Gotcha! by Fern Michaels Page B

thoughts were suddenly all over the place. He thought about how lucky he was to have run into Julie Wyatt when he did. Someone must be watching over him. He thought he was even luckier that Julie Wyatt was not into watching the twenty-four-hour news channels. His conscience pricked at him for the way he was lying to her after she’d gone out of her way to be so nice to him. Julie with the haunted eyes. While she smiled and even laughed out loud, the smiles and the laughter didn’t reach her eyes. And now he knew why.
    Mace squeezed his eyes shut and wished with all his heart that Oliver hadn’t shared what he’d learned on the Internet in regard to Julie Wyatt. Mace was out of his depth when it came to Julie Wyatt. He wished there was something he could do for her. He made a strange sound in his throat that the dogs didn’t like. They stirred and pawed at his legs until he calmed them down. He marveled at how astute animals were. Later, he would talk to Oliver about Julie Wyatt. Now, he needed to think about his own life, where it was going, if he would survive his immediate crisis, and the time he had left to either go forward, backward, or languish in some damned high-rise in New York. All alone.
    As hard as he tried, Mace couldn’t concentrate on his own problems. Problems that, except for one, were being taken care of by Oliver. In the end, he knew it would all be all right because Oliver would make it all right. His thoughts drifted to Julie again and the information Oliver said he’d downloaded and sent to him on his laptop. He wondered if he would have the willpower to ignore the e-mail that was waiting for him. Probably not, because, in the end, Mace Carlisle cared about people, and his greatest joy in life was helping the people he cared about the most. Right now, he had moved Julie Wyatt to the top of his list.
    Forty-five minutes later, the rain stopped, the sun peeked out from the clouds to the west, and things began to dry. Fifteen minutes after that, the power flickered a few times and finally came back on. “And we have light, boy and girls!” Mace said dramatically. Cooper hopped off his lap and ran to the door, Gracie behind him. Lola waited until Gracie turned and offered up a sharp bark that meant Lola should get it in gear. She leaped to the floor and ran to the door. All three dogs waited for Mace to follow. He opened the door in time to see Julie park her truck. He hadn’t heard a sound, and yet the dogs knew. He marveled again at how intuitive the animals were.
    Julie waved as she made her way to the back steps that would take her up to the kitchen. “How did you like that storm?” she called out.
    “It was awesome,” Mace called out in return before he shut the door.
    Totally alone, Mace didn’t know what to do. He turned on the TV to Fox Cable News to see what they were saying about him. He got an earful. He turned it off and opened his laptop. He downloaded the material Oliver had sent to him. That’s when he heard a pinging sound that he couldn’t identify. He walked around listening until he realized it was the washer telling him the towels were done. Now he had to figure out how to work the damned dryer. Once again, he searched the cabinets and found the instructions in a plastic bag. What happened to OFF and ON switches? Why did appliances need all these bells and whistles? Were housewives rocket scientists these days? He finally came to the conclusion that all the bells and whistles were just something to drive up the prices of the machines.
    Mace dumped the wet towels into the dryer and pressed six different buttons that the instructions told him would make the towels soft and fluffy. He didn’t like soft and fluffy towels. He liked a coarse towel, one that would absorb the water. The instructions told him to set the timer to forty-five minutes. He did. The machine came to life with a little three-second tune he could have done without. He was back at the table and his laptop a