Sleeping Beauty by Dallas Schulze Page B

The faded jeans could have been just a matter of style, but he'd mentioned that his bike was old, old enough that he was going to have to wait for parts to be found. Her mother would have said he was a failure, but Anne admired anyone who had a dream they were willing to work for.
    "I've heard that publishing is a very competitive field," she said when DeDe had reluctantly departed with their order.
    "lt can be."
    "But it's worth it, if you're doing what you love."
    Her tone was encouraging, the look in her eyes sympathetic, and Neill felt a vicious little pinch from his conscience. Obviously she'd jumped to the conclusion that he was a struggling freelance writer—a conclusion he'd nudged her toward. He nearly told her the truth right then but caught himself at the last minute. What difference did it make what she believed? He was going to be gone in a couple of days anyway, and if he told her now she would probably end up feeling foolish for having tried to encourage him.
    "So, where did you live before Seattle?" Anne asked, thinking a change of topic was in order, since he was so obviously self-conscious about his lack of material success in his chosen field. The vulnerability that revealed made him seem just a little less overwhelming. She settled back against the booth and smiled, suddenly almost comfortable with him.
    Anne had eaten at Luanne's more times than she could count. She could remember her father bringing her here when she was a little girl, in the days before he'd withdrawn so completely into himself. They would sit at a booth, and the meal was always punctuated by people stopping to say hello to Doc Moore. On rare occasions her mother would join them, though never without mentioning some restaurant she'd known in Atlanta and how much better the food and atmosphere had been there. Fewer people stopped to say hello when Olivia was there.
    When she was a little older, Jack had sometimes condescended to take his baby sister out for a hamburger or a piece of pie. He'd preferred to sit at the counter, the better to flirt with any girls who happened to be there. He never scolded her for spinning round and round on her stool, and he always let her order whatever she wanted, without telling her that her eyes were bigger than her stomach.
    The few dates she'd had in high school had, often as not, ended up at Luanne's. Lacking a mall or a McDonald's restaurant, it was the hangout of choice for local teenagers. The first time Frank Miller asked her out, a little less than a year ago, he'd brought her to LuAnne's. Since then, with the precision of a metronome, their weekly dates had altenated between Luanne's and Barney's Bar and Grill.
    In all the times she'd been here, Anne couldn't ever remember really talking to whoever she was with. Her father had always been a man of few words, her brother had been more interested in flirting with the girls, and Frank... Well, Frank just wasn't much of a conversationalist
    In one forty-five minute lunch, she talked more to Neill Devlin than she had in the last six months' worth of dinners with Frank. He made her laugh with his stories about the horrors of a cross-country road trip, like the motel in Wyoming where he'd awakened in the middle of the night when one of his neighbors put a fist through the wall next to Neill's bed. And the one in Nebraska where the pipes had been so rusty that the shower water had made him feel like he was an extra in a horror movie.
    Laughing, Anne shook her head. "You won't have to worry about that while you're here."
    "The fights or the rust?" Neill asked as he poured ketchup over his French fries.
    "Either one." Anne pushed a fork into her salad and tried not to think about how good his fries and burger looked. ''Dorothy runs a tight ship. No rust or fist fights allowed."
    "When I checked in, I felt like I was on Jeopardy. What's with the movie trivia?"
    "Oh." Laughter sparkled in her eyes. "The shoes should give you a clue."
    "Shoes?" Neill cocked