Shadows on the Sand by Gayle Roper Page A

woman and ask her to leave her husband for him, therefore curing all her ills.
    Ri-i-ight.
    Not that Carrie had ever been one of those women. She’d always been polite and kind, never pushy. Sometimes he wondered if she might have a bit of a crush on him. After all, she tended to blush whenever he spoke to her. Then again she might be allergic to him and the flush was the first step in getting hives or something. Wouldn’t that knock his pride down a notch or two?
    Because he felt foolish to even think of Carrie and crushes, he had held himself more aloof than usual around her. Until today. He had to admit he’d enjoyed his time shopping with her. He’d enjoyed her attention to his injuries. He’d even enjoyed her distress at Chaz’s near miss.
    So what did that mean? What did he expect from her now? That she’d get all teary and tell him how glad she was that he’d escaped death because—because what? Life wasn’t worth living without him? She’d have died if he had?
    No, what he wanted was for her to sit beside him and smile at him. Not just smile like she smiled at Mr. Perkins and everyone else who came into the café, but
smile
. At him. For him.
    He swallowed hard as it hit him that he wanted to matter to her differently and more deeply than anyone else, even than her sister or Mary P.
    His stomach cramped. That couldn’t be right. It couldn’t. It would be unfair to Ginny, disloyal, unfaithful.
    Which was stupid.
    Ginny was dead. Three years dead.
    Greg still got the sweats whenever he thought about that day. And he had suspected nothing. He should have. He should have!
    “You’ve got me blocked in,” Ginny had said, her voice rushed. “I’ve got to get the kids to school.”
    He pulled his keys from his pocket with no shiver of premonition and tossed them to her. She caught them, grinned, and blew him a kiss. As sheand the kids went chattering out of the house, he took a bite of his Cap’n Crunch, savoring the taste, when his world exploded in a fireball.
    There were no screams, at least not from Ginny and the kids. Just his own anguished cries. Just the shrill shouts of the neighbors and the shriek of the sirens of the first responders. And the mocking whispers of flames writhing and dancing in the bright morning sunshine.
    If only he hadn’t ignored the threats, hadn’t treated them like so much hot air from a buffoon who thought he was John Dillinger. If only he’d realized the depths of brutality and utter lack of morality in the man whose goal in life was to become a crime kingpin. If only he’d realized it didn’t take a large following to have men who would seek vengeance on their leader’s behalf, men who knew how to make bombs.
    If only. If only.
    Marco Polo was little more than a street thug, but he’d attracted a band of loyalists who followed his every wish. If his charisma had been coupled with matching intelligence, the man would have become a real-life don to rival the fictional Don Corleone or Tony Soprano.
    When Greg first heard of him, he’d joked about the man’s name. “His mother must have failed history to name a son Marco when he has the last name Polo.”
    Well, Marco got the last laugh if you didn’t count serving life with no possibility of parole.
    So here Greg sat, wanting Carrie to smile at him, all the while overwhelmed with guilt about what he knew was a very normal feeling.
    I like her
.
    Greg couldn’t breathe. It was Ginny’s voice.
    I do
.
    “Ginny?” But it couldn’t be.
    Her name as he said it was a mere whisper, little more than a breath, butCarrie heard it. She turned to him with a shocked, sad expression, not the smile he’d wanted. He tried to smile at her, thinking maybe then she’d smile, but he couldn’t. His facial muscles weren’t working.
    Go for it, Greg. With my blessing. It’s time
.
    It was the bump on the head. It had to be. He felt like Scrooge blaming Marley’s ghostly appearance on a bit of potato because Ginny’s voice was