Forever Grace by Linda Poitevin Read Free Book Online

sounded. His most reluctant hostess had finished her nighttime preparations and was no doubt coming to check on him. Time to pretend he’d be able to sleep. Sean reached up to undo the buttons of his shirt. He shrugged out of it as Grace came into the living room, balling it up and tossing it onto the table. To his amusement, Grace stopped dead in her tracks for an instant and turned the same color as the strawberries of which her scent reminded him. He raised an eyebrow.
    “I hope you don’t mind.” He indicated the shirt. “It’s not very comfortable for sleeping in.”
    Her gaze left his bare chest and flicked down to the tear-away athletic pants he wore—the only garment he’d found that would accommodate his cast. Sean grinned.
    “Those stay on,” he promised.
    “I wasn’t—I didn’t—” Grace’s blush deepened, and she crossed her arms and favored him with a sour look. “I just wanted to make sure you have everything you need.”
    “I do, thanks.”
    “I’ll leave the light on in the bathroom in case you need to get up. Do you still have the painkillers?”
    He patted the pocket of his pants.
    Grace nodded her satisfaction. She crossed the room to the wood stove, opened the glass door, and bent down to feed two sizeable chunks of wood into the flames. Sean’s gaze skimmed her silhouette against the firelight, lingering on the line of her—
    Grace straightened again and turned to him, and he yarded his attention back up to her face.
    “I should warn you that Annabelle is an early riser,” she said. “I’ll try to keep her quiet, but I can’t promise anything.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” he replied. “I’m not likely to get much sleep as it is, so an early wake-up won’t be much of a hardship.”
    Her gaze traveled to the couch. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you something more comfortable…”
    “Don’t be. Given the sound of that”—he tipped his chin toward the roof and the rain that drummed against it—“I’m just glad to be inside.”
    “I suppose.”
    “I’ll be fine. Seriously.” He watched her begin to turn away. “And, Grace?”
    Chocolate eyes met his.
    “Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”
    She raised a finely arched brow. “If I remember correctly, it was my nephew who initiated your predicament. Giving you my couch is the least I can do.”
    “And if I’d somehow gotten myself locked out without your nephew knowing I was even at the cottage?”
    Grace considered the idea, then smiled faintly. “You’re right. You definitely owe me—and him. You can begin by apologizing to him in the morning for yelling. Good night, Mr. McKittrick.”
    She disappeared back down the hallway, and a moment later Sean heard the soft closing of a door. With a rueful shake of his head, he plumped up the pillow she’d left him, got himself arranged full length and covered on the couch, and reached to switch off the table lamp near his head. The room plunged into dark, the pitch-black kind that came from having no street or city lights, and silence settled, leaving him with nothing to focus on but the grim, angry throb of the leg he had so abused that day. Sean drew a long, deep breath through his nostrils. Then he paused, sniffing at the scent rising from the pillow beneath his head.
    Strawberries.
    He smiled faintly.
    “Sweet dreams, Grace,” he murmured.
    ………………
    Grace slid under the duvet, shivering at the chill of its cotton cover. Annabelle’s soft, even breathing drifted from the cot on the other side of the room, muffled by the utter silence that came with living in a cottage in the middle of nowhere.
    It had taken Grace a full week to adjust to the lack of familiar, everyday sounds here. No sirens, no traffic, no neighbors. Not even so much as a dog barking. The absence of sound had felt deafening. And that had only been half the equation.
    The dark had been the other half. Once she turned out the lights on her way to bed, a blackness descended