He lay on his back in bed that evening with Del curled against his side. Her fingers idly combed through the hair on his chest and he decided that with very little effort he could be persuaded to make love to her again. But first, there was something he wanted to do.
“What do you think,” he began, “about dinner and a movie on Saturday night?”
Her fingers stopped moving. After a moment, she said, “I think lots of people probably will be doing that.”
He slid his hand down over her hip and pinched her backside. “Smart-ass.”
“Hey!” She lurched against him before settling back down with a grin. “Oh, did you mean what did I think about the two of us having dinner and then going to a movie?” she asked with false innocence.
“Or I could invite some other girl.”
“Not if you want to have any shot at sleeping in this bed again.” They both chuckled, but her casual words warmed him.
That was the first time Del had ever alluded to a future of any sort. She was generally extremely careful about not defining their relationship, to the point that for the past couple of weeks he felt as if they’d been dancing around some enormous piece of furniture, pretending it wasn’t there.
“So,” he said, “would you like to go out?”
Del turned over and levered herself above him, propping her arms on his chest. “I would love to,” she said, as her hair fell around them in an intimate curtain, “but may I ask what prompted this?”
He shrugged. “I just thought it would be fun.”
She digested that for a moment. “Yeah,” she said softly, “it would be fun. We don’t take much time for just enjoying ourselves, do we?”
“Outside of this bed?”
She smacked his chest with the flat of her hand.
He captured her hand and pulled her down closer. “You’re right. I think it’s time we started to think a little more about getting to know each other outside the bedroom.”
“Or the office,” she added.
He smiled, running a hand over the smooth hair that spilled down around them. “Yeah.”
She laid her head on his chest. “Dinner and a movie would be nice.” She paused. “Your heart is beating really fast.”
“My heart always speeds up when you’re around,” he said without thinking.
Del went still.
He realized what he’d said. Oh, hell.
Then he felt her body relax against his again. “My heart beats faster when you’re around, too,” she said softly.
He was so relieved that for a minute he couldn’t speak. And by the time his vocal cords were functional again, he’d let it go too long, so he didn’t say anything.
But long after her breathing slowed and evened out as she slipped into sleep, Sam lay awake wondering. What had she meant? Had she only been thinking in physical terms or had she understood that he’d been speaking of emotion?
They slept in the next morning until nearly ten. Unlike most of the Saturdays they’d spent together, he awoke before she did. He put on some coffee and grabbed a quick shower, then stepped into a pair of jeans before heading back to the kitchen. Pouring a cup of coffee for himself and one for her, he carried them to the bedroom.
After setting the cups on the bedside table, he bumped her hip with his until she grumbled and slid over far enough for him to take a seat on the edge of the mattress. Del wasn’t a morning person, he’d discovered with some amusement. Until she’d had a cup of coffee, there was no point in even trying to hold a conversation or expect her to frame a coherent answer.
“Good morning.” He braced his hands on the mattress on either side of her body and leaned down to nuzzle her throat, seeking out the warm, sweet woman fragrance he’d discovered was strongest there. When her arms came up around his neck and she arched her body up to his, he smiled against her skin. “I have coffee.”
Immediately, one arm left his neck, hand outstretched. “I am your slave forever.”
Forever. He liked the sound of that. A lot. And he wished she meant it, but he suspected it had simply been a trite phrase. Well, that was okay. He had plenty of time to make her see how good they would be as husband and wife.
He was flipping eggs when the shower cut off and he grinned in satisfaction. Perfect timing.
Then the doorbell rang.
Puzzled, he automatically headed for the entry-way. Who in the world could be at Del’s door? She appeared to have no close friends and didn’t do anything other than work that he’d been able to see.
He checked the peephole, but could only catch a glimpse of an artfully tousled blond head of hair and a bit of a woman’s profile. Relatively satisfied that whoever it was presented no imminent threat of physical harm, he flipped open the dead bolt and turned the knob.
“Darling!” The woman came at him with her arms outstretched, then halted abruptly. “Well,” she said, smiling coquettishly. “You’re not the darling I had in mind, but you’ll do.” She let her gaze drift over his bare torso. “You’ll do quite nicely.” Then her smile sharpened as she dropped the vamp act and she held out a hand. “You must be Sam. It’s wonderful to finally meet you.”
He couldn’t have spoken if his life depended on it. He’d recognized her the moment she’d turned to face him.
Aurelia Parker. The Aurelia Parker!
