Before I Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page A

though, so he snatched it out of her hand and shoved it into the lock.
    Thunder boomed, rolling in from a long way away. Lightning flickered, for an instant overpowering the yellow glow of the porch light, illuminating her face in harsh relief. What he saw was painful to behold.
    “Christ!” he said under his breath, and shoved the door open, pushing her through it ahead of him. He was glad to close the night and the storm outside. He didn't need it to play any more tricks with her face. He didn't want to feel anything for this woman, not even pity.
    She was already walking away from him, toward a winding staircase, pulling her sweater over her head as she went, giving him a breathtaking view of her slender back and the white of her bra.
    “Damn thing prickles like a cactus shirt,” she muttered as she climbed the stairs, dropping the sweater on the first riser. “Make some coffee, Rourke.”
    He just stared at her, disbelieving. What the hell had happened to the sometimes shy, always modest woman he had known?
    Life.
The word floated into his mind like a curse. Life. Just the way it had happened to him. She'd been little more than a girl back then. Now she was a woman. Maybe even a virago. Life had a habit of twisting people in the damnedest ways.
    Dragging his eyes from her before she rounded the bend in the stairs and gave him a sideways view of her full breasts in the white cradle of her bra—a view that he knew would confirm he still craved her—he turned, trying to figure out where the kitchen was stashed.
    He found it at the back of the entryway, through a door that opened just beneath the upper landing of the stairway. It was a nice kitchen, not too big but not too small. He remembered how she had often complained that architects had sacrificed the kitchen to the needs of people who dined out five nights a week. This kitchen was meant to be cooked in, and even had a cozy little breakfast nook with a bay window.
    So, he thought, she had her kitchen. He wondered if she ever used it. Because all the while she'd complained about tiny kitchens in modern construction, she'd complained just as loudly about how miserable it was to cook for one.
    The coffeemaker was on the counter, and beside it the same glass jar she had always kept coffee in. He found the filters in the cabinet above. She had always been logical in her organization. That much hadn't changed.
    As he spooned coffee into the machine, he found himself remembering how appalled she'd been by the utter lack of order in his home. He'd told her that he used it all up on his work, and didn't have any left over for his house. She'd laughed then. He wondered if she would laugh now.
    Then he told himself he didn't care.
    The coffee was almost finished by the time she reappeared in dry clothes, white slacks and a navy blue top. She'd brushed out her damp dark hair and caught it up in a clasp on the back of her head. He had to keep himself from sucking air at the sight of her slender neck. For some reason, that had always turned him on.
    She sat at the table and put her head in her hands. “God, I've got a headache.”
    “Hangover.”
    “Already?”
    “Yup. Where's the aspirin?”
    “In the cabinet over the sink.”
    He brought her three, along with a glass of tap water.
    She tossed them off like a shot of whiskey. “So tell me about your father.”
    “What's to tell? He's my father. I have one like most of the rest of the world.”
    She looked at him from hazel eyes, eyes that had always seen too damn much. He'd once fancied that when she cross-examined witnesses, they felt as if she could see straight to their souls—which was probably why so many of them blurted out things that their attorneys wished they'd left unsaid. “You're evading the question, Rourke.”
    “Damn straight, Stover.”
    “So, another big, dark secret from your past?”
    “I didn't say it was a secret, dark or otherwise. It's just none of your damn business.”
    She threw up a hand,