Read Online Alternate Worlds: The Fallen by Kaitlyn O'Connor - Free Book Online Page B

was almost empty. I went through
slower the next time around, reading the labels on everything until
I had a blinding headache and was tired besides.
    When I’d gotten home and put everything up,
I fixed myself a light lunch and sat down to eat it while I worried
over my plans.
    I didn’t like the idea of daycare. I knew it
was what working women everywhere had to do to make a living and I
still didn’t like it.
    Unfortunately, I wasn’t independently
wealthy.
    Tired from worry and nearly a week of
spending half of every night fucking, I finally crept into my bed
and took a nap. I didn’t feel a lot better when I woke up,
primarily I decided because I just wasn’t used to taking a nap
during the day.
    The fact that Gideon hadn’t appeared was
merely coincidental.
    I finally decided he had gone off to search
for his missing sword.
    His behavior the night before made me a
little uneasy about it, though, which in turn annoyed me as soon as
I realized I was worrying about it. I figured I ought to be old
enough and wise enough in the ways of the world by now not to get
too wound up about something like that.
    It was bound to happen sooner or later and
with most men, human men anyway, it was usually sooner. I realized
after a while that I was actually surprised and a little flattered
that it had taken him most of a week to start looking for greener
pastures.
    There was no getting around the fact that it
put a crimp in my enjoyment, but after a while I was able to focus
on the problem again.
    Along about bedtime, when he still hadn’t
shown up—which was purely incidental to my thought processes—it
occurred to me that I never had actually particularly liked living
in the city. My early childhood had been spent at the old family
farm. My mother had decided to move us up to the city to be closer
to her brother and his family, but I still owned the old farm.
    The kid would probably like the farm better,
too. Of course it wasn’t really a farm per se. We’d just called it
that because it was outside the city limits in the country. It
hadn’t been a working farm since my grandfather’s time and I was
certainly no farmer. The old house was pretty much falling down,
too.
    I decided, though, that before I spent a lot
of time job hunting in the city, I’d just take a ride down and
check the old place out. It was situated almost ten miles out from
the nearest town to it, and that town wasn’t big enough to be
called a city or even much of a town. I should see if there were
any job prospects and just how bad the house looked now.
    The following morning I rose and packed a
small suitcase, figuring I might want to hang around a few days if
the house wasn’t in too bad a shape. It seemed probable that it
could take me at least a few days to check out the job market
alone.
    The farm was a surprise, not altogether
pleasant. It wasn’t in as bad a shape as I’d feared, but it was
pretty grown up and the house was definitely in need of repairs.
The main surprise was that it looked a lot smaller than I
remembered from my childhood. That wasn’t the bad part, though. The
bad part was that it resurrected memories. My mother had actually
been fairly rational during that stage in my life. She’d already
been heading toward fruitcake, but there were good memories tied to
the farm and those made me miss her—or at least the her she’d been
when we lived on the farm.
    I spent several days just rambling around
the farm and house, making notes on what needed to be fixed and
whether it was something I could do myself or would need to hire
someone to do.
    I was in town getting estimates on doing
those jobs I couldn’t when I happened upon a job opportunity. It
wasn’t management, but I hadn’t expected to land anything in that
area anyway, not in such a small town. It was a job running
a small office which was still within my range of expertise. The
girl that worked there was getting married and planned to be a
housewife.
    Quaint! I