The woman standing before him was one of Hollywood’s darlings, an actress who’d been making men drool since he was old enough to spell the word woman. Possessor of an Oscar and a couple other awards he couldn’t name, a nominee several times, a guaranteed box-office star worth millions, Aurelia Parker had to be nearly old enough to be his mother but she looked hotter than a lot of women his own age in a slim black pantsuit beneath which a simple white shell showed a surprisingly decorous hint of cleavage.
Silently, he held out his hand.
The actress took it and he was surprised by her firm, no-nonsense grip.
“I am,” he finally said. “Sam.” Wow, that was brilliant. He cleared his throat and stepped back. “Please come in.” And tell me what the heck you’re doing here and how you know my name.
She gave him a dazzling smile. “Now I see why Del has kept you to herself for so long. I was so thrilled when I heard about you two. I had begun to despair of her, I tell you.” One finely arched eyebrow shot up. “I know I shouldn’t ask, but Del will never tell me. Is there any chance you two are thinking of starting a family soon?”
Huh?
“Sam, don’t answer my—” Del stopped dead in the entrance to the living room, her face a study in shock and dismay. All she wore was a large navy bath towel wrapped around her, with a smaller white one wrapped turban-style around her wet hair. The bloom he’d put in her cheeks earlier vanished instantly as she took in the scene. “Mother. Hello.”
Mother? Aurelia Parker was Del’s mother?
Now he knew what the expression thunder-struck meant because that’s exactly how he felt. As if he’d been struck by a bolt from the blue. Only that would be lightning-struck, wouldn’t it?
He supposed that single arching eyebrow should have been a clue, he thought, immediately recalling the expression. And just what the hell had Del told her mother—good God, could Aurelia Parker really be her mother?—about the two of them? He’d been under the impression that Del and her parent rarely talked, but apparently Del had confided in her sometime during the past few weeks when he wasn’t around. Which wasn’t often.
“Hello, dear!” Aurelia Parker crossed the room and threw her arms around her daughter. “Happy belated birthday! I hadn’t seen you in so long I thought it would be lovely to surprise you.”
“But I told you this weekend didn’t suit,” Del said in a tone that would have frozen a polar bear.
Aurelia Parker straightened her shoulders, her feathers clearly a little ruffled at Del’s reaction. “If I waited until it suited you, I’d be in a nursing home.” The voice was crisper than anything he’d ever heard her utter on the screen, and for a moment, mother and daughter simply stood and measured each other.
Studying the two women, their resemblance was startling, although their differing styles played down the similarities. Someone who wasn’t looking for it might not even realize they were related.
But to him, it was clear. Del’s chin was a little more determined, and she mostly ignored her assets while her mother enhanced her eyes, her lips, her skin and damn near everything else that he could see to the maximum. Their figures were similar although her mother seemed a bit top-heavy considering how petite the rest of her was. Then again, that probably was the result of a clever bra or surgery.
“Fine. Come on in and make yourself at home.” Del’s voice was resigned. She seemed to have recovered a little, but even through the anger that was rapidly replacing his shock, Sam could see that she was deeply upset. “I’ve asked you never to drop in without calling, remember?”
“But, darling, it wouldn’t have been a surprise if I’d called! And this way, I got to meet your adorable Sam. He’s been out of town every other time I’ve come by.”
Out of town? What other times? He looked at Del, who was even paler than she’d been when she’d first seen her unexpected guest.
“Uh, Mom—”
“Honestly, Del.” Aurelia glanced at him and smiled, then turned back to her daughter. “I thought I was never going to get to meet your husband.”
Husband? It was a good thing Aurelia wasn’t looking at him, because his mouth fell open.
“Mom, make yourself at home,” Del said hurriedly. “Sam and I need to get dressed.” She snagged his hand with the one that wasn’t holding her towel in place and towed him toward the hallway that led to the bedrooms.
He let her, not because she actually had any hope of moving him, but because getting Del alone seemed like the quickest way to find out exactly why in the hell Aurelia Parker thought he was married to her daughter.
Del dropped his hand the second they stepped into her bedroom. Crossing her arms defensively and hugging herself, she said, “I guess you’d like an explanation.”
“You mean I’d like to know why your mother—whom you neglected to mention is a world-famous actress—believes you’re my wife.” His voice cracked like a whip and he saw her flinch. But hell—all he could think of was what a disaster this was. He’d spent seven years in blissful anonymity, and the first time he took a full-time lover she turned out to be the daughter of a star who rarely went a day without making some publication somewhere. What were the chances that he was going to stay anonymous now?
