. “To the back door. Let me go.”
    “Don’t be stupid.”
    She wriggled and kicked at him, but he held her fast.
    “The whole property’s a fire trap. It’s—”
    The howling of multiple vehicles drowned his voice.
    An ambulance, a fire truck, and a couple of patrol cars pealed around the far bend, zipped toward them, and screeched to a halt. Uniformed men swarmed out of the vehicles like ants fleeing a fired nest. No one paid any attention to Joe and Susie. Hoses unfurled, ladders emerged, and stretchers appeared. All in the blink of an eye.
    The sky remained blue.
    The sun continued to shine.
    The ever-present spring breeze didn’t pause.
    A flock of geese detoured around the smoke billowing high in the air. And all the while every possession she had, save for the clothes on her back and her purse and its contents, was wiped out, erased, gone, reduced to ashes.
    A void centered in her stomach had her paralyzed. A sickening hopelessness, mired in the blaze dancing happily amid the water streaming from the multiple hoses trained on it, sucked the fight out of her. She didn’t protest when Joe locked his hands around her waist, never uttered a word when he gave her a little squeeze, and couldn’t have responded if he shook her again when he crooned, “It’s going to be okay. I promise you. It’s going to be okay.”
    “Everything I own is in there.” The words sounded hollow and empty.
    “I know, sweetheart. I know. It’s going to be okay.” He rubbed her shoulders, kissed the cusps, spun her around, held her chin between his fingers, and forced her to focus on him. “It’s going to be okay.”
    “Fine for you to say. I brought so much with me. Pics, mementos, so much stuff.” She curled her fingers into her palms. “I bullied Melanie into letting me take it, and now it’s gone.”
    “It’s going to be okay.”
    She walloped his chest. “It’s not going to be okay. The house is burning. Burning!”
    “I know. I know. The house is burning. But it is going to be okay.”
    Not believing a single platitude he uttered, she squirmed out of his embrace and put a good couple of feet between them. Hugging her arms, she couldn’t stop staring at the fire, tracing the thick curls of blue-black smoke willowing over the tops of the birch trees behind the collapsing roof.
    Poor Terri. She’d lost her home. Thank goodness Terri’d put most of her personal possessions into storage. But she’d left all her lovely antique furniture for Susie to use: the four-poster bed, an amazing footed bathtub, not to mention the stunning paintings on the walls. All gone.
    Vehicles crowded the narrow cul-de-sac.
    The police had blocked access to Birch Crescent from Champion Avenue and cordoned off the approach to the cottage. None of the occupants of the other eight houses of Birch Crescent had ventured forth, but she glimpsed old Mr. Arnold peering through the closed front window of the bungalow next door to the burning dwelling. Shouldn’t the police be evacuating everyone? Maybe she should go over and offer to help.
    The wind changed direction, and a cloud of acrid heat washed over her