When You Dance With The Devil (Dafina Contemporary Romance) by Gwynne Forster Page A

felt? “What I want now is to go home. I’ll pay for the room, but I’m not getting into that bed with you. I need somebody to care about me, cherish me and make me feel loved, and you don’t know what that is.” She tried to hold back the tears that streaked down her cheeks, but the sounds of her sobbing soon filled the little room.
    “What are you crying about? Hell, woman, I should have known better than to get mixed up with you. The room’s thirty-five dollars.”
    She heard his feet hit the floor, and when she looked up a few minutes later, he stood before her. Dressed. “What did you think I was? You were the one making up to me and giving me the come on. Don’t tell me you just wanted to hold hands; a man don’t get no charge out of that .” She only glared at him, too humiliated and too angry to respond.
    “Don’t you breathe this to a soul. You hear?” he went on, and held out his hand. “It’s thirty-five dollars. Let’s go.” She opened her pocketbook, counted out the money, and handed it to him.
    He counted it, folded the bills and put them in his pocket. “And I mean don’t you tell nobody. I’d be the laughingstock of the boardinghouse.”
    “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t want anybody to know, either.”
    Twenty minutes later in the hospital’s parking lot, he parked and let her get out of the car. “I’ll see you at supper,” he said in a voice approximating a growl.
    She didn’t answer, merely turned away and headed with leaden steps up Ocean Road to the boardinghouse. Her shoes made prints in the softened asphalt when she crossed to the other side of the street where trees would shade her from the searing sunshine. She wiped perspiration from her hairline and stained her once-white handkerchief with the bronze face powder that caked on her skin. At the corner of Rhone and Ocean Road, she leaned against the lamppost, exhausted from the heat and from her travail with Percy, and waited for the light to change. If only she could tell somebody how she felt. So alone, and with no one to care whether she lived or died.
    What makes you think you deserve a friend? She stopped short. Where did that idea come from?
     
     
    “Pretty hot out there, isn’t it?” Judd asked Jolene when she entered the boardinghouse. “You look like you mighty near wilted.”
    “It’s hot, all right.” She started past him toward the stairs.
    “You can cool off just as well down here,” he said. “I was just about to treat m’self to a nice cold bottle of ginger ale. Can I get one for you?” He stood between her and the stairs, all but challenging her to walk around him.
    “Thanks, but I’m beat.”
    He stepped back and let her pass. “A man who lives alone, dies alone.”
    She stopped midway up the stairs, as pictures of the seven people at her mother’s burial floated back to her. Emma Tilman had lived alone, died with only her daughter present, and had been on speaking terms with only two of the people who stood at her burial. She turned and walked back down the stairs.
    “I’ll have a ginger ale, but I won’t be much company.”
    He walked over to the soft drink dispenser, tall and sprightly for all his eighty-four years. She took a seat in the lounge, although she wished she was in her room.
    Judd opened one of the bottles, got a paper cup and poured her a drink. “Sometimes, you don’t need talk, just company. I’ve been sitting here watching the tennis matches over in Ocean Pines and wondering if I was ever that young.”
    “Tennis in this heat?” she asked. “It must be over a hundred degrees out there. I could hardly make it back here to the house.” She slapped her hand over her mouth, fearing that he would ask where she’d been, but her comment brought a different kind of response from him.
    “Live your life while you’re young enough to enjoy it, Jolene. I hope you don’t mind my calling you Jolene. When you get old, all you can do is watch other people live.”
    “But