Whispers at Midnight by Karen Robards Read Free Book Online Page A

feeling the back of his head, where presumably a good-sized bump was beginning to make itself felt, Matt glanced up. Carly’s smile widened at the look on his face. She discovered that she really, truly liked the idea of that bump.
    “Wish I could say the same.” Matt’s tone was sour; his hand dropped away from his head. He got to his feet, hanging on to the saucepan and grimacing. “You shouldn’t go around hitting people like that. You can get yourself in a lot of trouble that way.”
    “Sorry,” Sandra offered weakly, keeping a safe distance between them.
    Carly intervened with unconcealed enjoyment. “Hey, she thought she was saving me from a rapist or murderer or something. It was really brave of her to hit you over the head. Thank you, Sandra.”
    “You’re welcome,” Sandra said, sounding happier.
    Matt’s gaze swung to Carly, who deliberately widened her Cheshire cat grin for his benefit.
    “Think it’s funny, do you?”
    “Well-deserved, was more what I had in mind.”
    “Oh, yeah?” He considered Carly for a moment without speaking. It was too dark for her to read his eyes, but it wasn’t hard to guess what was on his mind: the same thing that was on hers. The air between them all but crackled with their mutual memory of the last time they’d been together. She’d been a shy and socially backward eighteen, it had been the night of her senior prom, and he, the handsome twenty-one-year-old hell-raiser that all the other, more popular girls drooled over, had been her date. That night of glory had ended with her losing her virginity to him. She hadn’t had to lose her heart,he’d owned it for years. She hadn’t seen him to speak to since. The son of a bitch.
    “Am I wrong, or do I detect some hostility here?”
    “Ya think?” Hostility wasn’t the word. She could feel her skin prickling with burgeoning antagonism. That whole, agonizing summer after she had given him her all, he had avoided her as if she had a communicable disease. The glimpses she’d caught of him had been rare and at a distance, like Bigfoot sightings. For years before then he’d come around almost daily, teasing her and advising her and in general treating her like a favorite little sister as he’d worked around her grandmother’s house, and then, after her not-so-secret crush had found its ultimate expression in the backseat of his beat-up Chevy Impala, he’d dropped her like a wormy apple. He’d broken her heart, shattered her self-esteem, and given her her first taste of the true nature of the male beast: slimeballs, the lot of them.
    “Jesus, Curls, it’s been twelve years. You ever hear of forgive and forget?”
    The nickname was too much. Carly gave him a huge, blatantly false smile.
    “Hey, Matt?” She flipped him the bird. “Go to hell.”
    Matt blinked, then shook his head at her. “Ah-ah. Your grandmother’s probably spinning in her grave right now. How many times did I hear her say, I don’t care what the other girls are doing, I’m raising you to be a lady? Too many to count. And there you go again, letting her down.”
    Both Carly’s hands clenched into impotent fists. “Like I said, go to hell.”
    “I thought you said he was a friend,” Sandra said uneasily, looking from one to the other.
    Carly glanced at her. “I lied.”
    Matt gave a grunt that could have meant anything. Carly’s gaze swung back to him. For a moment the two of them exchanged blistering looks. Then Matt shrugged.
    “Fine. Have it your own way. You want to hold on to a twelve-year-old grudge, it’s all right by me. What are you doing here, anyway?”
    “I own this place now. Why shouldn’t I be here? The real question is, what are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’re sleeping under porches now.”
    That last, uttered in the nastiest tone she could muster, was a low blow, and she knew it. It referred to his hand-to-mouth existence as a child, when he and his mother and three younger sisters had moved from trailer