Miracle Pie (27 page)

As they dig up Nia’s past, the attraction
between them grows. Their brains may be damaged, but their bodies
and hearts are working just fine.

Excerpt:

Chapter One

The thin man wearing the tan constable
uniform at Nia Beaudine’s front door was a liar.

People told Nia she’d been a liar in her old
life. Those memories had been lost along with pieces of her skull
and brain matter. Her new self couldn’t understand why people lied.
Truths were hard enough to remember.

Why would this man –
any
man – want
to pretend he was a constable in this village of only 629? Most of
them odd. A place she should fit right in.

This man...he didn’t look
odd, but she knew he must be very odd. Not dangerous, though. For
one second s
he considered closing the door on him, but
e
very instinct told her she could trust this
man.

Instead, she said, “I think my cat is trying
to talk to me.”

Her words seemed to hang in the air like
bubbles. She studied his face, waiting for his reaction. Ready for
anything.

He studied her back. Just watching.

Yesterday Nia had learned the word
cryptic
while doing a crossword puzzle in an exercise to
expand her word skills.

Her cat was cryptic. A cryptic, talking
cat.

The man blinked. Not talkative like her cat.
Perhaps even more cryptic. The silence stretched out between them.
Nina heard the birds chatter and small rustles of leaves. Probably
a squirrel or animal running across the wooded lawn of the house
her mother’s aunt had bequeathed to her.

“Why do you think that?” he finally
said.

Nia’s arms prickled. She was sensitive to
sound – as if to compensate her for losing twenty-five years of
memories – and his resonating baritone made her skin itch from the
inside out.

“Because I understand what she’s saying,”
she said.

He nodded, his expression serious.

Better than she’d expected when the words
tumbled out of her mouth. Any other person would frown, a
conviction of her insanity stamped on their disbelieving face, and
step back, as if fearful that crazy was catching.

She always wanted to tell them it was
catching only if someone was trying to run them over in a car.

And to make sure it worked, that someone
would back up and run them over again.

But instead of giving her the
loco
look, this man stared at her steadily. His full lips closed and
pressed into thinness, his eyes steady on her face. Mournful brown
eyes that matched his nut-brown hair.

He made her think of a tree. Solid but not
broad. One that would bend but not break. And his face... Like his
body, his face was long and lean. Deep lines of pain scored each
side of his mouth, though she guessed he wasn’t more than thirty.
He couldn’t be much older. Not with his skin clinging tightly to
his bones. His nose was blade-like, half a triangle. His jaw
resolute. His eyebrows and hair thick.

He was a man’s man, making up for his few
words with an excess of testosterone.

Pheromones shot straight at her. She could
smell them. They twirled around her like invisible dust motes,
capturing and captivating her, putting a magical spell on her,
bringing to life senses that had been sleeping since she woke up in
the hospital bed, the world fuzzy, her mouth dry, and no thoughts
in her mind.

But her mind hadn’t been silent, not with a
scream shrieking through it that no one could hear but her.

Later, she recognized the scream must have
been her own voice. Even later, she realized that must have been
the last sound she made as the car ran over her.

She shivered, the memories upsetting, but
not as upsetting as the way he made her feel.

This was not the kind of help she’d hoped
for when she’d called the constable’s number.

Maybe this was the trouble her cat had been
warning her about.

If only Bast had been more specific.

This cat and human communication was new to
both of them. They’d been living together for only three weeks.
She’d just started to understand Bast’s yowls and meows and mrows
and an entire orchestra of sounds yesterday. Like the first few
pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle coming together.

Maybe they would get better with time.

She shifted her feet, the silence pressing
down on her. Early on in her recovery, she discovered other people
hated silence. The need to fill the wordless void compelled them to
speak. To say things they later wished were unsaid. To say the
truth.

Apparently he’d reached the same conclusion,
since he kept his gaze on her, not moving a muscle. As if the loser
would be whoever spoke first.

The silence was like a chewed piece of
gum...growing longer and longer and longer...

“What’s the prize?” she asked.

“Prize for what?”

“For talking last.”

His lips stretched slowly then kicked up at
the edges. “You talked first. You tell me what my prize should
be.”

She glanced down at his shoes. She’d amused
him. Maybe there was a prize for making him smile.

Maybe there were no prizes in life.

“Something’s crawling on your shoe.”

He glanced down, not twitching. The most
unmoving man she could remember. Since her memory went back only
eighteen months, she supposed there might have been others.

“Caterpillar,” he said. “A monarch.”

She peered down at the yellow, black and
white stripes on the fuzzy thing. “How do you know?”

“By the colors.”

She nodded. That made sense. Every day she
found out something new. “I’ll look it up on my computer.”

“When you called, you said someone was
trying to kill you.”

Her head came up. “I called the constable,
but you’re not him.”

His stillness became different. More than
just holding his breath. As if his blood stopped pulsing through
his veins and his heart stopped beating and even his soul closed
up, hiding itself.

Then a shudder shivered through him. Like a
car that wouldn’t start, coming to life. He blinked and his lips
parted. “Jerry and I are twins. Identical. How did you know?”

She’d learned about twins. Her therapist had
advised her to watch TV to learn about life. And she did learn. One
twin could be evil. The other could be good. But by now she knew
not everything on TV was true, and she guessed most twins were
neither good nor evil, but just people trying to get through life
without being killed and not wanting to kill anyone else. People
like her.

