a-soft-place-to-fall by Rakhibul hasan (free e books to read .TXT) 📖

Easier said than done, Susie. Annie's phone wouldn't be up and running until tomorrow afternoon.

He could hear his pal's snort of derision. What's the matter with you, Talbot? Get in your fancy-schmancy Rover and drive over there. Bring a bottle of wine with you and toast her new address.

He glanced at the heavy watch on his left wrist. Ten minutes to midnight. The Family Friend still knew the boundaries. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The Pfeiffer cesarean had been rescheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Rounds were mid-morning. Maybe he would buy up a bag of donuts from DeeDee's first batch of the day and bring them over as a low-key housewarming present. It wasn't a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisee but even the Family Friend had to start somewhere.

#

She wouldn't stay put. No matter how hard Sam tried to keep her in the sleigh bed, she kept finding a way to slide out of it. Finally he climbed in next to her and blocked her exit with his body. She'd already nearly set the house on fire and then come close to drowning. He wasn't about to test the theory that bad luck came in threes.

The two cats were still at the far corner of the bed, down by the foot. Max was curled up in the hallway, snoring deeply. Outside the ocean crashed rhythmically against the

shore while he spent his first night in Shelter Rock Cove in bed with a beautiful woman. They hadn't made love or kissed or held each other close and yet he felt as if they had shared all of that and more. He had come up here to be alone for the first time in his life while he tried to figure out his next move. The career that had defined his life for so long was dead and the future – hell, he couldn't see it through the fog.

And then he saw her leaning over a grocery cart in the parking lot of Yankee Shopper and everything changed. He had made his living playing the odds, balancing the wise choice against the gamble, and he had always come out a winner. But when it came to life he took few chances. The lives of his brothers and sisters were in his hands and he wasn't about to screw that up. There had been women, not many but enough, but no one woman who made him feel as if everything that had come before was only a dress rehearsal. Besides, how many women wanted to throw in their lot with a guy who had five kids to raise at age nineteen?

He had watched as his friends met and married. He toasted a trio of godchildren and bought more baby presents than he could count. The wheel kept turning and after a while he wondered if maybe he was meant to be the helpful big brother, the terrific best friend, the world's best godfather who even endured the "Uncle Sam" jokes with a smile.

Funny how he had finally reached a place where he understood that not every man had a happily-ever-after ending in his future when fate sent The One into his life.

She murmured something in her sleep and shoved her rump up against his side. Her sweet warmth was more intoxicating to him than the champagne she would regret in the morning. He knew how she looked when she stepped from the tub and that she had a tiny birthmark near her right nipple. He knew that she wore a wedding ring on her left hand even though she was a widow and that the guy with the thinning blond hair had seemed taken with her.

Was she sleeping with him? The thought that another man might have the right to touch her twisted his gut into a painful knot.

And where was her furniture? She didn't strike him as the minimalist type, not with this enormous sleigh bed. The sleigh bed was the property of a sensualist. No doubt about it. The wood was smooth and curved and lustrous. The mattress, high and firm and welcoming. The abundance of pillows belonged to a woman who understood comfort and went out of her way to find it even if the bed took up the entire room.

There was so much he wanted to know. Who did she love? Was she happy? He wondered if Warren Bancroft knew the answers and, if he did, would he share them with Sam.

He turned on his side and fitted his body around hers, drew her warmth into his skin, and let the world fall away.

Tomorrow morning they would introduce themselves and go their separate ways but until the sun rose up over the ocean, the night belonged to them.

#

Annie opened her eyes then quickly closed them. Angry beams of sunlight stabbed her in the retinas, the temples, across her forehead, and around the back of her head. She took a deep breath then tried again. This time the room tilted at an odd angle while her

stomach threatened to slide out from under her. Bad idea. She wasn't about to do that again.

The vague memory of an empty stomach and a bottle of supermarket champagne swam into view. That would explain why she felt like a herd of elephants was learning to tango across her brain pan. Since when did George and Gracie snore like 747s on takeoff?

Just take it slowly. No sudden movements. All you have to do is get from here to the shower and you'll be okay.

Eyes tightly closed, she rolled over carefully, one little inch at a time, and was about to swing her legs over the side of the bed when she found herself face to face with the man she'd met in the Yankee Shopper parking lot yesterday. He was lying there next to her, bare-chested and in jeans, with his face pressed deep into one of her pillows. She glanced down at herself and realized she was wearing his shirt, half-unbuttoned, over her clearly naked body.

