Sweet Liar

by Jude Deveraux

  When Sam woke in the morning, at first she didn’t know where she was, but when she realized it was Mike’s bedroom, a feeling of safety came over her. Someone, and she knew it was Mike, had placed clean clothes over a chair for her. Getting out of bed, she pulled on the jeans and T-shirt he’d left for her—there were no shoes, as though he thought she’d run away if given shoes—and went into the bathroom. This was Mike’s bathroom, and the countertop had several bottles and jars on it, all neatly arranged, all clean. Picking up a bottle of aftershave, she smelled it, smiled, and put it down again, then found herself sliding back the glass door to the shower and looking inside to see his shampoo.

  There was another door that opened into the bath, and when she opened it she saw another bedroom. The bed was rumpled, recently slept in. Obviously, Mike had spent the night in this room, the room closest to her.

  After her inspection of the bathroom, she went back into the bedroom, and after telling herself she shouldn’t, she opened his closet door. It was a large, walk-in closet and had been fitted with built-in cabinets to hold his clothes, which were all neatly arranged. He didn’t have a lot of clothes, but what he had was all of the best quality. Touching the sleeve of a cream-colored jacket made of raw silk, she lifted the jacket from the rack, looking at the shoulders that were as broad as Mike’s shoulders and the waist as narrow as his. There was no way on earth that he’d bought this jacket off a store rack; it had to have been made for him. Inside the jacket was the label of a store in London.

  She put the jacket back, ran her hands across shirts and trousers, then touched perfectly polished shoes lined up on slanted shelves, each shoe with a cedar shoe tree inside it. Closing the closet door, she went back into the bedroom.

  There was a big chest against one wall in the bedroom, and after a moment’s hesitation, Samantha opened the drawers. Underwear, sweaters, a drawer full of workout clothes, socks. It was when she opened the bottom right-hand drawer that she saw a silver frame turned face down. She could no more have contained her curiosity than she could have willed herself to fly. Picking up the frame, she looked at the photograph of a very pretty young woman with lots of dark hair and an intelligent, almost aristocratic-looking face. “All my love, Vanessa” she’d written on the photo.

  As Samantha put the photo back in the drawer the way she’d found it, she wondered why Mike had hidden the photo, why he hadn’t wanted her to know that he had a steady girl who gave him all her love. Of course a man liked for a woman to think that she was the only one in his life, didn’t he? She remembered last night and Mike telling her that he wasn’t a rapist. He hadn’t been making a pass at her, but Sam had thought he was.

  After she finished dressing, she went into the kitchen where she found Mike sitting at the breakfast table. When she greeted him, he was distant to her, saying only that she should be in bed. She wanted to apologize to him for last night, for fighting him after he’d saved her life. She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t him but her, that she was the one with the problems, but she couldn’t bring herself to write what she felt. Quietly, she went back to bed and picked up a book, but didn’t read it.

  Later in the morning, Blair came and examined her throat and said she’d be all right by the next day, but if she could, she’d like for Samantha not to speak for another day. Blair went into the living room with Mike and minutes later Samantha got out of bed and followed them.

  Blair was leaning over Mike and examining his head. Neither of them saw Samantha, so she slipped upstairs and put on some makeup. When she came down, Mike was in the garden, sitting at the picnic table, lunch food before him.

  “You want something to eat?” he asked, but he didn’t look at her.

  Samantha opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. How could she explain something that she herself didn’t understand?

  The sunlight glistened on his hair, and she could see the bare place where his scalp was white. When she stepped closer to him, reached out, and touched his hair, he didn’t move. Encouraged, she stepped even closer and examined the wound. There were ten stitches holding the gash shut, and she knew without a doubt that his injury had something to do with why her throat was a mass of bruises.

  On impulse, she kissed the sewn cut. Mike sat still, for once not grabbing her, not trying to wrestle her to the ground, not tearing at her clothes. His acquiescence encouraged her, and she smoothed his hair over the place, covering it completely.

