“HONEY, WHY DON’T YOU just fly to Pittsburgh and see him?”
Amanda averted her eyes, not wanting to hear another lecture from Ginny, their administrative assistant, who stared at her from across her paper-laden desk. The older woman had figured out months ago that Amanda was involved with someone. She had finally gotten her to talk about Reese after the holidays. Probably because Amanda had walked around with a constant frown on her face since she’d arrived home.
As she’d flown back to Chicago on January 2, she’d wondered if it was time to end the affair. The intimate conversation she’d shared with Reese, and the way he’d made such sweet, tender love to her afterward, had convinced her she had to at least call a time-out, if not quit the game altogether.
Damn the man for slipping past her defenses, breaching her outer walls. Somehow, he’d worked his way into her previously brittle heart. That could be the only explanation for why she’d opened up to him the way she never had to anyone else before.
She’d told him such dark, ugly things about herself, it was a wonder he hadn’t run screaming into the night.
It wasn’t that she minded so much that she cared for him. The problem was, caring for him meant she wanted to be with him, to keep going with this thing that had sprung up between them. And that, she greatly feared, would not be good in the long run … for Reese. Having feelings for the man meant she didn’t want to see him hurt. And she especially didn’t want to be the one doing the hurting.
But it was inevitable, wasn’t it? Just a foregone conclusion? When the going got tough, Amanda hit the skies.
“Would you talk some sense into her?” another voice said.
Jazz had come into the office, wearing a pair of her mechanic’s overalls. A smear of grease on her cheek and the sweat on her brow made her hard labor obvious, but didn’t diminish her earthy beauty one bit. “I swear to God, Manda, if you don’t call the dude, I’m gonna leave a wrench in your aft engine and just let you fall out of the sky and put us all out of your misery.”
Amanda rolled her eyes, feeling very much ganged-up on. “I saw him on Martin Luther King day, and I talk to him every few days.”
The government holiday had been a busy one, and a weekday. She hadn’t been able to take time off for any out-of-town tryst. But she had arranged for a three-hour layover at the Philadelphia airport. Reese had driven all the way there … and spent those three hours doing incredible things to her in the cockpit of her plane.
She thrust away the warm, gooey feeling those memories inspired. “It’s not like I’ve ended it.”
“Uh-huh. But you’re planning to,” Jazz said knowingly. Ginny nodded in agreement. “Definitely.”
She glared at both of them. “It was never meant to be serious. My God, we live in two different states.”
“And you fly a plane for a living,” Jazz retorted. “An air trip from Pittsburgh to Chicago would probably take less time than commuting in from the suburbs on the El every day.”
That was crazy talk. Jazz almost made it sound like she thought Amanda could actually move to Pittsburgh and live with Reese. Make something permanent out of what was just a holiday fling.
Wouldn’t that be nice? Her, Amanda Bauer, the heartbreak queen of Chicago living a couple of blocks away from Reese’s perfect, all-American family with a house full of siblings who adored him and would absolutely hate her guts.
I don’t think so.
She stood abruptly, silently telling them the conversation was over. Jazz and Ginny exchanged a frustrated look, but they didn’t say anything else, knowing her well enough to know she was already mentally halfway out the door.
Glancing at the clock, she said, “It’s late. Time for all of us to call it a day, right?” Forcing a laugh, she added, “Wish that stupid groundhog hadn’t seen his shadow this morning. I don’t know if I can stand another six weeks of winter.”
Jazz muttered something under her breath. Something that sounded like ice-queen, but Amanda ignored her.
Ginny, a little less blunt, walked over and put her hand on Amanda’s shoulder, squeezing lightly. “We love you, honey. We just want you to be happy.”
Love. Happy. Two words that hadn’t even been in her vocabulary for the first eighteen years of her life. One of them still wasn’t.
Not true. Not entirely, anyway. She did love. She loved Jazz and Ginny and her uncle Frank. She loved her sister, if in a somewhat pitying way. She supposed she even loved her parents, because for all their inattention and coldness, they were still her mother and father, after all.
How crazy was it to imagine she might widen that circle and actually let herself love a man? One man?
Maybe it bore consideration.
“I know,” she finally replied, giving Ginny a brief hug. Normally not demonstrative, she knew the impulsive act had probably taken the older woman by surprise. Jazz’s wide eyes said she felt the same.
“I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
Grabbing her keys and her bag, she left them and walked through the quiet office wing of the airport where Clear-Blue Air was housed. As always, it took a while to make her way to the car, and even longer to drive to the city and park in the garage by her building. The entire time, she tried to pull her thoughts into order, to focus and make sense of everything that was going on and how she felt about it.