"Oh . . . my . . . God!"

He woke up on the last word, just before she let out a scream loud enough to bring the entire Shelter Rock Cove police department to her door.

"Nothing happened," he said. "You're not in any danger."

She felt like someone was blowing up balloons inside her head. "What in hell are you doing in my bed?"

"I was making sure you didn't hurt yourself."

Hurt herself? Just breathing made her fillings hurt. "Ten seconds," she said. "If you're not out of here by the time I count to ten, I'm calling the police." He didn't have to know that her phone service wouldn't be turned on until afternoon.

He swung his legs from the bed and stood up in the hallway. "You got drunk. You took a bath. Your robe caught fire and then you almost drowned in the bathtub."

"Please." It was hard to look dignified when you were nursing the mother of all hangovers. "Do you really expect me to believe that?"

He met her eyes. "Yes."

The smell of scorched fabric . . . the dream about him carrying a flaming robe . . . the sight of him plunging that robe into the bathroom sink . . . "I thought I dreamed it."

"The robe's hanging over the shower rod and I used all of your towels to sop up the water on the floor." A grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. "And don't worry about the front door. I'll take care of it as soon as the hardware store opens up."

She groaned and fell back against the pillows. "What happened to the front door?" "I didn't have a choice," he said. The grin widened. "Good thing I took kick-boxing." Another awful thought, one even worse than the kicked-in front door and the ruined

robe, occurred to her. "You were in my bathroom last night." He nodded. "Yep."

"And you –" She couldn't finish the sentence. It was too horrible.

"I tried not to look," he said as the grin turned into a downright smile, "but I'm only human."

She sat up, tugging at the shirt, wishing it covered her from neck to toes. "Then you got what you deserved," she snapped. "I'm ten pounds overweight and I haven't done a sit-up since 1997." Each word reverberated through her cranium like gunshot.

"You're beautiful."

"You're nuts."

He said nothing, just watched as she coiled her tangle of hair into a knot on top of her head. Her fingers felt disconnected from the rest of her aching, queasy body and she fumbled about, growing clumsier with each second that passed.

"Are you going to stand there blocking the doorway all day?"

"You had a bad night," he said. "I want to make sure you don't have a worse morning."

"I can take care of myself, thank you." "You weren't too good at it last night."

"Listen," she said with as much dignity as she could muster, "I'm sure you'll understand that making polite conversation with a strange man who saw me drunk and naked in the bathtub is more than I can handle in my current condition. Now if you'll step out of the way, I'd like to make it into the bathroom before I disgrace myself any further –"

She must have looked as green around the gills as she felt because he stepped aside immediately and she made it to the john in the nick of time.

#

She was deeply embarrassed, visibly angry, and, unless Sam missed his guess, badly hung over. The last face she would want to see when she came out of that bathroom was the man who had seen her at her worst.

She was also deeply vulnerable to kindness. She radiated loneliness the way some people radiated power and his own lonely heart responded to it.

He was already in over his head, drunk on the smell of her skin, branded by the feel of her body pressed against his in the heart of the night. He had no words for the way he felt, no easy explanation for what he knew in his bones was more than lust. He was hungry for her, for the sound of her voice, her smell, hungry the way a man would be if he had lost her once and then been lucky enough to regain a piece of heaven.

The feeling scared the hell out of him. He had no job, no home, no glittering prospects on the horizon. He had failed the people who relied on him to protect their future and he had no way to make it up to them. She'd be better off with the man in the Rover, the one who had looked at her as if she had hung the moon.

The thing to do was bail out now before things went too far. He would call Warren from the road and let him know he wouldn't be using the house and then he would drive north until he found a town where he could disappear. He needed solitude, not complications, and that was one thing he would never find here in Shelter Rock Cove. Not now.

He opened the door to his truck and dug out a faded brown sweater stashed in among his things. He slipped it on over his head then snapped his fingers for Max who was lying on the front porch watching him.

"Come on, Max," he called to the dog. "Let's go." No response at all from Max. He didn't even blink. Sam snapped his fingers again.

Max refused to budge. The dog rested his head on his forelegs and wagged his tail. "You too, huh?"

Max wagged his tail harder. Nothing short of filet mignon was going to move him from that spot. The place felt like home to him and the dog saw no good reason to leave.

And that was that.

Life's big decisions weren't always made after