  Moving away from him, she went to take her seat on the opposite side of the table. He was looking at her oddly, as though trying to figure her out. She wanted to tell him to not try to figure her out, that she wasn’t like other people, that she didn’t fit into any mold.

  Mike didn’t say anything, just ate and kept his thoughts to himself.

  At one o’clock the telephone rang and when Mike answered it, he broke into a smile. “That’s great,” he said, grinning. “Congratulations. Wait a minute and I’ll ask Sam.” Putting his hand over the phone, he turned to her. “Are you up for some company? A friend of mine just passed her bar exam and she’s celebrating today. She and some others would like to come over.”

  Smiling, Samantha nodded yes, although she was leery of more of Mike’s friends. So far she’d met strippers and rednecks. What kind of bar had this woman passed? Bartending?

  Not wanting anyone to see the bruises on her throat, Samantha put on a turtleneck knit shirt. An hour later, when she met Mike’s friends, she was pleasantly surprised. There were four of them, one married couple, Jess and Anne, who had been married all of six weeks, and an engaged couple, Ben and Corey. It was Corey who had just passed her exam that allowed her to practice law. She said that she’d grown up in the same small town of Chandler, Colorado, that Mike had.

  When the four ecstatic people, carrying bottles of champagne, entered the town house and saw Samantha on the couch, they immediately assumed that she and Mike were living together.

  It was Mike who set them straight. “Samantha is my tenant,” Mike said. “She has an apartment upstairs.” He told them she’d fallen against the banister and injured her throat so she couldn’t speak. Sam fiddled with the turtleneck, afraid they would see the bruises that looked exactly like fingerprints.

  When Mike said Samantha was no more than his tenant, his four friends looked from one to the other and wiggled their eyebrows. It wasn’t the usual tenant-land-lord relationship that had the tenant ensconced on the library couch wrapped in a quilt.

  For Samantha it was good to have the presence of the other people, for their laughter broke the tension that had developed between her and Mike, and she got to see Mike as he was around other people.

  Since she’d been twelve years old, Samantha had led an isolated life. Her mother had been the more social of her parents, the one who was always organizing barbecues, dinner parties, and church socials. After she died, Samantha had been left with her father, who rarely saw other people. Then there had been Samantha’s marriage to a man who liked his socializing in private.

  But Mike was a gregarious creature who was at ease in groups.

  Jess liked computers, and when he saw the new equipment in Mike’s library, he couldn’t wait to turn it on. Mike gave Samantha all the credit for having chosen the equipment and for doing whatever had to be done to it to make it work.

  Looking at the directory, Jess brought up the Sierra game and within minutes, the three men were moving the mouse about on the pad and arguing over bees and ants and robbers.

  Lying on the couch behind them, Samantha watched Mike, thinking that it was odd that in such a short time all other men seemed to pale beside him. She watched him move, watched the way his muscles moved under his thin T-shirt, looked at the dark curls of his hair.

  Suddenly, it hit her how close she had come to death. Remembering the man’s hands on her throat, she could almost feel her life being squeezed from her. Yet, in the middle of that, she had known, known, that Mike would come to her if she could just make som
e sort of signal.

  Now that she thought of it, she knew that hitting the wall with her heel was a very weak signal to send to someone who was asleep. How had Mike heard her three puny knocks? How had he known they were cries for help and not just normal sounds? She could have turned over in her sleep and hit the wall.

  Yet somehow, Mike had heard her and he’d come to her rescue. When she thought of the door to her apartment with the hole in it, she felt chills run up her spine. Mike had put his foot through the panel and had reached inside to the lock. He had come through a solid oak door with the force of a bulldozer. Or a superman, she thought.

  Now, she looked at him, at his profile. Was he actually the most beautiful man on earth, or was that just the way she saw him?

  Looking down from his face to his strong neck, to his bare arm, the tricep well defined, to his small waist, his stomach hard and flat, her eyes moved downward to his legs, hairy and brown beneath his shorts.

  When she looked back up at his face, Mike had turned to her and was watching her. Samantha looked away from his eyes, not wanting him to know that she had been looking at him.

