“The reporter said that it looked as though Lukkas Spader had finally stopped grieving over his dead wife and was moving on with his new assistant. That is you, right?” her mother asked with annoyance. “I didn’t see anyone else with him in that segment. Just you. My former daughter.
“The woman doing the segment went on to say that you two are an item. An item. And you didn’t even pick up the phone to tell me, your own mother. I raised you better than that. At least I thought I did. Well, let me tell you that is no way to treat your long-suffering mother, Yohanna.”
Yohanna rolled her eyes. Leaning over the answering machine, she said, “Yes, it is, because I just knew you’d be making a big deal out of it. And that’s what you’re doing,” she said, waving a hand at the answering machine. “You’re making a big deal out of it.”
She sighed, shaking her head. When the time came to actually talk to her mother, she knew she wasn’t going to say any of what she’d just said, wasn’t going to tell her mother to butt out of her affairs—oh, God, her mother would leap on that word, she thought in absolute dismay. No, there would be no indignant comebacks, no angry retorts forthcoming from her.
Instead, she would just sit there, listening to her mother politely, because she would tell herself that, at bottom, her mother meant well and all she really wanted for her was just the best.
Meanwhile, her mother thought nothing of making her utterly crazy in the process.
However, her mother and the drama Elizabeth Andrzejewski always created were of secondary importance in the scheme of things. Right now she was far more concerned with what this so-called “breaking news” broadcast her mother had referred to, which she herself as of yet hadn’t glimpsed on the air, would do to Lukkas if he happened across it—especially if someone brought it to his attention.
Would the threat of having this labeled a relationship cause him to step back from whatever was building between them? Would he tell her that people would get the wrong idea so to keep things the way they were—professional—he was going to back off?
The very idea of not seeing Lukkas privately anymore felt like a knife to her insides.
But there wasn’t anything she could do about that. She was just going to have to be holding her breath until Lukkas found out about the media’s current speculation about his life.
Part of her fervently hoped he never would find out because she had a feeling that that could very well signal the beginning of the end of their time together. And until just this moment, she hadn’t realized that she didn’t want it to end. At least not yet.
Not for a while.
A long while, she amended.
In all honesty, she had never had a relationship that had actually worked before. There had been a few halfhearted associations—for lack of a better word—but they had all simply petered out after a short amount of time.
Maybe it was because, as her mother maintained, she was too picky. But whatever the reason, she had never felt that lighter-than-air feeling she experienced whenever she was with Lukkas. Before she had gone to work for Lukkas, she’d begun to think something was wrong with her. And then she’d met Lukkas and suddenly everything was right with the world.
Her response to Lukkas wasn’t just physical—although heaven knew the man, with his well-defined chest, his tight butt and his sleek hips was a feast for the eyes—but he spoke to her on a completely different level.
Spoke to her soul.
Until just recently she had never believed in such things as kindred spirits, never believed in the existence of so-called soul mates. She’d thought it was a term people made up to make themselves feel as if what they had was special and that it would last until the end of time. Usually, it didn’t last anywhere nearly as long, and relationship extraction was always rather painful.
But in this case, in her case, she felt as if that was exactly what was happening to her. She and Lukkas were quietly building toward something solid. And she wasn’t about to have all that work destroyed by some hot-shot reporter or blogger calling unwanted attention to Lukkas and her, to their association.
She wasn’t about to allow Lukkas to be driven away from her by a few thoughtless words.
When her doorbell rang, she assumed that her mother had decided to do her “severely wounded mother” act in person rather than leave another message on the phone. Since her car was safely put away in the garage, Yohanna debated pretending she wasn’t home.
But her mother was nothing if not persistent. The doorbell rang a second time. And then a third. This could go on indefinitely. She might as well get it over with.
Psyching herself up for a confrontation, Yohanna strode over to the door and yanked it open even as she started talking quickly. “I didn’t tell you anything, Mother, because there’s nothing to tell! Understand?”
“Sure thing.”
Her jaw all but dropped when she saw that Lukkas was standing in her doorway, not her mother.
“Nothing to tell about what, Hanna?” he asked her, coming in.
She waved away both what she’d said and his question regarding it. “Doesn’t matter.” She knew she had to offer him some sort of an explanation in order not to come off as being too strange. “I came home to half a dozen messages from my mother. The usual thing,” she told him, brushing the matter aside and hoping he wasn’t going to ask her anything specific about what her mother had said in those messages.
Hope was short-lived.
“And the usual thing is?” Lukkas asked, attempting to coax an answer out of her.
Maybe she did need to begin at the beginning. Sort of. This definitely felt awkward. “One of those red-carpet reporters took a video of you at the premiere.”
“You mean of us,” Lukkas corrected. He had been quite aware of the clusters of paparazzi that would have been willing to literally kill one another just to get a clear shot of the two of them.
She nodded. “My mother seems to think that I’m keeping something from her.”
Pausing for a moment, he took the wildest guess he could. “You mean like a secret wedding?”
She could only stare at him in complete wonder. “What? No. She knows that no matter how crazy she makes me, I wouldn’t exclude her from my wedding. That would be too cruel.”
Maybe she had said too much. She had a sinking feeling Lukkas was going to say something about nipping this “romance thing” in the bud and that they were going to have to keep everything aboveboard.
“I’m sorry,” she told him.
He furrowed his brow. “Did you do something to apologize for?” he asked her.