Feelings and all that stuff so weren’t her thing. She just didn’t know what to do with them.
“Hell,” she muttered as she got out of her car, stepping into the frigid Chicago night. It was very dark out, and even inside the parking garage, the wind whipped wildly off the nearby lake. Its gusts made eerie whistles through the openings of the structure, making her freeze for a second before locking up and heading toward the elevator.
As she punched the button and waited for it, an unnerving sensation began on the back of her neck. She glanced side to side, then turned to look behind her. Nobody was around, not a single car moving. She’d gotten home after most commuters but before the club crowd started hitting downtown.
“Okay, cool it,” she told herself, knowing she was imagining things. Still, she didn’t drop her key chain into her bag, keeping it in her hand with long, sharp keys protruding between her fingers. Just in case.
The elevator arrived and she quickly scanned it to make sure it was empty before stepping inside. She remained close to the control panel, ready to jab the “open” button if somebody she didn’t like the look of suddenly came out of nowhere and joined her. But nothing happened, not a sound, not a soul.
She breathed a sigh of relief, laughing at her own foolishness as the doors began to slide closed.
That’s when she saw him. A man stood a few yards away, not far from her own car. Fully visible beneath an overhead light, he must have intentionally moved toward it because he had not been there a few seconds ago.
She caught a good look at his face right before her door shut, blocking the view. That glimpse was enough to capture a few quick impressions. Short, compact body clothed in black. Longish, stringy blond hair. Dark-eyed glare.
And suddenly, she remembered him.
“No way,” she muttered, her hand tightening on the keys.
But she knew it was true. She’d just seen the thief, the guy who’d mown her down back in Las Vegas.
“You rotten bastard,” she added, wishing the door hadn’t closed before she’d identified him. Because her first impulse was to go after him and punch his lights out for shoving her into the street.
Then, of course, the wiser head that had kept Reese from doing that very same thing back in Vegas whispered wisdom in her brain. He could be armed, and he’d already proven himself dangerous.
Within seconds, the door reopened on the ground level of the garage. There was no way he could have beaten her here, not unless he’d sprouted wings and flown. He’d been far away from the stairs and the other elevator was clear on the opposite side of the deck. So she wasn’t nervous as she stepped outside. Merely very curious. And worried.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered.
It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. The guy had tracked her down, come all the way to Chicago for some reason. But instead of confronting her, he’d played a sneaky game of hide-and-seek, trying to scare her.
But why?
Right outside the garage, people passed by, a nearby bar already swelling with regulars. She put her keys away, though she kept very focused, constantly looking around as she walked the few yards to her building. The doorman offered her a pleasant nod, and once she was inside, she breathed a small sigh of relief.
Not that she was truly frightened. Creeped out, that was a much better way to put it.
“Thanks, Bud,” she said to the doorman as she headed toward the elevator. Before she’d reached it, however, she heard a distinct ring. Her cell phone. Grabbing it, she answered with a distracted, “Hello?”
“Is this Amanda Bauer?”
The voice was unfamiliar and throaty, as if the person were trying to disguise it. “Yes, who is this?”
“Long time, no see. You look a little different without the wig.”
It was him. The guy from Vegas … the one from the garage. Tense, she stepped into a corner, not wanting to be distracted by the voices of people coming in behind her. “What do you want?”
“I want what’s mine. That night when I bumped into you, I dropped a bag of my stuff. The police report says they didn’t recover it, which means only one thing. You kept it.”
“Bullshit,” she said with a snort.
He hesitated, as if surprised she wasn’t quivering with fright. Which only made her more convinced he was nothing to be afraid of. If he’d had any kind of a weapon, and had the guts to use it, he would have grabbed her in the parking deck and forced her to take him to his so-called loot.
“I’m calling the cops.”
She could almost hear his sneer. “What are you going to tell them? That the guy you stole the jewelry from is after you?”
“Oh, I stole your merchandise, huh?”
“Yeah, you did. And I want it. More important, the people I work for want it.”
People he worked for? What was there some ring of thieves in Vegas led by a modern-day Fagin and the Artful Dodger? Ludicrous.
“Look, you’re crazy. I don’t have any jewelry and you’ve just wasted a trip to Chicago,” she said, feeling more annoyed than fearful. “Maybe you should go back and check all the storm drains or something. It probably fell down one when you tried to kill me.”
“Drama queen.”
“Psycho asshole.”
He hesitated, as if at last realizing he wasn’t scaring her one little bit. “Then your boyfriend has it.”
She stiffened, suddenly wary. If he’d tracked her down, he might have done the same thing with Reese. “No, he doesn’t.”