Hell, he’d even been thinking about marriage. Wouldn’t that have been just peachy?
“I needed a husband,” Del blurted. Her color was coming back in a big way as her cheeks flamed with what he could only assume was embarrassment at being caught in her lies. “Not a real one. Just a fictional one to get her off my back and make her stop trying to set me up with every man she came across.”
“So you used me.” He couldn’t control the rage and hurt seething beneath his set expression.
“Well, yes.” She looked completely ashamed. “It was easier if I talked about you than if I completely made a guy up. This way, I didn’t have so many details to worry about, since I already knew you.”
“How long?”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Almost six years now. She thinks we have an anniversary coming up in two weeks.”
“Hell!” He raked a hand through his hair. Aurelia Parker was Del’s mother. He’d be lucky if there hadn’t been tabloid photographers outside Del’s door this morning taking pictures of him in his unbuttoned jeans.
Del flinched again at the succinct curse. “I didn’t think you’d ever really meet,” she said, her voice shaking. “I mean, it wasn’t as if…”
“We were lovers,” he finished grimly. “Didn’t it even occur to you recently to tell me who your mother was?”
Tears were standing in her eyes now. “Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know. I’ve spent my entire life trying to get away from being Aurelia Parker’s daughter. I was afraid if I told you, you’d…look at me differently or something. Or not want to be with me at all.”
He was too angry to be careful with his words. “You’re damn right about that. The last thing I want is to be hooked up with someone whose name is going to get in the papers.”
Del put a hand to her throat, a blatantly defensive gesture, but her voice was steadier when she spoke again. “You have something specific against fame or is this just a general policy?”
Ah, what the hell. He’d been going to tell her soon anyway. “Eight years ago I stopped a gunman on the street in San Diego before he killed more people. I spent the next year trying to get away from the publicity it generated.”
“The San Diego shootings,” she whispered. She looked absolutely stunned. “He killed seven people before he was stopped by a Navy SEAL on shore leave. That’s you? Sam Pender?”
“Was,” he corrected. “I even had to change my name.”
“Why? You should be proud of the lives you saved that day.”
“I am,” he said. “But I didn’t need all the hoopla that came with it. I was just doing what I was trained to do. What I knew I needed to do to stop that guy.” He shook his head, looking into the past. “At first, there were reporters all over the hospital where I’d been taken. They would have followed me to the rehab center if I hadn’t changed my name—”
“They said you would never walk again,” she said, almost to herself. “They were wrong.”
“Yeah, and the last thing I want is to have to start running from the press again.”
“Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry.” Del looked stricken, but he was too angry to care. She slumped down onto the edge of the bed, her lower lip trembling. “I’ll go out and explain to her that I’ve been lying to her. You can leave if you like. I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
He turned away from her and paced the room. “Why in the hell didn’t you tell me?” He was repeating himself in his agitation.
This time, a hint of the Del he knew emerged. Her spine straightened. “Why didn’t you tell me your secret?”
“I was planning to!” he roared, and she flinched. “If you’d been straight with me from the beginning—”
“I didn’t think it was any of your business in the beginning,” she flared. “We might be sleeping together but that doesn’t mean I have to share my life story with you.”
The words hit him with the force of a blow. He stopped moving, his back to her as he absorbed the implications of her terse response. Clearly, she hadn’t been seeing their growing closeness in the same light he had. In her mind, all they were doing was sleeping together. She couldn’t have made her position more clear.
“You’re right.” His voice sounded stiff and rigid even to him; he had to force the words out through a throat so tight he could barely speak. “It isn’t any of my business.”
There was a silence behind him as he stalked over to the dresser and yanked out an old university sweatshirt, his standard Saturday attire. As he tugged it over his head, she said, “Sam…” in a trembling voice.
But he was done with the whole mess. “I’m leaving,” he said. “You can tell your mother whatever you want.”
He slammed the bedroom door behind him and snatched his keys off the kitchen counter as he headed for the door.
Del’s mother half rose from the couch where she’d taken a seat. “Sam….”
He didn’t bother answering.
He didn’t know where else to go, so he went to the office. It was pretty damn pathetic, he thought, when a man didn’t have a single friend he could call on at a time like this. But it was true. He’d immersed himself in his business so deeply that even his family had been excluded gradually. It had been too painful to stay in touch with his buddies still in the teams so he’d let their overtures and persistent calls go unanswered until they’d finally given up.
