by Cat Schield
“When this whole thing started it was my older brothers who caught the heat. Few news outlets cared about a teenage kid.”
Sammi shot him a skeptical look. “Did you forget that your drug addiction was newsworthy? But now you’re a world-famous photographer who is as enigmatic as he is brilliant.”
“Enigmatic?” He arched his eyebrow, pondering the word. “I would think most people would describe me as difficult or volatile.”
“That’s your professional side,” she countered. “No one knows anything about your personal life. And you work hard to keep it that way. That’s why if you are seen around town with the same woman a few times, everyone would assume you’re involved with her.”
With all the splashy headlines surrounding the upcoming trial for Vernon Lowell, Sammi had wondered how long before her connection with Oliver would surface. Was she ready for her low profile to change overnight?
He snorted. “Is this your way of asking me how many women are rotating through my bed?”
“Ah...no.” She cleared her throat. “I mean...” More throat clearing. “It’s none of my business who you see.”
“Do you think it should be?”
Sammi shook her head. “Of course not. I mean you and I don’t have that sort of relationship.” Abruptly the car changed lanes, and the momentum pushed her toward him. Her thigh brushed his and made her pulse jerk. Sammi should’ve shifted away, but snug against his hard body felt so right, so good. “I want us to be... I think we should be friendly. Friends.”
A partial truth. Despite her efforts to resist, he held her enthralled.
“And I want to sleep with you again.”
“What? You do? We shouldn’t.” Oh, but she wanted to. So very much. The only thing that had enabled her to hold out this long was knowing that the moment she let herself fall, she wouldn’t be able to stop until she was deeply in love with him. Glad for the darkness that hid her eager expression, she bumbled on, “I mean...that could...complicate—” she paused for breath and commanded her racing heart to calm down “—our situation. And neither one of us wants that.”
“You’re right.”
Good. At least they were both on the same page.
His next words shattered that assumption. “But I think it will only get complicated if we let it.”
Sammi ejected her breath in frustration. Easy for him to say. He wasn’t fighting a crush that went back eight years. “And how do we not let it?”
“We need to be honest with each other.” He turned his upper body in her direction, caught her shoulder and compelled her to face him.
She put her palm on his chest to steady herself against the movement of the taxi and to keep some distance between them. “Honest how?”
“Tell the truth about how we feel. You were right about what you said earlier. I’m very private when it comes to my personal life and don’t open up to anyone. But with you I have things that I want to talk about. Things that I haven’t told anyone before.”
His declaration caused her head to spin. How could she not be swept away by such a flattering admission? Sammi’s toes curled in her tall black boots.
“There’s more to it than just speaking the truth,” she said, unsure she was ready to hear everything he wanted to say. “We’d also have to agree to listen with an open mind. Do you think you could do that?”
“I’m not big on listening,” he admitted. “I’m more of a ‘boss everybody around until I’m happy’ sort of guy.”
The car’s momentum abruptly changed as the driver was forced to brake. Thrown off balance, Sammi gripped Oliver’s thigh, eliciting an inarticulate sound from him. When she peered at his expression from beneath her lashes, his hungry stare made her stomach drop.
“But for you,” he murmured. “I’ll try.”
Emboldened by the possessive light in his eyes, she leaned into his hard body. “Then I guess I should confess something to you.” She flattened her breasts against his chest, eliminating the last bit of space between them. “I had a huge crush on you when I was a teenager. So, when you say nice things to me, it feels like I’m seventeen again and completely out of my depth.”
Oliver studied her through heavy-lidded eyes. “Are you telling me that sweet talk is the way to your heart?”
Was he really interested in capturing her heart? Would he treat it well once he took possession?
“It’s one way,” she replied, mustering an inscrutable smile.
“Is there another way?” he asked, lowering his head until his lips hung over hers.
The invitation was hers for the taking. Feeling daring, she lifted her hand and brushed her thumb across his lower lip. He smiled, the expression a sexy, sweet hammer blow to her faltering resistance.
“Later tonight you could take me to Max Brenner,” she suggested, naming a well-known chocolate bar near Union Square. “I have a sudden craving for chocolate.”
Seven
“This is terrible.” Oliver barely restrained a shudder as he stared around the East Harlem two-bedroom apartment.
“It’s not terrible,” Sammi countered, waving at the west-facing windows. “There’s tons of light and the wood floors are beautiful.”
“The appliances are old. There’s no closet space.” He took a step toward the front door. The longer he stayed, the more the dull cream walls seemed like they were closing in on him. “And it’s barely eight hundred square feet.” Half the size of her current place.
“It’s less to furnish.” Her voice held a note of forced confidence as she opened the door to the second bedroom, revealing a room that was smaller than his walk-in closet. “I can fit a crib and a changing table in here, no problem.”
“It’s awful,” he declared definitively.
“It’s not awful.”