Her tone must have betrayed her tension, because Mr. Robber’s voice got a tad more confident. “Oh, he has it, all right. I think I’ll have to make a trip to Pittsburgh now.”
Damn it. “How did find out who we are?”
“You’re famous, lady, don’t you know that?”
She had no idea what he was talking about.
“Plus, the people I work for have a few friends in the LVPD. Your names and contact information were right on the police report.”
That didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the Las Vegas Police Department. She suddenly had the urge to call Parker and tell him to stop worrying about his wife’s footwear and start looking for dirty cops.
“I guess I’ll be seeing ya,” he muttered with a laugh.
“Wait, he doesn’t have them, I swear to …”
But she was talking to dead air. The creep had hung up on her.
She quickly flipped back to her caller ID, not surprised that the last incoming call had been from an unavailable number.
Nine-one-one? Officer Parker? Who to call first?
Of course, the answer was neither of those. Without hesitation, she thumbed to her address book, highlighting Reese’s contact information on the tiny screen.
She started with his cell number. “Come on,” she said when it rang and rang. When his voice mail came on, she didn’t bother leaving a message, just moved on to the next one on the list, his house. Again, she got the same result.
“Damn it, where are you?”
The elevator had come and gone a couple of times, and it returned again with a loud ding, letting off a couple who lived on her floor. She smiled impersonally, bringing the phone up to her face to avoid any conversation.
The elevator door remained open and she stared at it. She was in the lobby of her own building, a few floors down from her apartment. But she suddenly found herself unable to walk through the open door and take the short ride upstairs.
An entire evening of trying to track Reese down, to warn him about the crazy thug from Vegas, sounded unbearable. And Jazz’s claim about how quick the commute was between Chicago and Pittsburgh kept repeating itself in her head.
She gave it about ten seconds’ thought. Then she turned and strode toward the exit. “Bud, would you flag me a cab?” she asked, knowing she couldn’t go back for her own car. El Creepo could still be lurking around, and she didn’t want him knowing she was heading to the airport, going to warn Reese.
“Sure, Ms. Bauer,” the doorman said.
A few minutes later, as she got into the taxi, Amanda had to smile. Because, as usual, when in crisis mode, she was taking off, hitting the skies. This time, though, instead of running away, she intended to fly toward the very person who’d been filling her head with confusion and her heart with turmoil.
Trouble could be heading Reese’s way. But she fully intended to get to him first.
WHEN SOMEONE knocked on his front door at ten o’clock that night, Reese immediately tensed. The reaction was instinctive. Even now, two years later, the ring of a phone awakening him out of a sound sleep, or an unexpected knock on the door this late brought him back to the moment when his whole world had changed.
He’d been the one who’d answered the door when the uniformed police officer had come to inform his mother of his dad’s accident.
He thrust the dark thoughts away. His family was just fine. He’d left them a half hour ago, happily eating birthday cake at Aunt Jean’s mansion, where they’d been celebrating her seventy-whatever’th birthday. Nobody was entirely sure how old she was since she’d lied about the number for so many years.
The only other person he truly cared about was Amanda, and nobody even knew they had any connection. So it wasn’t like anybody would be coming to him if something had happened to her.
Besides, he had no doubt she was just fine. Right about now, she was probably in her bedroom, wearing something plain but incredibly sexy, staring at the phone. She would likely be having a mental debate about whether to call and entice him into some serious phone sex, or to continue to try to be strong and resist him, showing them both she didn’t really need him … at least until she just couldn’t help herself.
God, the woman drove him crazy. In a good way, as well as a bad one. And oh, how he adored her for it.
The doorbell rang, then rang again, as if his visitor had become impatient. He forced himself to relax and headed over to answer it, reminding himself not to worry. Still, he couldn’t deny his pulse sped up when he turned the knob and pulled the door open.
Seeing who stood there, he jerked in surprise. “What are you doing here?”
His four sisters, his brother, his mother, his young niece and nephew and his great-aunt all pushed their way into his house, babbling a mile a minute, all talking over one another.
Reese froze, trying to make his brain process what was happening.
A gaggle of insane people had just turned his quiet respite into a loony bin. Ralph, smart dog that he was, got the hell out, dashing toward the laundry room, probably to snuggle between the dryer and the wall, his favorite hiding spot when he’d done something bad.
“My God, Reese, how could you be so damned irresponsible? How am I supposed to raise my kids to make good choices when their uncle does something so incredibly brainless?”
“Reese, are you okay? I’m so sorry if you felt you couldn’t share this with us.”
“Oh, I’ve failed you. What would your father say? How could you do such a thing? Where did I go wrong?”
“Were you ever going to tell us, you sneak? I can’t wait to meet her.”
