Whispers at Midnight by Karen Robards Read Free Book Online

words dripped sarcasm. His mouth quirked into the slightest of smiles.
    “Curls, is that really you?” Seemingly in no hurry to move, he propped himself up on his elbows as the nickname he’d bestowed on her years before took her back to places she didn’t want to go. With his dead weight still pinning her to the ground, he did a quick visual inventory of each feature. It galled her to realize that any claim to beauty she might under better circumstances have possessed had been done in by an unfortunate combination of the weather, the lateness of the hour, the marathon drive she’d just endured, and her lingering depression over the implosion of her entire, carefully constructed life. Since she’d been driving, she’d washed her face with plain old liquid rest-room soap and water at the last pit stop in an effort to keep awake, which meant she had no defenses left. What he was seeing was her face just as he no doubt remembered it: the same unadorned blue eyes, the same freckled and sure-to-be-shiny snub nose, the same too-wide, bare-except-for-Chapstick mouth. Her face, without blush to shape it, was still more round than oval, herneglected eyebrows were once again well on their way to reverting to unibrow mode, and, in a complete antithesis of the woman she’d become over the last dozen years, not a trace of tinted moisturizer remained on her face to stand between him and the unvarnished truth. This circumstance did not make her feel any more kindly toward him; in fact, it increased the vitriol factor about a hundredfold. As their eyes met again, she scowled. In response, his smile widened into a full-fledged grin.
    “Baby, you’ve changed. And not just with the boobs and the hair. Way back when, you used to be sweet.”
    The teasing infuriated her all over again. If he had forgotten the most recent chapter in the history of their acquaintance, she had not.
    “Way back when, I used to be a lot of things—like stupid. Very, very stupid. Now get off—”
    She never finished. A copper-bottomed saucepan interrupted her as it came swooping out of the darkness like a navigation-impaired bat to crash with a sickening thunk into the back of his head.

5

    “D AMN IT !” Matt yelled, grabbing his head and rolling.
    “Run, Carly!” Brandishing the saucepan, Sandra was dancing around in the darkness as if someone had poured hot coals into her shoes. “Don’t you move. I’ll hit you again,” she said threateningly to Matt as he started to sit up. “See if I don’t. I’ll hit you again.”
    “Sandra, no!” Carly shrieked as Matt, cursing, arms wrapped around his head, sat up beside her anyway and the saucepan swooped down again. Matt ducked just in time. The pan’s copper bottom flashed harmlessly past his cowering shoulder. “He’s a friend.”
    Although friend wasn’t quite the right word to describe the role Matt had played in her life. And it certainly didn’t cover her feelings for him now. The lonely little girl who had hero-worshiped the three-years-older boy was long gone. She had grown up, and in the process had painfully discovered that the swaggering black-haired youth she’d thought hung the moon was just one more in a long line of untrustworthy male rats.
    “What?” Sandra looked at her, hesitating, the saucepan poised for another swing.
    Matt dared an upward glance and grabbed it, yanking it away from Sandra with a disgusted sound.
    “Whoops,” Sandra said, backing away.
    “It’s okay.” Carly scrambled to her feet. She felt a little shaky from the aborted battle, and her entire back side from her shoulders to her knees was damp, but as she looked down at Matt sitting on the ground with the saucepan beside him and his long fingers gingerly exploring the back of his head, a smile began to tug at the corners of her mouth. “He’s stupid but harmless. Sandra, meet Matt Converse. Matt, this is Sandra Kaminski.”
    “Uh, pleased to meet you,” Sandra said, nervously eyeing Matt.
    Still