They were squabbling like old friends, the exchange heated but without any hostility. During moments like these, Oliver could scarcely believe Sammi had been in his life for only a few weeks. She felt like an old friend from back home that had been with him through the best and worst times.
When reporters pestered him, she refrained from asking questions, offering him empathetic silences that had in turn prompted him to share what he knew about his father’s crimes and how that had torn his family apart.
“You can’t possibly imagine yourself going from where you live now to this,” he said, picturing her Midtown apartment with its high ceilings, spectacular views and stylish furnishings.
She returned to the middle of the empty room and crossed her arms. He kept his face impassive as he took her in. She wore ripped jeans, leopard-print pumps and a fuzzy white sweater that invited him to run his hands all over her. That she wore a stubborn expression kept his libido in check, but the more time he spent with her, the less he understood why he was resisting his attraction for her.
“It’s affordable,” Sammi persisted. “I made a budget and I intend to stick to it.”
“I don’t want my child living here.” Oliver faced her, mirroring her stubborn defiance, equally determined in his opinion. “Let me find you a nice building with a doorman.” He’d considered offering her the house in Falling Brook he’d bought years ago and never used, but he wanted them nearby so he could keep close tabs on both of them.
“That will cost me double what I’d be paying up here.”
Oliver ground his teeth at her resistance. This was the fifth apartment she’d brought him to and no more suitable than the last four. “Then let me help.”
“No.”
She was growing more independent by the day, and while Oliver cheered her budding self-reliance, he wished she’d listen to reason.
“When I agreed to help with your apartment hunting, I assumed that you asked because you wanted my opinion.”
“I do.”
“Then take it.” He caught her by the elbow a
nd turned her toward the exit. “This is not the place for you.”
She made a half-hearted attempt to free herself but in the end allowed him to propel her out the door. No doubt she wasn’t as optimistic about the units they’d toured as she wanted him to believe.
“It’s been two weeks since I gave my thirty-day notice,” she told him, approaching the town car that had been driving them around Manhattan all afternoon. “I’m going to be homeless if I don’t find something this week.”
While Sammi slid into the back seat, Oliver murmured instructions to the driver, before following her in. As the car started off, he noticed that her earlier energy had washed away. She looked defeated, and he put his arm around her shoulder. The gesture was meant to comfort her, but the delightful softness of the white sweater beneath his fingers made it nearly impossible to avoid petting the fuzzy fabric and the slim arm beneath. With her tucked against his side, the craving to taste her soft lips increased. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand and wrestled with temptation.
He wasn’t accustomed to feeling possessive about any woman. The girls he dated in high school blurred into a string of women he could barely remember from the years he’d spent modeling. These days, sobriety hadn’t made him any less selfish, but he’d grown more mindful of his actions.
“You aren’t going to be homeless,” he assured her, his voice gruff with the desire flowing through his veins. “You don’t have any furniture to move, just some clothes and personal items, so you could find something temporary while you keep looking.”
“I’m trying to save money.” She bent over her phone and began tapping the screen. “There’s one more place to see. Maybe this one will be better.”
“No.” Oliver plucked the phone from her hands and held it beyond her reach. “We are not going to look at another apartment in a rat-infested walk-up.”
“Oh, please,” she countered. “Every one of those buildings was perfectly nice. They just don’t happen to be up to your overly inflated standards.”
“My standards are perfectly reasonable,” he said.
“You grew up in a big house, with a chef, chauffeur and maids to keep everything running smoothly.”
“I’m not suggesting we hire you staff.” Oliver exhaled in exasperation. “I just want my child to have the best of everything. Is there something so wrong with that?”
“I’ll have you know that until I walked my first runway, my mother and I lived in places even smaller and less cared for than what we looked at today.”
Oliver winced at the hurt in Sammi’s voice, starting to see where he’d gone wrong. “I didn’t mean—”
“Those were the happiest days of my childhood, because even though we didn’t have much, my mom was always finding ways to have fun for free. Whether it was trips to the library or picnics in Central Park, Thursday evenings at the Children’s Museum of the Arts or a ride on the Staten Island Ferry.”
As he listened to Sammi recount her fondest childhood memories, Oliver found himself envying her. He thought about the fishing rod his father had sent from the Caribbean two months earlier and how the gesture had been too little, too late. What he wouldn’t give to have a collection of father-son experiences he could draw upon when his own child arrived.
“Sounds like she was a great mom and that you two were really close.” Yet given the tension he’d witnessed between mother and daughter, he couldn’t help but wonder when things had changed. “I don’t have any memories like that.”
Sammi shot him a sideways glance. “No, I imagine you did the sort of things I couldn’t dream of. Like box seats for a Yankees game or helicopter rides around the city. Luxury vacations and backstage passes to the hottest concerts.”
“I guess I did some of those things,” Oliver said, recalling his friend’s birthday party where they’d spent the night at the American Museum of Natural History. “But I honestly don’t remember my parents being around for any of them.”
“Why were they gone so much?”
