Road Rage Read Online Free

the lamplight, the strands winked various shades from strawberry blonde to deep auburn. It smelled like melon.
    Before she could decide what to do with herself, she heard the man say, “Goodnight, Haley-girl,” through the wall.
    “Night, Daddy-man.” The sleepy reply made her smile.
    The man padded toward the bedroom.
    She stiffened. The impulse to hide made her grab the closet doorknob. The brass felt cool and solid in her palm, but it wouldn’t turn. Wouldn’t even wiggle.
    Her heart hammered with the fear of being discovered. It might have been smart to dive under the bed at the last second, but in a panic-induced fit of optimism, she kept yanking at the closet door. It wouldn’t budge.
    The man came into the room, and she froze with both hands on the knob and one foot on the doorjamb. He didn’t spare her a glance as he shuffled in her direction, stopped a pace away, and peeled off his t-shirt to toss in the hamper beside the closet.
    Ah. Mystery solved. That torso was the stuff of dreams.
    The man’s chest looked like molded armor covered with tawny velvet. Soft-looking hairs nestled in the cleft between his pecs made an inviting trail to the waistband of his sweats. His stomach was firm with muscle, but a healthy layer attesting to a moderate appreciation for food and drink muted the six-pack that might have doubled as a cheese grater ten years ago. He was probably in his thirties, which appealed to her. That narrowed her age down to somewhere between twenty and Cougarville.
    She released her chokehold on the doorknob and stood there stupidly, staring at the masculine perfection an arm’s reach in front of her. The man swiped a left hand with no ring on it over his stubbled jaw and yawned. He made an adorable, unselfconscious sound. His exhalation lifted a lock of her hair and smelled of earthy hops and sleep. Lightly-creased eyes looked through her to the bed, and she glimpsed some heavy burden in his gaze, something darker than the memory of a nightmare. An urge to shine a light into that darkness eclipsed her fear.
    He moved toward the bed, and she had to suck in a lungful of air and flatten herself against the closet door to avoid a collision. The fresh bite of Irish Spring soap wafted by. Her skin zinged with the nearness of a man so stunning and haunted.
    He clicked off the lamp, casting the room in orange-tinged darkness, care of the streetlamp outside. The moment his cheek mashed into the pillow, he began breathing in the deep, regular pattern of a heavily sedated rhino.
    “Now what?”
    As far as dreams went, this one could use more action. The thought of crawling into bed with the attractive, single man and turning it into one of those dreams would have had some merit if a child hadn’t been sleeping in the next room.
    For lack of anything better to do, she tiptoed to the cracked-open door, planning to snoop around the man’s house, maybe go outside and check out the neighborhood, see if anything triggered her memory. But like the closet, the door wouldn’t budge. Not even when she wedged her foot in the crack and pulled on the handle with all her might.
    Her fear threatened to kick back into action, but she held it in check long enough to cross the room and try thumbing the latch on the window. It wouldn’t move.
    “Okay. Not going to panic.” But her shaking hands didn’t get the memo. She was trapped in this room by some strange object stasis. Did the phenomenon only apply to means of egress? She squared off with the baseball mitt on the dresser.
    “I am going to pick you up,” she informed it. She reached out and grasped the soft leather. Despite its worn appearance, the supple glove wouldn’t dent under her fingers. She could feel the texture of the leather, the roughness of every stitch. When she squeezed the woven netting, the edge abraded her skin. But she couldn’t move it or change it in any way. It might as well have been a bronzed display fixed to its pedestal in the Baseball