  Moving away from his friends, Mike came to sit by her on the couch. Behind him the men were arguing over the game, and the women were outside looking at Mike’s garden.

  “Are you all right?” Mike asked, tucking the blanket around her, even though it was warm in the house.

  She nodded, looking down at her hands.

  Leaning toward her, Mike slipped her high collar down and put his hand on her throat, on the ring of yellow bruises there. As his fingers slipped around the back of her neck, his thumb rubbed over her lower lip.

  Samantha’s breath caught in her throat as she looked into his dark eyes. It was as though they were alone in the room, but at the same time she was well aware of the other people around them. When Mike moved closer to her, she didn’t pull away, and when his lips were inches from hers, she still didn’t pull away. His breath was warm on her lips, warm and sweet and fragrant.

  When he touched his lips to hers, she closed her eyes, but when he moved away, she opened them. He was looking at her, looking at her in a way that she didn’t understand.

  “Sam,” he whispered, then kissed her in earnest, kissed her sweetly, not aggressively, but meltingly, as though he wanted to tell her something, as though he wanted to reassure her—as though he wanted to tell her that he cared for her.

  She put her hand up to his neck. Ah, she thought, to touch Mike, to feel the warm skin that she looked at so often, to feel the curls of his hair about her fingers. She applied pressure to his neck with her fingertips and he moved his head, his kiss deepening.

  Samantha lay back against the pillows, her fingers tightening on his neck, her mouth opening a bit as she felt the sweetness of Mike’s tongue touch hers. He wasn’t jumping on her, wasn’t forcing her, wasn’t overwhelming her.

  It was he who pulled away. Her heart was pounding and her breathing was deep and fast.

  “You like that better, sweetheart?” he whispered.

  “I—” she started to say, but he put his lips to hers again and didn’t allow her to speak.

  Putting his hands on the side of her head, he ran his thumbs over her cheeks, then moved and touched her eyelids, her nose, her lips. After a moment, he pulled back and held up his hand. It was shaking. “You do something to me, Sammy-girl. I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve felt it since that first day.”

  It was the women coming in from outside that brought them back to the present. Straightening, Mike stood up from the couch, but the way he was looking at her with eyes so hot, eyes that asked so much of her, he may as well have still been kissing her.

  “Have we interrupted something?” Anne asked. “Mike, you and your…tenant want us to leave?”

  Mike grinned at her. “Actually, I’d rather you stayed. This house seems to get a little, ah, friendlier when there are people around.”

  Looking down at her hands, Samantha tried to keep anyone from seeing her blush. What Mike said was true: She felt safer when there were other people with them. When there was an audience, she was sure Mike wasn’t going to do something that would take her where she didn’t want to go.

  At four everyone was starving, so Jess ordered food, enough for at least twenty people. When it was set up on the picnic table, Mike insisted on carrying Samantha outside.

  “Shut up,” he said when she started to protest. “You act like I’m a sex deviant when we’re alone, but you let me kiss you when the house is full of other people. If the presence of other people loosens you up, I will consider keeping the house packed. Now be still and let me enjoy myself.”

  She couldn’t keep from smiling as she put her head into the curve of his shoulder.

  Mike kissed her forehead. “Sam, you go to bed with me and I’ll show you a real good time. I swear.”

  She laughed—but she wasn’t tempted, not actually. She liked this much, much better than what people did in bed together. She liked the touching and the caressing, the kissing, liked the feel of Mike’s breath on her lips, the sight of his muscles moving beneath his clothes. She liked sitting close to him, liked the way he leaned over her when he tucked the blanket around her. All in all, she liked the way a man treated a woman before he’d had what he wanted from her. After he got that, everything changed.

  The five of them laughed and talked all through the meal. They talked of people Samantha didn’t know, but they always made an effort to explain who the people were. Corey told stories about Mike as a child.

  “Did you tell Sam what you did to your sister’s friends’ clothes?” she asked Mike, pointing a plastic fork at him.

