Free If I Can't Have You by Patti Berg Page A

differently.
    He took another deep breath and set the empty cup on the kitchen counter. Absently, he opened one of the cabinets and took out the spare bedroom key from the rack he’d installed a few months back.
    Suddenly he laughed. The woman in his house hadn’t moved the rack, hadn’t taken out the keys, had changed hardly a thing in sixty years. He didn’t understand her any more than he understood what was happening to him.
    But he wanted to see her again, and the only thing that kept them apart was that she’d locked him out of her room.
    Leaving the kitchen, he walked down the hallway and leaned close to her door. He listened for sound, for any movement within. When he heard nothing, he quietly turned the key in the lock and stepped just a foot inside and watched her sleep. Her blond hair feathered over her pillow, surrounding her head like a halo. She was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, and he’d seen a hell of a lot of beautiful creatures.
    At one time tonight he’d thought she was an angel. Later he decided she was the devil in disguise, taunting him at the gates to hell. Now, sober again, he realized she was an angel. God knows only an angel would take him in and give him shelter.
    He didn’t deserve it. He was a drunk, although he’d admit it to no one but himself. He’d shoved her against a wall. He’d bruised her wrists. He’d tried to make love to her in the middle of the ocean, wanting to know how good she felt, wanting something sweet to distract him, to help him escape his pain.
    Instead, he’d agonized over what he’d done, and now he felt like hell.
    It was nothing new. He’d felt that way quite a few times in the past twenty years. He’d never admit that to anyone, either.
    He walked softly toward the bed and in the first light of morning he could see her eyes fluttering rapidly beneath tightly closed eyelids. She frowned, a deep crease furrowing her brow. Were her dreams haunted, too?
    She rolled onto her side and a lock of straight blond hair fell over her eyes. As if by instinct, Trevor slid a finger under the strands and curled it around her ear.
    So soft. So very, very soft.
    She’d made up a story and saved his worthless hide when she should have had him arrested. She’d rushed into the ocean to save him. He hadn’t planned on committing suicide that time, he only wanted to cool off. But she’d come for him all the same. She’d made him coffee, a sandwich, and she’d stood just inside her bedroom and watched him as if she cared.
    She was special, not like the women he’d known before. Caring rather than self-indulgent. Vulnerable instead of tough. Fragile, where too many others had been hard and hadn’t given a damn—any more than he had. He’d never known anyone like her, and he hoped he knew how to treat her the way she deserved.
    oOo
    Daylight beamed through the curtains, slashing across Adriana’s face. She rubbed her eyes, yawned deeply, and stretched. Morning had come far too soon.
    Cracking open one eyelid, she peered at the clock. Eight o’clock. Maybe she’d just go back to sleep and try to have pleasanter dreams. Last night’s sleep had been fraught with too many nightmares, like intruders in the house, and the police coming in the middle of the night.
    She rubbed her eyes again and saw the bruises on her wrists. Suddenly she remembered, last night hadn’t been a dream at all.
    “Good morning.”
    Bolting up in the bed, she saw the stranger standing in the open doorway with a tray in his hands.
    Adriana dragged the sheet over her chest, feeling terribly naked in his presence even though she’d worn a more revealing gown last night.
    “How did you get in here?” she asked. “I locked the door.”
    He smiled. The same smile she’d seen in peaceful dreams, in books, on her TV screen.
    “I keep a spare key in the kitchen cupboard... right behind the coffee mugs. You never moved it. You haven’t changed much else since I went away,