Free Whispers at Midnight by Karen Robards Page B

ridiculousness of what had happened to him occurred to her, and she batted her eyelashes at him and gave him a huge, razzing smile. “My hero.”
    “As always.”
    His eyes mocked her. Carly frowned.
    “What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were leaving.”
    “Did you really think I’d let you two come up here all by yourselves? I was walking up the porch steps when I heard you scream.” He set the flashlight down on the cabinet that concealed the radiator by the door. “Good thing I didn’t leave.”
    With that he picked up the hem of his tee shirt and swiped the wet fabric over the bloody left side of his face. Carly was rendered speechless by a surprise glimpse of six-pack abs and a buff, wide, hair-covered chest. Clamping down hard on her purely instinctive female response, she realized to her dismay that some things never change.As cynically wise to the ways of men as she had become, she was still a sucker for a hunk.
    Good thing she knew this particular hunk for the skunk he was.
    She wrenched her gaze away to the open dining-room doors.
    “So I take it that whoever was in the dining room got away?” Glancing around, Carly shivered. The sheer horror of being grabbed in the dark was still sickeningly fresh; but the light and, as much as she hated to admit it, Matt the grown-up sheriff’s reassuring presence were going a long way toward helping her to get a grip.
    “He ran out the kitchen door just about the time I tripped over the cat,” Matt said. The cut was still bleeding copiously, Carly saw as she looked back at him. With less moisture to dilute it, the blood was bright scarlet now, and starting to drip from his jaw. “I wasn’t but a couple of yards behind him, either. That flowerpot knocked me for a loop. When I could see straight again I chased him across the backyard, but he had too much of a start. He jumped the fence into the cornfield, and I lost him.” His attention shifted back to Sandra, who was slowly, cautiously, sitting up. “Anything broken?”
    “Nothing but my shoe,” she said, staring dismally at the leather strap of her left sandal, which stuck straight out across her instep. “Third pair that got ruined so far this summer. Do you know how hard it is to find wide shoes?” She made a disgusted sound, and cast Carly a dark look. “See there, I told you: We should’ve waited ’til August. My horoscope said that any new venture I undertook early in the summer would turn out to be more expensive than I thought.”
    “Sandra’s a Pisces,” Carly offered with a faint rekindling of her earlier enjoyment. Matt’s expression as he absorbed Sandra’s gloomy acceptance of her astrological fate was priceless. He’d never had any patience with what he had called all that psycho stuff, probably because his mother, who believed in it so avidly that she kept a tarot deck beside her bed and checked her horoscope each morning, was always seeing brighter days ahead for her family that, so far as Carly knew, had never materialized. Now, as Matt extended a hand down to Sandra, he cast a derisive look Carly’s way.
    Carly grinned.
    “The stars know what they’re talking about,” Sandra said, taking a good grip on the handle of her pan again before she grasped Matt’s hand and let him haul her upright, which he did with impressive ease. Once on her feet, she dropped his hand, looked at him and frowned. “You know, you’re bleeding.”
    “I think you might need stitches,” Carly added, looking at Matt’s cut. It was simple human decency that prompted the stab of concern she felt for him, she assured herself, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the man bleeding all over her front hall was Matt.
    “That bad, huh?” Turning to look in the gold-framed mirror above the radiator cabinet, he grimaced at what he saw, then pulled his soaked tee shirt over his head, wadded it up, and pressed it to the cut. “Nah. Head wounds always bleed a lot. It’ll stop in a few