  With an embarrassed chuckle, Mike looked at his plate. “I somehow forgot to mention that.”

  “All those girls in those white clothes,” Corey said, laughing.

  At the mention of white clothes, Samantha became alert. She motioned Corey to tell the story, but Corey looked at Mike, at his pleading eyes, and said no, that it was Mike’s story. Nothing anyone said could entice Mike to tell the story.

  After dinner, they went into the living room where Mike put on Kiri Te Kanawa singing Puccini and talked. Samantha got Corey into a corner and wrote on her pad, Tell me about Mike.

  “What do you want to know?”

  Samantha put her hands palm up to signify that anything Corey told her would be all right.

  “I don’t know where to begin. He has eleven brothers and sisters, and—” She laughed when Samantha’s mouth dropped open in shock. “There are a lot of Taggerts in Chandler.”

  Are they very poor? Samantha wrote.

  Corey gave a snort of laughter, then began chuckling as she put her hand on Samantha’s arm. “You should ask him about that. Let’s see, what else can I tell you? Mike’s degree is in mathematics. He did all the course work for a Ph.D., but then got interested in his old gangster and never finished his dissertation.” She looked at Sam. “His father would love for him to finish his degree. Maybe you could influence him.”

  Samantha shrugged to show that she had no influence over him. She and Mike were nothing to each other, just temporarily living together, and the fact that Mike spent a great deal of time trying to get her to go to bed with him meant nothing. As far as Samantha could tell, all men did that to all women. It meant nothing before the event and less than nothing afterward.

  “Mike,” Corey said as she picked up a calculator from a bookcase, “what’s two hundred and thirty-seven times two thousand six hundred and eighty-one?”

  Mike didn’t look around, nor did he take so much as a second before he answered. “Six hundred thirty-five thousand, three hundred ninety-seven.”

  When Corey showed Samantha the calculator reading, she saw that Mike was correct. “The whole family is like that,” Corey whispered. “In school we all thought they should have been in a circus.” She pressed Samantha’s arm. “Mike’s a good guy, a really good guy.”

  Samantha looked across
the room at him, and as she did so, Mike turned and winked at her. Sam smiled in return.

  Why do you like white so much? Samantha wrote on her pad. She was once again in Mike’s bed, and the house was empty and quiet, and she was very tired. In spite of the fact that she hadn’t done much that day, it had been a tiring one. Now, she wanted to go to sleep and she didn’t want to have to wrestle with Mike, didn’t want him trying to continue what they had started on the couch in the library.

  “You sure you want to know?”

  She nodded as he tucked her in, then started to protest when he stretched out on the bed and put his head in her lap, but he acted as though he didn’t hear her.

  “When I was fifteen my sister, she was about nineteen, I guess, brought home four of her college friends to spend a week at our house. I thought those girls were the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen. I followed them around everywhere and they teased me mercilessly.

  “To this day I don’t know what made me do it, but one day while they were out swimming, I gathered up all their clothes and took them downstairs, threw them in the washers, and added three cups of bleach to each load, then turned on the hot water.

  “When the girls got back, they had nothing to wear except their swim suits and clothes that were white and tiny.” He stared into space for a few moments. “They were beautiful. Tiny white shorts. Microscopic T-shirts. Skirts that only reached midthigh.”

  What did your parents do? Samantha wrote.

  “It took them half a day to figure out who had done it—I do have brothers, you know—but when they found out, my mother said I should be blindfolded and stood up against an outside wall of the house and the girls should be given shotguns. But Dad said he’d take me outside and beat me. So we walked outside, he grinned at me, rubbed my head, and sent me off to spend the rest of the week with Uncle Mike, but he told me to limp whenever I saw my mother.”

  That’s all that was done to you?!!!!! she wrote.

  “Sure. Dad took the girls into Denver and bought them new clothes. After the girls left, my father gave me a small white shirt that had no buttons down the front. He said one of the girls had worn it to breakfast, and when she’d reached for something, all the buttons had popped off. He even saved a button for me.”