Sweet Liar Read online

  “No. No choice at all. You’re not very good at listening, are you? You obviously didn’t listen to your attorney when he told you to read your father’s will.”

  “I am an excellent listener and I meant to read it.” He was spreading pâté on warm toast nearly as fast as she could eat it.

  “Like you meant to take a bath?” He wanted to insult her and make himself believe that she wasn’t the sexiest female he’d ever seen. But even when she should have been so unappealing, he had several thoughts about what he’d like to do to her delicious—perhaps that wasn’t the right word just now—little body. If she could read his mind, she really would be afraid. He’d like to see that tongue of hers on something besides the piece of pâté that had fallen to her wrist.

  “If you don’t want to be around me, you could always leave. You have my permission,” she said. Now that she was fully awake, now that her fear of him was lessening, she was looking at him. He had on a soft, dark brown cotton shirt and jeans, and he should have looked respectable, but she could see the outline of his chest muscles under the shirt. While he was slathering pâté on bread and handing pieces to her, he was eating just as much as she was, and when he chewed, his lower lip—that beautiful full lower lip—moved. She looked away.

  “I’m not going to leave until you’ve heard everything. When were you planning to start looking for your grandmother?”

  That startled Samantha into looking back at him. How did he know about that? “I am an adult and I—”

  Mike grunted. “That’s what I thought. You had no intention of looking for her, did you?”

  “It’s not any of your business, is it?”

  “It’s entirely my business. Did it ever occur to you to wonder who was to check your research? Who was to approve what you’d done and say you’d done enough searching so you’d get the money your father left you?”

  Samantha paused with a piece of toast on the way to her mouth and stared at him. No, not one of those questions had entered her mind.

  Knowing he had at last piqued her interest, Mike got up, went to the wine safe and took out a cool bottle of white wine. He knew there were several bottles of wine in there because he had put them there in preparation for Samantha’s arrival. Now, he had correctly guessed that every bottle would still be there. She may have problems, he thought as he looked in the safe and saw every bottle he’d put in there still sealed, but she was no drinker. Opening the bottle, knowing exactly where the corkscrew was, he took the wine back to her bedroom and poured two glasses full, frowning at the look on her face. “This is not a prelude to a seduction, so you can stop looking at me as though I’m a satyr. Drink it or not, your choice. I’m sure that someone as uptight as you is probably too prudish to do something so wild as drink a glass of wine.”

  Curling her upper lip at him in a sneer of what she hoped looked like contempt, she took the glass, drained it, then handed it back to him for a refill.

  Mike laughed. “A real sailor, are you? Any tattoos?”

  Samantha didn’t bother to answer him, but she wished she hadn’t drunk the wine. She had not eaten very much, and the wine was already going to her head, yet she desperately needed to be alert right now, not fuzzy-headed and relaxed as the wine was making her feel. “Not any tattoos I’m going to show you,” she heard herself say, then grimaced, for she had always been the very easiest of drunks. Half a glass of wine and she was dancing on tables—or at least thinking about dancing. It was something about her that had always disgusted Richard, but he had managed to cope with the problem. As always, he figured out a solution to all of Samantha’s “problems”: Because she had no head for drinking, he didn’t allow her to drink.

  Looking down at the tray across her legs as he lifted the cover, she saw a fat, succulent steak smothered in sauce. “I don’t eat meat,” she said, looking away.

  “Why not? You don’t like it?”

  “Where have you been for the last century? Haven’t you read the reports on meat? Fat content. Hardening of the arteries. Cholesterol. No fiber.”

  “Is that all? The air’s worse for you than any steak. Eat it, Sam.”

  “My name is Samantha, not—” She didn’t say any more because he shoved a piece of meat into her mouth. When she chewed, she found the flavor to be divine, really truly divine. Continuing to chew, she remembered that she had first given up meat as a way to cut down on their grocery bill.

  “Hated that, didn’t you?” he said smugly, watching her.

  She ignored his comment. “I thought you wanted me to listen to you. Would you say what you have to say, then get out of here?” Cutting another bite of steak, he started to feed it to her as though she were a child or, perhaps, as though they were on far more intimate terms than they were, so she took the fork from his hand and fed herself. He didn’t seem to notice the look she gave him when he picked up her salad fork and began helping himself to part of the steak. Samantha tried not to think of the scene: her sitting at the head of the bed, him sprawled across the middle, his head near her knees as they both ate from the same plate.

  “Ever hear of Larry Leonard?”

  “Yet another person we do not have in common,” she said jauntily, pointing her fork at him. She definitely should not have drunk that glass of wine.

  “Larry Leonard is—was—a writer of murder mysteries. He didn’t write very many of them and they didn’t sell well, but they received some critical acclaim because they were so well researched. All of them were about gangsters.”

  Her mouth was full of steak and she kept sipping on the second glass of wine. “The two of you should have gotten along splendidly as that’s all you read about.” As soon as she said it, she blushed.

  Mike grinned knowingly. “Been snooping, have you? By the way, thanks for putting my clothes away the day Tammy had to leave.”

  Samantha looked down at her plate so he couldn’t see her red face.

  “Anyway,” Mike continued, “Larry Leonard was actually named Michael Ransome, and he was my honorary uncle, a friend of my grandfather’s, and I was named after him. Uncle Mike lived in a guesthouse on my father’s land in Colorado, and I spent a lot of time with him when I was a kid. We were…buddies,” he said softly.

  Samantha stopped chewing when she heard the barely concealed pain in his voice, for she understood all too well how it felt to have people you loved die. Reaching out her hand to him, she pulled back before touching him.

  Mike didn’t seem to notice as he kept eating and talking. “When Uncle Mike died three years ago, he willed everything he owned to me. There wasn’t any money, but there was his library of books on gangsters.” He smiled at her teasingly. “The books you’ve seen.”

  “I’m sure they’re your own taste in literature.” She speared a cherry tomato before he could take it.

  “He also left me work he’d done on a biography of a big-time gangster named Dr. Anthony Barrett.”

  “The man you think I know.”

  Raising one eyebrow in praise of her memory, Mike didn’t answer directly but made a stab at the last bite of steak, then just as he was about to eat it, offered it to her.

  Samantha almost took it, but then shook her head. “I really wish you would finish this story and leave.” The intimacy of this shared meal was not something she wanted to continue.

  Removing the last cover from the tray, Mike revealed a deep dish of chocolate mousse. Samantha started to refuse, but it looked so rich and dark and creamy that before she knew what she was doing, she had dipped her spoon in it at the same time that Mike dipped his.

  “Where was I?” he asked, leaning back, licking his spoon while Samantha watched him, wondering if he was always so at ease. “Oh yes. The biography. I read what work Uncle Mike had done and became interested in this Tony Barrett. I’d just finished the course work at school and I was at loose ends, so I thought I might continue what Uncle Mike started. So I decided to move to New York and continue researching. When I was moving Uncle Mike