And Then Came You Read Online Free PDF

roared in counterpoint to the ocean, which slammed into the rocky beach just below the inn’s gracefully sloping back yard.
    Sam drove into the inn’s wide parking lot, pulled into a diagonal slot, and turned off the engine. Her hands fisted on the steering wheel until she determinedly relaxed them. She took a deep, calming breath. But she wasn’t fooled.
    She wasn’t calm.
    She wasn’t peaceful. What she was, was furious.
    A neatly buried deep-down, fury nibbled at the corners of her heart despite her efforts to quash it. “I shouldn’t have to be doing this. Dealing with this. With
him
.” She should have been able to leave the past precisely where she’d left it. But even as that thought stumbled clumsily through her mind, she had to admit, if only to herself, that the past was never very far away.
    It walked beside her, shadowing her through holidays she couldn’t share with her child. It stopped and sneered at her every August 8, when she was forced tomark the passage of another year—and wonder what her daughter was doing. What she looked like. What she was feeling. If she was happy.
    All of those questions and more were a part of Sam’s life. They’d become the underlying thoughts that lived just beneath her consciousness. They were with her always. She tortured herself, wondering if her little girl was now taking ballet lessons or playing soccer. If she preferred dirty jeans to party dresses.
    If she ever wondered about her birth mother.
    The hard, cold knot of pain and loss stayed lodged in her chest every moment of every day.
    The past was a shadow that stayed just out of reach. Taunting Sam with memories that weren’t real—just imaginary home movies she’d made of the little girl she’d held briefly and then let go.
    Sighing, Sam stared out through the windshield at the sweep of ocean stretching out in front of her and squinted as the sunlight dazzled the surface of the water. Far enough out to avoid the slam of the waves against the shore, sailboats glided serenely under the cloud-dotted sky. Seagulls wheeled and danced in the wind. Closer to shore, surfers sat atop their boards, waiting for just the right wave. Sam knew exactly how they felt.
    Here she sat.
    Waiting for some unseen signal to tell her to get off her butt and go face Jeff.
    She leaned her forehead on the sun-warmed steering wheel and closed her eyes, seeing him again. Not just this morning, but nine long years ago. It was all so clear. Her last glimpse of him as he marched out of their apartment, a duffel bag stuffed full of his clothes in his right hand. He hadn’t stopped to look back at her.Hadn’t even lifted a hand in a good-bye wave. He’d just walked away.
    And now he was back.
    “But nothing’s changed, right?” Sam blew out a breath and straightened up. Shifting a glance at the inn to her right, she imagined Jeff in one of the plush suites. Rich men liked having the biggest hotel rooms, didn’t they? With hot and cold running room-service flunkies at their beck and call? She could practically
see
him, sitting at a table, poring over the
Wall Street Journal
and wishing he were anywhere but there.
    Then again, maybe he didn’t care.
    Maybe seeing her again didn’t affect him at all.
    Sam wasn’t sure which notion was more hurtful. If he hated seeing her again—or if it meant nothing.
    And as she stared out at the water stretching on forever, Sam’s mind drifted back, drawing up images that were all too clear.
    At eighteen, Sam thought she’d found her world. Every time Jeff touched her, skyrockets went off inside her. He’d been her first lover and the magic she’d found with him had never been repeated
.
    That last night with him, heat surrounded them and dazzled every breath, every whispered word. They came together over and over again in the dark, bodies meshing, hands stroking, breath mingling
.
    His body claimed hers and she gloried in the feel of him, sliding deep within. Climaxes rippled through her and