“You aren’t identical. You have deeper lines
on your face.”

He frowned, as if the thought displeased
him. She looked him straight in the eye and didn’t take it back.
Pretending to be what she wasn’t was too complicated. Life – with
all its strange scents and flashing colors and loud sounds – was
already too complex.

“You’re thinner than he is,” she said.

His frown didn’t smooth. “Anything
else?”

“Your voice is deeper.”

“No one’s said that before.”

“My hearing is very sharp.”

He looked at her oddly. A look she got
often. One that said
what are you?

If they asked her, she would tell them she
was like a book with most of the pages blank, the words wiped
off.

“My sense of smell is sharp, too.” Smells
could be awkward. And unpleasant. Except food. Most of the time,
the smell of food cooking was wonderful. If there really were a
heaven, she wanted it to smell like an Indian restaurant. Or
Italian. Or pumpkin pie baking in an oven.

If it were heaven, the smells could
alternate days. Every soul could walk around in its own cloud of
scent.

This man’s scent wasn’t unpleasant. She
wanted to lean in and give him a good sniff to identify the smell.
To imprint it in her memory. But the thought of getting too close
to him made her skin prickle again.

“Is that it?” he asked.

She scratched her head on the left side. The
thinking hemisphere, Dr. Whitcomb called it, the reason her
thoughts weren’t quite normal. As she scratched, she avoided the
area where her head indented.

“I think I should wait for your brother to
come. He’s the real constable.”

“My brother’s sick today.”

His deep voice snapped her gaze back to his
face. Though he still looked into her eyes, she could tell he was
lying. Maybe because he was staring too hard, watching to see if
she believed him.

“If this was a TV show,” she said, “he would
be with a woman.”

The shadows in his eyes lifted and the skin
around his eyes crinkled, while the corners of his lips curled up.
She warmed inside, an unusual feeling. She tried to figure out what
it was so she could explain it to Dr. Whitcomb.

Happy. That’s what it was. An
ice-cream-melting-on-her-tongue feeling. Only this melting happened
inside her chest, warming her heart.

Maybe she wouldn’t tell Dr. Whitcomb after
all.

She’d tell Bast instead.

Bast didn’t say, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” after
every sentence, as if she were analyzing her words like they were
math problems. Instead, she had a way of saying
mrrow.
Meaning:
That’s interesting. Go on.

“So you came instead,” she said.

“You said someone was trying to kill
you.”

“I didn’t actually say that. I said someone
had tried to kill me in the past. And someone was on my property
last night.”

The crinkles around his eyes deepened, as
did the creases on the sides of his face. “Did you see anyone?”

“Bast heard whoever it was first. And then I
did.”

“You didn’t call last night. You called this
morning.”

“I heard them leave last night.” She paused.
This was when the way he looked at her would change. But she had to
say it because it was the truth. “I only called this morning
because Bast told me trouble was on the way.” His expression didn’t
change, but Nia didn’t allow herself to relax. There was more.
“What if it was the person who tried to kill me?”

The sense of lightness coming from him
turned suddenly dark. Though no clouds dimmed the sun above them,
the air around Nia chilled as she looked at the hardness of his
face, as if his outline from the chin up were carved on a sword
hilt.

“I’ll protect you,” he said. “I’ll make sure
that doesn’t happen.”

Now Nia relaxed. For this second, she
thought she wouldn’t want to be the person he caught on her
property. For this second, she was fiercely glad he seemed to be on
her side.

OTHER
BOOKS BY EDIE RAMER

Contemporary

MUST WORSHIP CATS (a Miracle Interrupted
novella – before the miracles)

STARDUST MIRACLE (a Miracle Interrupted
novel)

MIRACLE LANE (a Miracle Interrupted
novel)

MIRACLE PIE (a Miracle Interrupted
novel)

YOU’VE GOT MURDER co-written with Karin
Tabke

Paranormal

CATTITUDE

DEAD PEOPLE

DEAD PEOPLE IN LOVE (short story)

DRAGON BLUES

THE SEVENTH DIMENSION (short story)

Science Fiction Romance

GALAXY GIRLS

MIXING IT UP (a Galaxy Girls novella)

Short Stories and Essays

The Fat Cat
in ENTANGLED, A
PARANORMAL ANTHOLOGY

(all proceeds go to Breast Cancer Research
Foundation)

The Kiss
in EVERY WITCH WAY BUT
WICKED

(all proceeds go to Kids Need to Read)

Killing the Rat Bastard Disease
in
AUTHOR MOMENTS

Fighting Back
in AUTHOR MOMENTS
II

(all proceeds from both Author Moments books
go to Cancer Research UK)

Edie Ramer is funnier on the page than in
real life. A multiple award-winning writer, she writes stories with
heart, attitude, and magic. She lives in southeastern Wisconsin
with her husband, two dogs, and one important cat.

In addition to her Miracle
Interrupted series, she’s published in paranormal and sci fi
romance, plus a humorous mystery. She co-edited
ENTANGLED, A PARANORMAL
ANTHOLOGY
, with all the
proceeds going to cancer research.

She’s happy to be able to
do what she loves nearly every day. And it’s a pleasure to hear
from readers who enjoy her books.

Connect with Edie Online

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