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

park to rented room to apartment to rented house with numbing frequency, depending on whether they had managed to scrape together the money to pay that month’s rent. Once Matt had gotten old enough to get a job—at eleven, he’d been mowing grass and pulling weeds for her grandmother the summer she’d first met him—things had been better, and eventually the family had managed to spend a couple of years in the same small house, where, for all she knew, they lived still. Matt had always been prickly on the subject of his family’s poverty, and she had always gone out of her way not to offend his sensitive male pride. He, on the other hand, had ultimately shown no such consideration for her sensitive female heart. Such one-way relationships were the story of her life, and she was sick and tired of it. The days of Carly the doormat were gone for good. A new chapter in her life had just dawned.
    Call it Carly Linton: No more Mr. Nice Guy. Or girl. Or whatever. The key point was, she was sick and tired of being nice. If she had learned just one thing in her life, it was this: Nice girls get the shaft.
    Matt’s eyes narrowed at her. He recognized her verbal thrust for what it was, of course. He’d always been good at divining what she was thinking.
    “I got a call about a possible prowler around your grandmother’s house. I was checking it out.” There was the briefest of pauses. “I’m the sheriff now.”
    For a moment Carly simply stared at him, wondering if she’d heard him aright. The Matt Converse she’d known had been a hard-partying, motorcycle-riding hellion who’d been right at the top of the town’s list of native sons most likely to end up on death row. The product of the union of a tiny spitfire of a Mexican mother and a tall, blond, eye-catchingly handsome but shiftless itinerant worker whohad ambled in and out of her life as the seasons and his whims dictated, Matt had been earmarked by the town as a potential troublemaker almost from the moment of his birth. His appearance, which combined his mother’s Hispanic coloring with his father’s height and good looks to devastating effect, had attracted attention early on. His awareness of local opinion and his defiant determination to live up to it as a boy and his increasingly bad-ass behavior as a teen and young adult had meant that too much attention flowing his way wasn’t a good thing. The fact that he’d been a reliable employee, a good son and brother, and a dependable friend to Carly and a few others was known to only a limited group. The rest of the town had taken his wrong-side-of-the-tracks toughness at face value, and treated him with the kind of wary watchfulness generally reserved for a rumbling volcano.
    “You’re joking, right?”
    “Nope.”
    Her eyes swept him. It was dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t tell that besides the jeans, his attire consisted of a plain old white tee shirt and sneakers. She also couldn’t help noting that he hadn’t changed a bit in appearance. Oh, maybe his black hair was shorter and he was a little taller, certainly a whole lot broader about the shoulders and chest, but he was basically still the same old too-handsome-for-his-own-good Matt. Not that she cared. In the aftermath of that long-ago night in the steamy closeness of his backseat, she’d been inoculated against his looks but good.
    “You’re not wearing a uniform.” Not that she actually thought he was lying or anything, but…
    His eyes narrowed at her. “It’s after midnight, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m off duty. Mrs. Naylor, who you might recall is the nearest neighbor, called me at home.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, which he flipped open. “Want to see my badge?”
    His tone told her that he really had one, but still Carly looked. Sure enough, there it was, all shiny and silver and official. Unbelievable. Her gaze rose to meet his. For a moment their eyes locked and held.
    Then she