Sweet Liar by Jude Deveraux Read Free Book Online Page B

glad for the time to rest.
    When she was in Louisville, she hadn’t been able to bear giving all of her father’s clothes away, so she’d boxed some of them and mailed them to New York. She found that it made her feel closer to him to wear his shirts over her jeans; she liked sleeping in his pajamas, and she especially liked his heavy flannel bathrobe.
    By her fourth week in New York, Samantha was feeling very relaxed. It was amazing how much she could sleep; sometimes she didn’t wake until ten in the morning, when she’d go downstairs to get a bowl of cereal, but sometimes she didn’t eat anything. When she did eat, instead of cleaning up after herself, she discovered that she could leave her dirty dishes in the sink and the young woman who came on Wednesdays would clean them. Samantha was glad of that because, quite honestly, she felt too tired to do much cleaning.
    Every day by noon she was feeling sleepy again, so she didn’t bother to take off her father’s pajamas. In fact, it began to seem like too much effort to bathe and put on clean clothes, after all, she couldn’t be too dirty since she did little more than sleep. When she tried to read a book about Elizabeth I, she could hardly keep her eyes open.
    Several times over the weeks she heard laughter in the garden, but she no longer got up to see what was going on. And her landlord no longer disturbed her. A few times she’d seen him in the kitchen, but she just smiled sleepily at him and went back upstairs, no longer running to get away from him.
    Putting the book on the bedside table, she turned off the light. It was only seven in the evening and it was full daylight outside, but she was too sleepy to stay awake. As she fell asleep, she thought that as soon as she was rested, she’d finish the book and all the others in the apartment, but right now she wanted to sleep.

    Looking across the picnic table in the back garden at Mike, Daphne Lammourche knew it didn’t take a genius to see that he was upset about something. Usually Mike was cheerful, always making jokes, and usually he came close to eating his weight in meat, but tonight he was pushing his steak around on his plate as though he weren’t hungry.
    Daphne didn’t know why he’d invited her tonight, but then maybe it was because she’d pretty much invited herself because she was “between jobs” at the moment, as people put it so politely. The last club where she’d worked had hired a new manager, a greasy little creep who thought it was Daphne’s honor to be allowed to do things to his body. When Daphne had declined the honor, she’d been fired as a result. She had a bit of money saved, and she knew she’d be okay until she got another job, but until then she knew Mike was good for a meal.
    â€œYou okay?” she asked.
    â€œSure, fine,” he said, but he was almost mumbling.
    Daphne had never seen Mike like this. Usually he was the life of the party, always laughing, always ready to have a good time. With his looks, he always had women falling all over themselves for him, even though, for the most part, Mike remained unaffected by them. Daphne wondered if he had a girlfriend back home somewhere, or for all she knew, maybe he had a steady girl right here in the city. When she saw the girls from the club who worked with her fling themselves at Mike, Daphne felt like telling them to stop wasting their time, because they weren’t going to get a guy like Mike.
    Daphne was aware that all the girls thought she slept with Mike, and she never told them differently, but she and Mike were just friends.
    Daphne had a problem that, unfortunately, she shared with too many women: She desperately wanted a man to love her, but every man who did love her she couldn’t seem to care about, so she spent all her time and energy, and often her money, trying to make uncaring, screwed-up jerks love her. When they did nothing but