Tasting Fear by Shannon McKenna Read Free Book Online Page B

her spine. “No. They’re busy. I’ll be out there as soon as I can.”
    “No!” He sounded appalled. “You’re upset! You should not drive!”
    “I will be fine. I’ll see you in an hour and ten, barring traffic.”
    “Hey! Wait! Nancy—”
    She hung up on him and lurched over to the kitchen counter. The little espresso pot had a mouthful of powerful coffee in the bottom. She poured it into a cup, cold though it was, and dosed it with sugar.
    Her cell began to tinkle. She checked. It was him. No freaking way was she answering now. Ten rings. A pause. Ten more. Take that, buddy. Then, the chime of a text message. She opened it. It said,
     
    At least take a goddamn taxi pls
     
    She snorted. Like she had a hundred and twenty bucks to burn. She tossed on her jacket, legs wobbling. This news had taken all the starch out of her, but it gave her a feeling of unfurling warmth in her chest that he worried about her. She cherished the feeling.
    Silly though it was. Bossy though he’d been. Sweet of him.
    She spent the drive up to Hempton trying to figure out why she’d flipped out like that. It was just a deserted house. A break-in was upsetting, expensive, a rotten inconvenience—and that was it.
    Lucia was no longer in that house. The very worst that could possibly happen had already happened.
    So why did she still feel so scared?
     
    Liam lurked in his truck and watched cops and forensics techs trooping in and out of the D’Onofrio house. Finding the house trashed had been a shock. Weird, for lightning to strike the same place twice, just a week after Lucia’s death. He felt strange, queasy, like he was missing something important. Something that kept flitting out of sight before he could focus on it.
    Maybe that was a result of not having slept. Around two-thirty a.m. he’d given up and headed to his furniture workshop. The detailed work of joining without glue or nails was one of his favorite activities. It put him in a mellow, focused place that he liked. The next best thing to sleep. Currently, he was working on a dining room table big enough to feed a dynasty. Sometimes he fantasized, in a vague, hopeful way, about his future wife while he worked on it, imagined how it would feel to see his wife and children gathered around it.
    The fantasy usually gave him a connected feeling. Hope for the future. He’d figured that working on that table would be just the thing to chill him out. Hook him back into reality. His real, bedrock values.
    He’d bombed out, big-time. He hadn’t been able to picture his future wife. She was a fog of bland possibilities, whereas Nancy D’Onofrio stood out, brilliantly sharp and clear. Every vivid detail of her, burned onto his retina. Those soft, cool fingers. At a certain point, his unruly mind had gone wild with erotic fantasies involving Nancy and the dining room table. Her, perched on the edge, graceful legs spread wide. Him, on his knees, with his face in her muff and his tongue as deep inside her as it would reach, licking up her lube. Her hands wound into his hair. Writhing and whimpering.
    He was still twitching from the aftereffects. Whew. Working on that dining room table was never going to be the same again.
    He’d gotten out of the house before Eoin was up. The first thing he’d done was to drive by the D’Onofrio house. And the bitch of it was, she wasn’t even in the damn house. Oh, no, it was enough for him that she’d been in it the day before. That she’d be in it again today.
    Jesus. How sick was that. How stupid.
    Well, he’d paid for his sophomoric bullshit. He got to be the dumb-ass who bore the bad tidings. That was what happened when a guy started nosing around in a woman’s messy, complicated life.
    Even so, he was quietly glad it had fallen out this way. Better him than her. If she’d been that upset to hear about it on the phone, it would have scared her out of her wits to see the condition of that house in person and alone, with no warning.