It Happened on Maple Street - Page 85

I had to move. To work off excess energy. I must have had too much

diet cola. I had to use the restroom. Urgently.

I had to call someone.

Who would I call?

For so long the only person I reported to, good or bad, had been Chris. He didn’t like to spread our information around. He said people judged. And didn’t forget.

Back in front of my computer screen, I read the note again. I had to answer Tim. I had to tell him I hadn’t broken his heart. He’d broken mine. More than once.

I hit reply.

No, that didn’t work. It was going back to Classmates.com.

I read again what he’d written.

He’d given me his private e-mail address.

I had a book due. Two of them. I had hundreds of pages to write in a matter of weeks.

I had business e-mail to tend to.

I copied that e-mail address, opened another post window, and pasted. I addressed an e-mail to Tim Barney.

Sitting back, I couldn’t quit grinning. At that moment, I didn’t care that I was forty-seven years old. I didn’t feel forty-seven. I felt like I was eighteen again. And fully alive.

Really, truly alive.

Like I hadn’t been since that night on the country road with James.

The memory might have stopped me, before. It had stopped me the last time I’d seen Tim, that day in the summer of 1980 when he’d come to see me.

But I was Tara Taylor Quinn now. A woman who’d learned that she could take care of herself just fine. A woman with friends who cared about her. A woman of worth.

Old history was just that—old. I’d left it behind. As of this morning. I’d heard from Tim the very same day I’d broken from my old life and was finally seeing myself honestly. The timing was not a mistake. It urged me on.

Tim wasn’t in the past. He was saying hello now. And I wanted to answer him.

I had to answer him.

I scrolled down and started typing.

Coming in from the factory floor where he’d been supervising the trial of a machine he’d designed to mold plastic to go around a windshield, Tim stopped at his desk in the engineering office to check his e-mail and see what fires he had to put out there before he could start on the design waiting for him.

The engineering portion of his job he enjoyed. The managerial bull was usually a huge time waste.

Tara Taylor Quinn.

Who in the hell was that? Some toolmaker trolling for business? Didn’t sound like a toolmaker. Probably just junk mail.

He clicked.

And skimmed what was there. Wait. Was this his Tara?

Skipping down to the bottom of the e-mail, Tim read the signature. Sure enough. It was Tara.

His heart was racing, and he could feel the grin stretching across his face. Sounds around him faded. Everything faded. He was in another world as he kept reading.

Tags: Tara Taylor Quinn Romance
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