AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He pulled his hands from hers and stood up, glaring. “I did not have time to search those things. I was finding this for you.”
“Liar.” She stabbed a finger at the screen. “You found this for you. So I’d have time for you. And you’d have time to get what you want from me.”
“But it is what you—”
“Liar, liar, liar! You’re lying to me and you’re lying to yourself. You spent all that time on this because you were too chicken to look up what you came here to find out.”
He drew himself up to his full height, his face an icy mask of fury. Her heart clenched and she feared she’d gone too far. Was he familiar with the idiom of calling someone a chicken? Had she insulted his manhood and his machismo?
“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”
He closed his eyes briefly, inhaling deeply, then letting his breath out on a shaky sigh. When he opened his eyes, he was no longer glaring.
“No. You were right. I was hiding from the truth.”
Sam stared at him in dumb fascination. She was right? She insulted him and she was right?
This was something completely outside the realm of her experience. She knew that all men did not react like her ex-husband, screaming and shouting as they demeaned and belittled the person responsible for making them uncomfortable. She had after all dealt with plenty of men while getting her degree and doing her student teaching. But the most common reaction she’d seen was denial, ranging from angry to merely insistent and sometimes walking away from the argument. In the heat of the moment, they seemed as a gender to default to the need to win the argument first and only later considering what had been said during the argument when they had a chance to cool off.
“Sam?” Master Giacomo waved his hand in front of her eyes and she blinked rapidly.
“I’m sorry. You surprised me.”
He smiled again, a boyish grin—if the boy had just been caught putting a frog where frogs were not supposed to be.
“As did you. We are neither of us at our best when surprised, sì?”
“Sì,” she agreed, and caught herself before apologizing a third time.
A quick glance to the side showed that the old woman had no interest in watching them make up after their fight and had returned her attention to her computer.
He heaved another deep sigh and Sam realized this was his technique to keep himself calm and rational, the way she counted to ten in all the different bases. “I have spent years wondering and worrying about what happened that day. The one who saved me refused to say anything about it.”
“You mean you have amnesia? You can’t remember the accident?”
“No. I remember it clearly. But I was not alone. I don’t know what happened to the others.” He shook his head and his hand closed about hers. “I need to know. But…you were right. I am afraid of what I may find.”
She wove her fingers through his, clasping his hand securely and giving it a reassuring squeeze. “Then we’ll find it together.”
He nodded and stepped away from the tall stool in front of the computer, leaving the keyboard open for her. She pushed the stool away, preferring to stand in front of the computer. Master Giacomo stood behind her, his arms wrapped loosely around her waist and his jaw brushing her hair as he looked over her shoulder at the screen. She smiled, relaxing into his embrace, and called up her favorite search engine.
“What name are we looking for?”
“Jeffrey Middlemarch.” He spelled both names for her. “1967.”
“And what kind of accident was it?”
“The fuel line leaked and the yacht’s engine exploded.”
She quickly keyed in search terms, using the Boolean operators to find any combination of his name, the terms boat, ship, yacht or engine, and any word starting with the letters “explo”.
The first hit was an About Us page for the Middlemarch burn clinic in England. It had been endowed with funds by Reginald Middlemarch, a British earl, in memory of his youngest son, who died in the explosion of his yacht in 1967.
“But what of his family?” Master Giacomo whispered. “Did they survive or not?”
“His family?”
“His wife and young son. I did not know their names.”
