Read Online Far From Heaven by Cherrie Lynn - Free Book Online Page B

shrugged and said he’d thought it looked cool. Okay. Then he’d come back to bed and made her forget all about it. For the time being.
    “I don’t really feel like discussing my sex life with David, if it’s all the same to you.”
    He scoffed. “Well, that answers my question. Come on, Madeleine. He was nothing to you. I saw the tears you shed over him and they were a crime .”
    She looked at him for a moment, then sat up and hugged herself, suddenly unexplainably chilled. “You say that like you know it for a fact.”
    “I do.”
    “You can’t.”
    “Everyone leaves you, don’t they?”
    “ What? ”
    “It’s a wonder you let anyone close to you at all. You only let me in because you expect that I’ll be gone tomorrow. No surprises. No pain. Right? Everyone you just told me about in your life, your mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles…none of them are in your life anymore, are they? You’re utterly alone.”
    Who the hell was he, mind-fucking her like this? “What does it matter to you? You will be gone tomorrow, so quit trying to head-shrink me. I already had that fight tonight. What are you, a psych student and I’m a fucking experiment for you?”
    He leaned up and, to her utter bemusement, skimmed his hands up her bare arms. Her shoulders. Gooseflesh exploded over her skin as if a phantom breath had gusted across it. His hand came to rest over her heart, which leapt toward him as if it wanted to break free and feel the squeeze of his fingers around it. A tiny sound erupted from her throat. She must be seriously disturbed.
    “I’m sorry,” he whispered, lowering his lips to her shoulder. He trailed a warm path to her neck and, against her better judgment, she found herself leaning her head away to give him easy access. After everything they’d done tonight, she still turned to liquid beneath his touch. “But you intrigue me. So much.”
    Why? She’d asked him already, but he wouldn’t answer. And she wished he would, wished he could tell her something that would make all the madness make sense, all the pieces of her life fall into place.
    That was ridiculous. Wasn’t it? Still, the idea wouldn’t leave her alone.
    “Everyone leaves me,” she whispered, stunned when the words slipped from her lips. Once they were out, she couldn’t build up a dam fast enough to stop the rest. “You’re right. But I’ve learned to deal with it. I’ve learned to put up walls, to not let anyone get too close.”
    It had all started with her mother. Sad, that she could pinpoint the moment when things started going out of control in her life—but had there ever been control of any sort? A kid could only be lied to so many times before she began to grow wary and mistrustful. By the time her mother had OD’ed, after years of empty promises and failed attempts to get sober, Maddie had been so removed from her own emotions she could remember looking in that casket and thinking that thin waxy figure inside wasn’t anything that had ever been attached to her. It had never loved her or cared about her at all.
    She wanted to unload all of that on someone, she realized. Maybe she did need therapy. Or maybe she just needed this . Someone to put his arms around her and not question her sanity. To whisper in her ear it was all right. Even if it was only for tonight, the night when she needed it most.
    “I’m…sorry, Madeleine, that you were hurt,” Ash said, his lips brushing her ear as the words left them. He sounded as if…as if he really meant it, which struck her as odd, because it implied he hadn’t meant anything he’d said all night.
    “I’ll be fine. I always have been,” she said, hearing a quake in her voice she hoped he would dispel. Suddenly she wasn’t so tired anymore. And there was only one kind of therapy she craved.

Chapter Seven
    The nightmare came; she’d known it would. It was never the same dream, but the same undercurrent of darkness ran through them all, like an obscene