Read Online Darkness before the Dawn by Anne Stuart - Free Book Online Page B

spirits had plummeted even lower. For a moment she considered burrowing down under the sheets, bursting into tears, and hiding away from everything she didn’t want to face. But Kate would have left for work hours ago—there was no one to witness her weakness. And Maggie Bennett was made of stern stuff. She threw back the covers and staggered, moaning, to the shower.
    She was standing in the tub and turning around under the stinging spray of the shower when full consciousness returned. And she remembered what shower she was standing in.
    She screamed and jumped out of the tub, bringing down the new shower curtain that Kate had bought the day before, and then collapsed on the toilet seat, shaking. “Hell and damnation,” she said out loud in a shaky voice, pushing her sopping hair away from her face. She was tough, but nothing on this earth was going to make her get back in that shower.
    She leaned over, turned off the spray, and headed down the hallway to her sister’s bathroom to finish her shower. Her wet feet left a trail of footprints on the pale gray carpet. The living room curtains were open letting in a flood of pale yellow sunlight, and Randall Carter sat on the couch watching her.
    Her Scandinavian blood had left her essentially unconcerned about her nude body, but having Randall see her wasanother matter. She would have preferred Jack the Ripper. She could feel the flush covering her pale skin as she met his incurious gaze. “Pervert,” she said, and kept walking. His soft laugh followed her.
    By the time she climbed into Kate’s shower, she was well and truly awake. She stalled as long as she could. There was no question but that Randall would be there when she emerged, but she intended to be completely in control before she made her second appearance of the day. Kate kept aspirin in her medicine chest, makeup under the sink, perfumes and skin creams and everything a sybaritic female could want. That Kate usually had only minimal interest in such things didn’t pass Maggie unnoticed.
    Maggie washed her hair, blew it dry, shaved her legs, flossed and brushed her teeth, rubbed Chanel 22 body cream all over her skin, gave herself a manicure, a pedicure, and a facial mask, discovered a partially done crossword puzzle in the trash and completed it in eyebrow pencil, and finished it all with stretching exercises. It was damned hard to stretch an almost-six-foot-tall body in a six-foot bathroom, but she managed—the thought of Randall in the living room waiting spurred her on. She tried not to think much about Randall Carter, but one thing was indelibly etched in her memory: He hated, he absolutely detested, to be kept waiting. She doubted he’d learned patience in the last six years.
    She had no choice but to make use of Kate’s silk Chinese bathrobe, which didn’t do much to cover her statuesque proportions. Now, if she really had guts, she told herself, she’d walk back down that hall stark naked, just to show him how little he mattered to her. But that much guts she was sadly lacking, and even the skimpy turquoise silk bathrobe was too revealing to be completely comfortable.
    He was still sitting where she’d left him, immaculate and at ease, the Italian gray suit fitting him to perfection. He’d helped himself to coffee, in Kate’s best Limoges cups, of course, and he lounged, if Randall could ever be said tolounge, on the wide white sofa with his long legs stretched out in front of him.
    He looked up when she reappeared in the hallway, and his gray eyes swept over her, impassive as always.
    “Still here?” she demanded.
    “Still here,” he replied. “Did you expect otherwise?”
    “No. But one always hopes.” The animosity in her own voice startled her. She wasn’t that sort of person. But her outward hostility disturbed her far more than it seemed to disturb him. Carefully she pulled her self-possession back around her. “You could get me a cup of that coffee while I dress. I drink it with