“They had a hugely active social life because of the success of the hedge fund my father founded, the one he’s in prison for stealing money from. There was always some event or another that kept them from showing up for school events or big games.” Oliver made no effort to hide his bitterness.
“I’m sorry,” Sammi said, setting her hand on his knee, the innocent gesture making his pulse jump. “I didn’t mean to stir up sad times. My mother changed a lot when my career took off. Suddenly I was making more money in a month than she’d make in a year, and it began to consume her.”
“So, you’re looking at tiny apartments, hoping to re-create your happy childhood, and I’m trying to throw money at you because that’s what my parents did in an effort to appease me.”
Sammi leaned her head against his shoulder. “Maybe we need to meet somewhere in the middle.”
Oliver handed back her phone, contentment humming across his nerve endings, awakening his desire to lose himself in her. “It would be nice if every one of our disagreements ended this well,” he said, covering her hand where it rested on his leg. The stirring behind his zipper drowned out sensible thought.
“I don’t think you should count on that happening.”
“You’re planning to cause trouble for me at every turn, aren’t you?” He turned his head and grazed his lips over her smooth forehead.
There was a smile in her voice when she answered. “Trouble’s in the eye of the beholder, don’t you think?”
The car stopped in front of his building before he had a chance to respond. Sammi shifted away from him and glanced out the window. Recognition widened her eyes.
“What are we doing here?”
“Come upstairs and let’s talk.”
“Talk?” she echoed, a frown appearing. “About what?”
Instead of answering, Oliver opened the door and slid out. Once he stood on the pavement, he turned to find Sammi still sitting in the car. She worried her lower lip between her teeth.
“You don’t trust me?” he asked, flooded by bitter resentment. The emotion caught him by surprise. Nothing Sammi had ever done before aroused such a strong negative reaction. This feeling was usually reserved for interactions with his family.
“Of course I trust you. That’s not what this is about.” With a sigh she took his hand and set her foot on the pavement. “Fine, let’s go upstairs and talk.”
Thanks to Sammi’s show of great reluctance, Oliver felt no satisfaction at convincing her to do as he asked. Instead, irritation kept him from offering reassurance as they entered his building. Then, as the elevator rose to his floor, his increased heart rate caught him by surprise. Although he’d been pondering his decision for several days and thought he was at peace with it, Oliver found himself gripped by anxiety. He hadn’t realized until now how important it was for her to say yes to his proposal.
“You asked for my help in finding a place to live,” he began, leading her into his living room. “Now you’re going to listen to me.”
Given the tight set of her mouth, she looked poised to argue. Instead, she merely raised her eyebrows and waited for Oliver to reveal his plan.
“I think you should move in with me.”
“What?” She goggled at him. “No. That’s crazy...” She paused. “I mean, I couldn’t put you out like that.”
“You won’t be putting me out.” He took both her hands in his and let his thumb play over her skin. “You need a place to stay. There’s plenty of room here.” He wanted to keep her close while her pregnancy advanced. The idea of watching her grow round with his child thrilled him in a way he’d never imagined possible. “And this way, I won’t have to worry about you or the baby.”
“When you say move in...” Her cheeks grew rosy as she assessed his expression. “You mean as roommates, right?”
Her need to clarify the ar
rangement sent desire through him like a current of electricity. Suddenly every cell in his body was sizzling with awareness. His senses alerted him to the clammy grip of her fingers, the peppermint coolness of her nervous laugh, and the play of relief and regret in her brown eyes.
“I want you to be comfortable,” he replied, deliberately keeping his answer vague.
“And what happens if I get so comfortable living with you that I don’t want to leave?” A smile ghosted across her lips at whatever she believed his expression had revealed. “Oh, don’t worry. I have no more desire to live with you than you have for me to invade your bachelor space.”
“You wouldn’t be invading, and it isn’t exactly a bachelor space.” Frustration flared. He knew she wasn’t immune to him, so why did she persist in keeping him at arm’s length?
She gave him a wry look. “You are a bachelor. And it is your space.” She pulled her hands free and widened the distance between them. “Give me a couple days to think about it, okay?”
“What’s there to think about? You want to be practical. I’m offering you a way to save a great deal of money.” He was hoping that using logic would up the appeal of his offer. “Think of your budget.”
He knew the speed with which her body was changing would soon affect her income. She’d already had to skip casting calls for next spring’s New York Fashion Week, and even her hopes of acting as a maternity model had dimmed because so many fashion firms used regular models with fake bumps.
“I haven’t been able to think about anything else,” she grumbled.
Hearing the surrender in her voice, Oliver relaxed. “Moving in with me is a smart option.”
“Is it?” she countered, expelling a hearty sigh. “I took the easy way out and let my mother make decisions for too long. Now I feel like I’m making the same mistake with you.”
“I don’t want to control you,” he said. “In fact, I made the suggestion for purely selfish reasons.”
“Such as?”
