Sweet Liar Read Online Free PDF

twenty-five after four, she thought that maybe, if she rang the bell now, Michael Taggert would answer and maybe he’d give her back her bag so she could find a place to stay. The sooner she got started on this year-long sentence the sooner she could get out of this dreadful city.
    Taking a deep breath, smoothing her skirt, making sure her hair was tightly in place, she put her finger on the doorbell.

2
    W hen the man opened the door promptly at Samantha’s ring, she stood for a moment blinking at the change in him. He was wearing a clean blue dress shirt, partly unbuttoned but still neat, a loosened silk tie, dark blue tropical weight wool trousers, and perfectly polished loafers. His thick growth of black whiskers was gone and the black curls of his hair had been tamed into a conservative, neatly parted style. Within minutes he had gone from resembling the sexy, rather dangerous leader of a gang of hoodlums to looking like a prosperous young banker on his day off.
    â€œHello, you must be Miss Elliott,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Michael Taggert. Welcome to New York.”
    â€œPlease give me back my bag.” She ignored his outstretched hand. “I want to leave.”
    Smiling, acting as though she hadn’t spoken, Mike stepped aside. “Won’t you please come in? Your apartment is ready for you.”
    Samantha did not want to enter this man’s house. For one thing, she found it disconcerting that he could change his looks so quickly and so completely, that within minutes he could go from looking like a muscle-bound jock who’d never done anything more intelligent than memorize a few football plays to looking like a young professor. If she had met this man first, she wouldn’t have guessed what he was really like. As it was now, she wasn’t sure which man was the real one.
    When Samantha saw her tote bag at the foot of the stairs, she stepped inside the house to get it, but as her hand touched the handle of the case, she heard the door close behind her. Turning toward him in anger, her lips were tight, but his glance didn’t meet her eyes.
    â€œWould you like to see the house first or just your apartment?”
    She didn’t want to see either, but he was standing in front of the door, blocking her exit, as big as a boulder in front of a cave entrance. “I want to get out of here. I want—”
    â€œThe house it is, then,” he said cheerfully, as though she’d answered positively. “The house was built in the twenties, I don’t know the exact year, but you can see that the rooms have all the original moldings.”
    Refusing to move away from her bag, she stood where she was.
    But Mike forced her to participate, however reluctantly, as he put his hand on her elbow and began to half pull, half push her out of the foyer, propelling her toward the living room. She saw a large room, with big, comfortable-looking black leather chairs and a couch strewn about, a rough, hand-woven carpet on the floor, folk art from all over the world tastefully scattered about the room, as well as two enormous palm trees in the corners by the windows. Several masks hung on the walls, as well as Chinese tapestries and Balinese paintings. It was a man’s room, with dark colors, leather, and wooden objects—the room of a man of taste and discrimination.
    The room didn’t look much like a bordello as she would have thought from her first impression of him. In fact, the man beside her, the one wearing the banker’s clothes, looked more at home in this room than the jock she had first met.
    Aware that Mike was looking at her face, she sensed that he seemed to be pleased with what he saw, because the pressure on her arm lessened. Reluctantly, but with less anger, she followed him from room to room, seeing a dining room with a large table from India and a magnificent cinnabar screen against one wall, then a powder room papered with