The Liar by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

compelled to check all the doors, check the alarm system.
    Despite the waste of electricity, she left a light burning in the foyer, left the second-floor hall light on. Rather than go to her own bed, she slid in with Callie.
    And lay awake a long time praying the phone didn’t ring again.
    •   •   •
    T HE FURNITURE COMPANY sent a crew who packed up two guest rooms, the foyer, and the dining room, where Shelby hadn’t had a meal since Richard’s accident. After some haggling, she’d agreed to sell the master bedroom suite to the private buyer.
    She wiped out the time payment, paid off a second credit card.
    Two down, ten to go.
    The house felt even bigger and less friendly with so much of the furniture gone. She had a nagging itch at the base of her spine to get gone herself, but there were details yet, and they were her responsibility.
    She had an appointment at one-thirty with the book buyer—made at that time so she’d have Callie down for her nap. She tied her hair back, put on the pretty aquamarine dangles her grandparents had given her for Christmas. Added some bronzer, some blush because she looked too pale. She changed the thick socks she liked to wear around the house for good black heels.
    Her grandmother claimed heels might pinch the toes some, but they boosted a woman’s confidence.
    She jumped when the doorbell rang. The book man was a solid fifteen minutes early, time she’d counted on to put coffee and cookies out in the library.
    She rushed down, hoping he didn’t ring again. Callie slept light at naptime.
    She opened the door to a man younger and better looking than she’d expected—which went to show, she supposed, about assumptions.
    “Mr. Lauderdale, you’re timely.”
    “Ms. Foxworth.” Smoothly, he held out a hand to clasp hers.
    “Come in out of the cold. I’ll never get used to northern winters.”
    “You haven’t been in the area long.”
    “No, just long enough to go through a winter. Let me take your coat.”
    “I appreciate that.”
    He had a strong-looking stocky build, a square-jawed face, cool hazel eyes. Nothing, she thought, like the thin, older, bespectacled bookworm of her imagination.
    “Donna—Ms. Tinesdale—said you might be interested in the books I have.” She hung the sturdy peacoat in the foyer closet. “Why don’t I take you right into the library so you can have a look?”
    “You have an impressive home.”
    “It’s big, anyway,” she said as she led him back, past a sitting room with a grand piano nobody played, a lounge area with a pool table she still had to sell, and to the library.
    It would’ve been her favorite room, next to Callie’s, if she could have made it cozier, warmer. But for now she had the fire going, had taken down the heavy drapes—also in the to-sell pile—so the winter sun, what there was of it, could leak through the windows.
    The furniture here, the leather sofa in what she thought of as lemon-pie yellow and the dark brown chairs, the too-shiny tables would all be gone by the end of the week.
    She hoped the cases full of leather-bound books no one had ever read would be gone, too.
    “Like I told you on the phone, I’ll be moving before much longer, so I’m inclined to sell the books. I’ve already packed up the ones I want myself, but these—well, to tell you the truth, my husband bought them because he thought they looked good in the room.”
    “They look impressive, like the house.”
    “I guess they do. I’m more interested in what’s in a book than how it looks in a cabinet, I guess. If you’d like to take a look at them, I can make coffee.”
    He wandered over, took out a book at random.
“Faust.”
    “I read how a lot of people buy books this way, by the foot? To decorate.”
    She wanted to clutch her hands together, had to order herself to relax. She should be used to this by now, she thought, it shouldn’t still make her nervous.
    “I guess I think it’d be nicer—more appealing to the eye,