Sweet Liar by Jude Deveraux Read Free Book Online Page A

out, she sometimes walked through his rooms, for there was no door shutting them off from the rest of the house. She didn’t touch anything of his, she just looked, reading the titles of his books about gangsters, but nothing interested her. He wasn’t a very tidy person, for he seemed to leave his clothes on the floor where he took them off, but on Wednesdays a rather pretty young woman came to the house to clean. She picked up all his clothes, washed them, and put them away. On one Wednesday, Samantha heard the telephone ring then the front door slam, and she knew the young woman had left early.
    Going downstairs, Samantha saw that the dryer was full of clothes and the dinning room table was littered with dirty dishes. Without conscious thought of what she was doing, she began to clean the room. When the dryer buzzer went off, she folded his clothes, took them to his bedroom, and put them away, telling herself all the while that she was free and if she wanted to do this she could. Besides, her landlord would never know who had done the work.
    It was at the beginning of the third week that Samantha found out about New York delivery services. As she was carrying three bags of groceries out of the store, one of the employees suggested that she have them delivered; after all, the delivery was free. All she had to do was tip the delivery boy a couple of dollars. For that matter, if she was very busy, she could call the store and tell them what she wanted, and they’d deliver her order. Samantha thought this was a marvelous idea, because now she wouldn’t have to leave the apartment at all. First thing the next morning, she went to the bank and withdrew five hundred dollars in cash, knowing that the money would enable her to stay in the house for a long time.
    When she returned to the town house, glad as always that it was empty, she breathed a sigh of relief and thought about what she wanted to do. Reminding herself that she was free, she knew she could do anything. With that thought, she popped herself some popcorn, went back to bed, and watched videos. But the videos her father had were all intellectual treatises on the lives of various bugs and birds, so after a while she fell asleep. How wonderful to be able to sleep in the afternoon, she thought, for surely a nap was one of life’s great luxuries.
    When the sound of laughter awakened her at twilight, she got out of bed, went to the window, and looked into the garden, where her landlord seemed to be having a party. He was cooking steaks on an outdoor grill—and Samantha could see he was doing it incorrectly, piercing the meat as he turned it—and drinking beer with a half dozen nicely dressed people.
    As always, he seemed to sense when she was watching him, for abruptly, he turned and waved his arm, beckoning to her to come down and join them, but Samantha stepped back into the room and drew the curtain closed. Putting a CD on the player, she sat on her father’s chair and picked up a book—she was now reading a five-pound biography of Catherine the Great. When the laughter from downstairs became louder, she turned up the music. All of her father’s CDs were of old blues singers, music from the twenties and thirties, mournful songs sung by people like Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson. It wasn’t music that Samantha would have chosen, but she was beginning to like it since it was what her father liked.
    As the third week ran into the fourth, Samantha found that what she really wanted to do most was sleep. It had always seemed to her that since she was twelve and her mother had died, she had never had enough time for sleep. There had always been school and household chores and other people’s needs to see to. Then, after she’d married, she’d had to prepare three meals a day and work eight to twelve hours a day six days a week. Now it seemed perfectly feasible that her tiredness would be catching up with her, and she was