“Man, wait’ll I tell the guys. They’re gonna shit bricks.”
“How could you! I’ll never be able to show my face at school again!”
“When I said to have an adventure, dear boy, I didn’t know you’d take it quite that far.”
All the voices swelled, a chorus of them, but one comment, his sister Debra’s, pierced through the cloud of confusion.
“Wait. Her who?” he asked, staring at his second-to-youngest sister.
“Reese, are you listening to me?” his mother asked, waving a hand in front of herself, as if to fan away a hot flash. She was red-cheeked, and appeared a bit woozy, although that could have been from the brandy Aunt Jean had been shoving down her throat before Reese’s departure.
“Do go sit down before you faint,” said Aunt Jean, pushing his mother toward Reese’s leather couch. “Molly, take the little ones into the kitchen and get them a snack. They weren’t happy that they didn’t get to finish their cake.”
The sixteen-year-old cast a furious glare at everyone, then grabbed Reese’s young niece and nephew and marched them toward the kitchen.
“Jack, why don’t you go find Ralph. I’m sure he’s scared to death at all of us barging in like this,” Aunt Jean said.
Jack frowned darkly. “I’m not a kid.”
“No, you’re not, which is why you are mature enough to recognize that a poor animal is hiding and frightened in the other room and you should go help him,” Aunt Jean said.
Jack had always been a sucker for animals, and he really loved Ralph. Sometimes he came by just to play with the dog, throwing a stick for him, bringing a toy. So the quiet request worked like nothing else would have.
Finally, when it was just the older females of his family, and him, the lone man—Lord, talk about painful torture: estrogen poisoning—Reese repeated his question. “Which her are you talking about? What the hell is going on here?”
“Don’t act all innocent. The truth is out. Oh-ho, is it out, in a major way,” said Tess, the oldest of his siblings. She was the mother of the two kids who were probably right now whining that they had to make do with dry crackers because Uncle Reese didn’t have any cookies or good snacks in his pantry.
Seeing Reese’s open laptop on the coffee table, since he’d been checking his e-mails before bed, hoping for one from Amanda, Tess grabbed it and began punching letters on the keyboard. “Talk about irresponsible. And stupid!” she snapped, as always, voicing her opinion and not caring how anyone else felt about it.
“Will someone please talk to me?”
His mother sniffed, then waved a hand toward the computer screen. Reese turned his attention toward it, wondering why in the name of God everyone was so worked up about a YouTube video.
Then the video started.
“Hey, sweet thing, how late you working tonight?” a male voice said from off camera.
The voice was unfamiliar, but the words rang a bell, though he couldn’t place them right away. Nor could he make much out in the dark, grainy image.
Then the focus kicked in, the picture brightened and cleared. And another voice said, “Got a business card?”
“Sorry, guys, she’s retired.”
That voice he recognized. “Oh, hell,” he muttered, unable to believe it, but knowing what he was looking at. Especially now, as the image got nice and sharp and the screen filled with an easily identifiable couple.
Him. And “Mandy” the hooker. In all her wicked glory.
He glanced away, scrambling to remember everything they’d said and done, wondering if the sly videographer had caught the sexy kiss. Or, worse, the line about …
“… I roped myself a man tonight at that wedding chapel over there. Jeez, what’s a girl gotta do to enjoy her wedding night?”
He leaned back in his seat, dropping his head onto the back of the couch and staring up at the ceiling.
This couldn’t be happening. It just couldn’t.
“You’re married?” his mother cried. “How could you get married and not tell us?”
“Worse, how could you marry a poor, down-on-her-luck prostitute? Do you know anything about her? Where is she? Did you abandon her?” asked Bonnie, his twenty-four-year old sister, who shared the middle-child title with Debra but was extremely empathetic and had never seen a tree she didn’t want to hug.
“Look,” he said, not even sure what he was going to say. “It’s not what you think.”
“Then what is it?” Tess asked. “Did you or did you not either go temporarily insane or get roofied, and marry some trashy Vegas whore?”
That made him sit straight up and snap, “Watch your mouth.” He cast his sister a stare so heated she actually drew back a little. Her mouth remained shut, her lips compressing tightly.
Beside her, watching like the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary, was his aunt Jean. Her mouth was tightly shut, too, only it wasn’t because she was trying to control her anger. The wicked old woman was instead trying desperately not to laugh. It was a wonder she didn’t hyperventilate from lack of oxygen as she held her breath, trying to contain her merriment.
She was loving every minute of this. Probably taking full credit for pushing Reese completely over the edge.
“I’m just thrilled that you’re so happy,” he said, his voice dripping sarcasm.
