Nightfall Read Online Free PDF Page B

will.
     
    Gram had been half gone in the end, her mind giving up before her body could, but she’d looked Roxanne right in the eye, the last time Roxie had visited her. “Don’t marry for love,” she’d said. “Love won’t do you no damn good in the end. Marry your best friend. Marry someone who’ll take care of you, when you can’t take care of yourself.”
     
    Of course, that was when all the trouble with Matt had started. She wished she’d never told him about those last words with Gram. It would have made the last two years a hell of a lot simpler.
     
    She’d known that Matthew Robbins had been carrying a torch for her since high school. He was a charmer, son of a rancher himself, and the kind of tanned and muscled that a man got working in the fields. He didn’t look like all that much in a shirt and jeans, all narrow and lean and wiry, but when he stripped his shirt off, all the girls—and a bunch of the boys—stopped to watch how the sun shone on him like he was absolutely its favorite. He had dark hair and dark eyes, he loved to read, and he was one of the kindest, fairest people she’d ever known. One of her favorite pastimes, when she was a girl, was to ride out to the Robbins’ ranch and watch Matt gentle colts. He refused to call it “breaking” them; said if you had to break them, you were doing it so wrong there was no point in talking about it. He’d make friends with them, tease them, ease them into partnership. Even before he was in college, people were coming to get riding horses for their kids from Matt’s hand.
     
    He should have been her dream. Hell, in a different world, he would be. He’d certainly set his sights on her early on, and both his parents and hers had approved. But he’d been her friend for so long, and the idea of letting him have what he wanted, and then having their relationship be no different than those she’d had with everyone else—she couldn’t stand the idea. He’d never forgive her, and she’d lose one of her best and oldest friends. What had happened between them in college had been bad enough, and it had taken years to recover from that. She wasn’t going to let it happen again. No way.
     
    * * *
     
    Inside her house, Roxanne tossed her shoes onto the mat beside the door and her keys onto the table along with her purse. She wandered into the kitchen, loving the feeling of her bare feet on the cool tile floors, and opened the fridge. She kept it well-stocked with the kind of heat-and-eat entrees that were ready to go at the butcher’s counter, and after a minute, she settled on a stuffed salmon filet. She turned on the oven and put the food in to heat while she went into the bedroom and changed out of her scrubs.
     
    The clothes she wore to the hospital tended to be painfully utilitarian, but at home, she liked to indulge. Lace panties with a matching lace bra, sometimes thongs, sometimes nothing at all. She liked the way it made her feel, the sensation that it divided her time from the busy, intense, but sometimes brutally boring day of work into the luxurious joy of her time alone. She chose a set of purple lace this time, and as she leaned forward, shaking her breasts into the cups of the bra, her mind turned toward the man in the bed, and the shocking green of his eyes as he caressed her cheek. She felt her body tighten just thinking of it. Her thighs were electrified with sparkling wet heat, and her nipples twisted into bright, hot peaks. She ran her palms over them and gasped at the rush of sensation that shot straight to her cleft.
     
    She had a sudden, strong urge to play a crazy game, a silly little thing that drove her crazy sometimes—but no, it was too weird to do it when she was thinking about this total stranger. Way too weird. She pulled on a comfortable tank top and a pair of loose pajama pants, but her gaze kept sliding back to her nightstand. She rolled her eyes at herself as she walked over and opened the drawer. She surveyed