Coming Undone by Susan Andersen Read Free Book Online

then, hadn’t you?”
    She tipped her head so he could no longer see her eyes in the shadow of her hat brim. “I did so hear,” she muttered.
    The car arrived at their floor and he waved her out ahead of him. She stepped into the alcove with alacrity but then hesitated and turned back to him. “I’m sorry,” she said grudgingly.
    “Are you? What for?”
    “For making those rich-boy cracks.”
    He laughed. “Honey, I’m still rich. I’m just not obscenely wealthy like I was before.” He followed her off the elevator.
    She backed up a step. “What are you doing?”
    “Would you believe walking you to your door?”
    “This isn’t a date! I don’t need to be walked to my door.”
    “In that case, I’m walking me to mine.”
    She blew out an aggravated breath. “Fine. Whatever. I’m too tired to figure out your riddles. I’m going to bed.” She turned on her heel and stalked off.
    Once again he found himself walking behind her, eyeing the irritated twitch of her butt. After her performance with the band, he figured she had reason to be tired.
    She’d knocked his socks off tonight. He’d heard her music before, of course, so he’d already known she had a powerhouse voice. But listening to a CD and watching her perform live was like comparing silver to platinum. A record didn’t showcase the incredible contrast between her raspy speaking voice and that full-throated way she had of belting out a melody.
    And she moved onstage. From the instant she’d sashayed up to the microphone, she’d been in motion. Either her hips had been swinging, or her arms had been in the air or she’d been bopping in place while holding the mic out for the audience to sing the chorus of a song. All that energy in motion had been like a time warp back to the days when she used to dance backward in front of him so she could talk his ear off while they walked the sidewalks of Denver. Except tonight there’d been a confusing overlay of vivid woman superimposed atop the memory of the child she’d been then.
    An overlay he was dead determined to ignore.
    She stopped at the door to room 617 and inserted her card. When the light turned green she pushed down the handle. She was halfway into the little hallway inside the door before she appeared to notice him opening the door to room 619.
    She shot back out into the corridor and faced him, hands on her hips. “You’re next door? ”
    “Handy, isn’t it? We have connecting rooms.”
    She made a sound like pressure escaping a steam valve and stormed into hers. “I’ll be sure to lock my side,” he heard her say as she slammed the door shut.
    “Nah, really?” he murmured as he closed his own door behind him. Opening the closet, he dumped his satchel on the luggage rack, then sloughed the backpack off his shoulder as he continued into the room. Dropping it and his fistful of flatware onto the bed, he sat down and stared at the wall as a wave of exhaustion swept over him. It had been a long day.
    And it wasn’t over yet. Pulling the backpack closer, he unzipped it and rummaged through the main compartment until he located a spool of fishing line. Then he moved up the mattress until his back pressed against the headboard, laid out the utensils he’d taken from the coffee shop and started tying them, one next to the other, on the line. He fastened one end of the filament to the nightstand lamp’s finial, then fed out the line down the short hallway, looped it around the doorknob to the open bathroom door and ran it between the threshold and the bottom of the door to the hallway. Quietly making his way to P.J.’s room, he looped the line around her door handle, tied an angler’s knot and cut the remainder of the spool free.
    Returning to his room, he stripped down, brushed his teeth and went to bed.
    The sound of his bathroom door slamming and a half dozen forks and spoons clanking together as they danced on the line next to the bed woke him half an hour later. Rolling from bed,