Kisses From Heaven Read Online Free PDF

of a sniper.
    William Shephard was sleeping the sleep of the innocent. His wife had no longer died on a Friday fourteen years ago. His son and daughter-in-law hadn’t been killed in a yachting accident. The family business sustained for nearly a century had not disintegrated in his hands. He was curled up like a child, and as Loren looked at him, she felt a pit of pain inside trying to burst. Gramps was seventy-four, and she loved him, and she was totally powerless to help him.
    Her eyes closed, and the days ahead stretched out in wretched weariness in her mind. Two weeks of double work were coming up at the plant, and every day of the fortnight was filled to the brim with other people’s troubles. The scene at that horrid bar still grated on her nerves; how she hated the sleaziness of the place, all the men’s eyes on her… Her failures suddenly pressed in on her—her marriage, for one, Gramps, for another; and surely somehow she should have managed to control Angela, force to her sister to accept some badly needed discipline…Then there was the house. Everything seemed to be going at once, and there was just no way her salary could be stretched far enough to meet every need…
    She could manage, she’d told Buck. Well, she had and she could; nothing was going to get her down. Nevertheless…
    She walked slowly back down the stairs and pushed open the revolving door to the kitchen. Buck was leaning back against the counter, his hands shoved lazily in his pockets. He projected an easy, careless strength, a ton more than any one person needed, and not only brute power, but also a mental steel that just seemed to come with the man. She suddenly coveted that strength desperately and could feel something inside of her start to slip that she just never let slip…
    “I want you to go now.” She intended to sound very firm, to use the dismissive tone for which she was famous at work. Instead, even to her own ears, her voice sounded hoarse and even pleading.
    He was across the room in two seconds. “The hell you do,” he growled.

Chapter Three
    Loren couldn’t imagine how it happened. She never cried, and once the tears started, she was horrified when they wouldn’t stop. Her throat clogged up, and her eyes simply kept flooding…she was just so exhausted; it had been such a wretched, wretched day. Suddenly, Buck was there, encouraging her face to his chest, offering a comfort like riches in his silence and the gentle strength of his arms. He scooped her into his arms, found his way by some streak of fate to her favorite rocker in the library, and cradled her to his lap in that dark room, and rocked. One long arm circled her close, his fingers resting on the slim curl of her hip; the other hand very slowly smoothed back her hair, over and over.
    “I feel so ridiculous,” she burbled miserably.
    “There’s nothing ridiculous about crying,” he said gently. “You’re unhappy, Loren. Good Lord, I don’t know how you handle all of it—”
    “I am not unhappy!” she thundered between sobs.
    “All right. You are not unhappy,” he echoed patiently.
    With some effort, he dredged up a handkerchief from his back pocket, first mopping her face and then holding it over her nose. “Blow,” he ordered.
    She was mortified. “I do not have to blow my nose!”
    “Of course you do.”
    “You’ve been driving me crazy from the minute I set eyes on you!” she accused him and, snatching the handkerchief away from him, blew her nose. “You think I regularly invite strangers home? It’s all your fault. You…confused me. And I never cry. Certainly never on some—”
    “Stranger’s lap?” he supplied readily.
    “You may find all of this very funny—”
    “Loren, it’s obviously not a rational day for you. You might as well give in to your feelings…”
    She tensed like a coil when his head came down. Their lips met at an awkward angle, a whispery tease of softness in the dark. His fingers twined in her hair,