She sucked her bottom lip in her mouth, then finally let out a whoosh of air. Rushing toward the kitchen, she said, “I think I’ll go check on Molly and the children.”
Well, that was one for the record books, a red-letter moment. The ballsiest woman he knew had cut and run. Add that to the rest of this funfest and this might just go down as the strangest night of his decade.
“So tell us, brother dear, what’s the story?” asked Debra as she leaned back in a chair and lifted her feet onto the coffee table. She looked to be enjoying this almost as much as Aunt Jean had, but she didn’t race for the kitchen in an effort to hide it. “When do we get to meet our new sister-in-law?”
He didn’t reply. Instead he stared again toward the computer screen. The video had ended, but he wasn’t focused on that, anyway. No, what had drawn his eye was the small counter that indicated how many people had viewed it.
Thousands. Many of whom had left five-star reviews and salacious comments.
He could only shake his head in disbelief.
“Well?” prompted his mother. “Don’t you have anything to say for yourself? Not a single explanation?”
Hmm. Which would be worse? Letting his family believe he’d married a hooker during a wild night of partying in Vegas? Or admitting that, for months, he’d been traveling all over the country to play naughty, sexy role-playing games with a woman he was falling head over heels for?
He wasn’t sure what he was going to say. Truth or consequences? Either way, he came out looking like a total jackass.
Before he could figure it out, he was, quite literally, saved by the bell. The ding-dong was the perfect sound effect for the insane situation in which he’d found himself.
“Good heavens, who can that be?” asked his mother.
“Not a clue,” he replied, hearing an almost cheerful note in his own voice.
“Who on earth would simply show up here unannounced at this time of night?” she added.
“Can’t imagine. Rude, isn’t it?” he muttered, certain the sarcasm would go over her head.
Reese didn’t know who had landed on his doorstep this time. He only knew he was grateful to the bastard for giving him an excuse to get up and walk away from the inquisition.
Maybe he’d get lucky and it would be a fireman saying the whole neighborhood had to be evacuated due to a gas leak. Maybe he’d get even luckier and just blow up with it. Anything to escape having to share embarrassing fiction or even more embarrassing truth with his nosy, incredibly obnoxious family was a-okay with him.
Whatever he’d been imagining, though, it didn’t even come close to reality. He thought he’d been surprised to find his family barging in twenty minutes ago? Hell, that was nothing compared to the shock he got when he opened the door.
Of all the times he’d imagined Amanda Bauer coming to his home, being part of his real world, it sure hadn’t been under circumstances like these. Yet there she was, staring at him with uncertainty in her eyes and apologies on her beautiful lips.
“Reese, I’m sorry to just show up like this, but I need to see you and it’s not just to jump your bones, even though that’s exactly what I’d like to …” Her words trailed off as she looked past him into the house, obviously seeing a bunch of wide-eyed, openmouthed females who’d heard her every word. Her babbling nervousness segued into a momentary horrified silence.
Gee. The night just got better and better.
“Oh, man, please tell me you’re having a late-night Pampered Chef party, and that’s not your entire family sitting over there,” she said in a shaky whisper.
“’Fraid I can’t do that.” He forced a humorless smile, stepped back and extended an arm to beckon her in. “Welcome to the asylum.”
To give her credit, she didn’t run. A few months ago she probably would have. But tonight, she took one tentative step inside, and then another, her curious stare traveling back and forth between him and the women watching wide-eyed from a few feet away.
The silence lengthened, grew almost deafening, and finally, the sheer ludicrousness of the whole situation washed over him. This was like something out of a movie—a romantic comedy where the hapless hero went from one humiliating situation to a worse one, constantly looking like an idiot in front of the smart, witty heroine.
Fortunately, this smart, witty heroine had a couple of skills that could come in really handy right now. First, she wasn’t the type to pass judgment. Second, she was really good at adapting to new situations, as evidenced by her aptitude at role-playing. And finally, she had one hell of a sense of humor. So, with laughter building in the back of his throat, he squeezed Amanda’s hand and drew her toward the others.
He opened his mouth to make a simple introduction, trusting that she looked different enough from the woman in the video to be unrecognizable.
He should have known better. Eagle-eyed Tess leaped out of her seat, hissing, “She’s the one—it’s her!”
Amanda flinched, obviously having no clue what the other woman was talking about. Reese kept a strong, comforting arm on her shoulder. And then, though he didn’t really plan to say the words until they left his mouth, he introduced her to the judgmental women watching them with expressions ranging from pure curiosity to horror.
“Amanda, this is my family.” He draped an arm across her shoulder and tugged her against him. “Campbell family, meet the little woman.”