Del was the only other person who knew him anymore. Under normal circumstances he might have considered calling Robert, but this situation was far from normal, and besides, Robert couldn’t be expected to be objective. The man might not be related to Del by any legal or biological means, but it was clear that he was the closest thing she had to a father figure.
And Robert had been married to Aurelia Parker. That was going to take a while to compute.
As he let himself in and reset the security system, he berated himself for being four kinds of an idiot. He almost snorted aloud as he thought of how wrong he’d been in his mental vision of Del’s mother.
Your mother didn’t want kids?
She was afraid they’d ruin her image.
What an ass he’d been! He’d assumed she meant that her mother was worried about regaining her figure and still looking young. He’d half feared her mother had been a hooker, dependent on her looks for her income. When, in fact, Del had literally meant that a child might ruin the sexpot image Aurelia Parker projected as her stock-in-trade.
God! He threw himself into his executive chair and spun around to face the window. What the hell was he going to do now?
What did it matter? He doubted Del would keep his identity from her mother, and even if she did, what were the chances he could hang around Aurelia Parker’s daughter without everyone in the world seeing him? Someone would eventually recognize him, and then he’d be right back to that crazy place he’d been in eight years ago, with women everywhere angling to meet him. He knew how the reality-TV bachelors felt—the only differences were that he hadn’t chosen to make himself America’s bachelor, and he hadn’t gotten a million dollars for it.
Just one hell of a lot of aggravation and a total loss of privacy.
The beeping of the security system interrupted his thoughts, and he swiveled his chair back around, moving the mouse so that his computer monitor screen saver vanished and the programs were visible. Clicking on the state-of-the-art program, he saw that Walker’s ID had been confirmed by the scanner that surveyed his employees’ irises.
Moments later, he heard the subdued whoosh of the elevator doors opening and Walker’s footsteps marched across the carpet toward his office. Hell. The last thing he wanted to do was put on a pleasant face today.
“Hey, boss.” The big man loomed in the doorway. He leaned a shoulder against the frame and crossed his arms. “Thought I’d be the only one in here today.”
“Nope. Beat you to it.” He didn’t feel like answering questions so he asked one instead. “What are you doing in here on a Saturday?”
Walker shrugged. “I wanted to check over the plans for the child-recovery op next week one last time, be sure we’ve got contingency plans to cover every sort of foul-up.” He shifted from one foot to the other and his gaze slid away from Sam’s.
And suddenly Sam thought he knew what was eating at the guy. Karen Munson was going undercover on that op.
“She’s going to do fine,” he said quietly. “Her references are terrific. I wouldn’t send her if I wasn’t confident of her abilities.”
“I know.” Walker didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I just want to be sure nothing goes wrong.”
Sam nodded.
“I mean, I’ve been thinking…” Walker’s eyes met Sam’s. “I’m not sure putting Karen on cases involving kids is such a good idea. If something ever goes wrong, she’s going to take it hard.”
The man might have a point. “But I can’t pick and choose her assignments,” he said to his buddy.
“I guess not.” Walker sighed. “She knew coming in that a lot of recovery work deals with kids.”
“She did.”
“And it’s not my job to worry about how she’s handling that.”
“It’s not,” Sam agreed.
“It’s just that…she’s hurting,” Walker said. He looked thoroughly ashamed. “I’ve already hurt her more. And I don’t want to add to it.”
“I don’t, either, but I can’t just yank her off every case involving a kid, with no explanation. Everyone else would see what was going on and they might resent her getting special treatment.” He met Walker’s gaze with a cool one of his own. “Most of them don’t know about her past. Or they didn’t before the other night.”
Walker’s face turned a dull brick-red. He put up a hand and massaged the back of his neck roughly. “I was an idiot,” he said. “You probably should have fired me.”
“I thought about it,” Sam said honestly.
“The thing is,” Walker said, “she said she loved me. But when we couldn’t agree on our lifestyle, she bailed. Couldn’t get away from me fast enough. I couldn’t let that go.”
“And now?”
Walker sighed heavily. “And now I have to face the fact that I’ve destroyed any chance at a relationship with the only woman I’ve ever loved.” He let his arms drop to his sides as he slowly straightened. “Guess I’ll check over a few things before I take off.” He aimed a halfhearted wave in Sam’s direction as he moved off down the hallway toward his own office.