Lover Beware 03 - After Midnight

loading groceries into a trolley. She couldn't remember what she'd gone to the supermarket to buy, she'd simply turned on her heel, walked back to her car, and driven home. She'd gotten through the rest of the day, she'd managed to function, but that moment in the supermarket had stunned her.
    She'd had visions of him in intensive care, close to death.
    She'd even worried that he had died, and she simply hadn't heard. In the supermarket, he hadn't looked as if he'd suffered anything as traumatic as a life-threatening wound. If anything, he'd seemed even bigger, more muscular—more of everything.
    Jane stared at the note in her hand, brought back to the soft scent of the night air, the whine of mosquitoes on the prowl.
    "What did you want to tell him?" she muttered to herself.
    "That you were head over heels in love with a man you barely knew?"
    Because the fact was, falling in lust with a man had never happened to her before. She wasn't promiscuous, and she hadn't had that many relationships. Sexually, she'd always been as dead as a doornail unless she was emotionally involved. Crazy as it seemed, somehow she had become emotionally involved with Michael Rider; she had fallen in love.
    Jess lolloped inside, her claws clicking on the hall floor.
    Automatically, Jane picked up her groceries, readjusted the strap of her purse on her shoulder, closed the door, and locked it. She was tired and she was hungry, and her feet were aching.
    She'd spent hours driving around Winslow, tramping the streets trying to buy a security alarm—without any luck. Ap-After Midnight
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    parently, they'd sold out within a day of the news breaking about the home invasion in Tayler's Creek. Security firms and appliance stores had more alarm systems on order, but it would take a couple of days for them to be shipped, and then there was a waiting list. If Jane wanted an alarm, she would have to stand in line like everyone else.
    After stowing the groceries, she walked slowly upstairs, flicking light switches as she went, the note crumpled in her hand. When she got to her room, she stowed her bag and dropped the note on her dressing table, and walked over to the dormer window and looked in the direction of the Rider place.
    The faint glimmer of lights shone through the trees.
    Her gaze shifted, caught by her own reflection in the glass, and for the first time in months she took the time to examine herself. She was medium height and slim, her breasts a re-spectable size and shape, her hips narrow enough that she had difficulty buying pants that fit and often had to shop for teenagers' sizes. She'd lost weight—enough that most of her clothes were loose on her now—but with Patrick dwindling away, her appetite had faded and she hadn’t wanted to eat.
    Her hair was long, and dark enough to be mistaken for black, her eyes a light amber and faintly slanted, and her skin was tanned a honey colour from spending so much time outside.She lifted a hand to her lips. She hadn't worn lipstick in—
    She tried to think, and couldn't remember the last time she'd worn so much as a clear gloss, let alone makeup.
    She was still attractive, despite the passage of years, and now she was fiercely glad she was pretty, glad that even if she felt old inside, the outer packaging looked young.
    Her waist was small, her hip bones jutting faintly, her stomach flat. Her hand came to rest on the strip of tanned skin left bare where her tank top had separated from the waistband of her shorts, and the heat of her palm against her skin sent a small shiver through her. The weight loss had made her more sensitive, as if the gradual paring away of her normal subcu-taneous layer had left all of her nerve endings exposed and unprotected.
    Abruptly, she wondered what it would be like for her belly to swell with a child.

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    FIONA BRAND
    A part of her longed fiercely for the physical changes that pregnancy forced on the female body. For more years than she cared to count, she'd wanted her belly to balloon and her breasts to grow heavy with milk. She'd wanted a baby to hold in her arms, to suckle at her breasts, and she wanted to be tired because her life was filled with kids, and not just emptiness.
    She'd ached with wanting a baby, and still did, but as the years had passed and all of her energy had been focused on Patrick, the sharp, panicked feeling that her childbearing years were slipping away had dulled into acceptance.
    Maybe Patrick's death had sharpened her need to