“No.” Technically, she hadn’t, Yohanna thought. There was no way she could have foreseen this sort of a reaction from the voyeuristic press.
To her surprise, Lukkas didn’t really need any convincing as to her culpability.
“That’s right, you didn’t. I knew it was a calculated risk, taking you to the premiere to ward off being ‘fixed up’ by some of my well-meaning friends and their wives.” He moved a little closer to her, his eyes holding hers. “What I didn’t calculate into this was my own reaction to you.”
For a split second her heart almost stopped beating.
“And that is?” Yohanna asked so softly that had he not been standing so close to her, Lukkas wouldn’t have even heard the question.
“That you make me feel again. That very possibly you brought that dead part of me back to life. I’m not going to tell you that I’m ready to do cartwheels and break into song right this minute—I’ve still got issues to work out,” he confided. “But you have made me realize that there just might be a light—albeit a very distant light—at the end of this tunnel I’m traveling through.”
Her relief was practically immeasurable. “So you’re not going to tell me that my services are no longer needed?”
/>
Where had that come from?
“You’re kidding, right?” he asked her, surprised she would even think something like that.
“No,” she admitted. “I was being very serious.”
He laughed. “After you made yourself indispensable to me, got the production running like a well-oiled machine—an efficient, well-oiled machine—do you actually think I’d stand dramatically in a doorway and point to the road, saying you needed to hit it and never show your face here again?”
It almost sounded melodramatically ludicrous when he said it that way. Still, she wasn’t going to lie about her reaction. Maybe he could even say something to make her feel that she wasn’t expendable at this time.
“Something like that,” she conceded.
“You’re just humoring me. You’re way too smart to actually think something like that,” he told her with finality.
“So what are you going to do about that story the network’s running?” When he raised a brow, she understood that he had no idea which story she was referring to. Nice going, Hanna. “The one that has us wildly in love,” she clarified.
“What I’m going to do is what I’ve been doing ever since I first started on this pilgrimage to solidly build up my reputation in this otherwise make-believe world of tinsel, smoke and mirrors. I’m going to ignore the story, ignore the paparazzi—a difficult task, but still doable—and go on doing what I’m good at doing. Producing movies people want to see.
“And in order to do that, I intend to keep amassing a production company comprised of people who are damn good at what they do. And that, in case you have any doubts, most assuredly includes you.” And then he paused to look at Hanna. He had left out one important point. “Unless, of course, having those stories and the annoying paparazzi swarming around you like so many blood-sucking mosquitoes with cameras is intolerable to you.”
His analogy made her smile. “I think that mosquitoes with cameras are rather intriguing. Far be it from me to run for cover. Actually,” Yohanna told him proudly, “I’ve never run from anything in my life.”
“With the possible exception of your mother?” It wasn’t a contradiction but an amused question on Lukkas’s part.
Yohanna inclined her head, conceding the minor point. “I stand corrected. I have run from my mother. But in my defense, I’ve only run from her because no matter what I say, my mother only hears what she wants to hear—even if what I say isn’t anything remotely close to what she wants to hear.”
“Well...” he said, thinking that perhaps he had a very simple solution to her problem. “Would you like me to talk to your mother in this case, straighten things out for you?”
Yohanna wasn’t really clear on just exactly what he was offering to “straighten out.” Would he tell her mother that they’re just sleeping together, thereby minimizing the importance of what they had? Or was he going to tell her mother that they were just friends?
Not that it really mattered. Because either way, her mother would somehow convert the words into what she wanted to hear.
“I think,” she began slowly, examining her words very carefully before she uttered them, “for the sake of my continuing to work for you, you should just abandon the idea of talking to my mother, of even saying a single word to her.”
“Come again?”
“Talking to my mother might make you want to permanently terminate our association, if only to make sure that there was no reason for you to ever encounter my mother on a one-to-one basis again,” she warned him. For once, she didn’t feel as if she was exaggerating.
“Get that notion out of your head,” he told her. “That’s not about to happen, not from my end. There’s nothing your mother could possibly do to make me entertain the idea of sending you away so I wouldn’t have to deal with her.”
In her heart Yohanna felt she knew better. “My mother would have made Gandhi look around for the nearest gun shop.”
He laughed. “She can’t be that bad.”
“Trust me, she can. She’s not a bad person,” Yohanna quickly interjected so that he wouldn’t get the wrong idea. Her mother was a peaceful soul—she was just a harpy. “But she can totally make you crazy inside of five minutes. Sometimes less.”
Lukkas began to speak, but she held her hand up to silence him. Cornering his attention, she pressed the play button on her answering machine.
“Listen to a couple of her messages and then tell me that she can’t be that bad,” she told him.
Lukkas dutifully sat on the sofa and listened to the two messages she had already screened.
When she pressed the stop button, Yohanna looked at him, waiting for Lukkas to react. He remained silent for a very long moment. And then he smiled. “I guess you win this round. Apparently your mother can be that bad.”
“Told you.” It gave her no pleasure to be right this time.
“But she’s just motivated by her concern for you,” he added.
The addendum to his initial appraisal surprised her.
“I do believe you missed your true calling.”
He looked at her, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“You should have joined the diplomatic corps,” she told him. “You obviously know how to twist a phrase to make it sound not just good, but like a compliment.” Yohanna took a deep breath. She wasn’t finished just yet. This was serious. “I could try to get the story squelched.”
“You do that,” he told her, “and the media’ll really feel as if they’re on to something. In my experience, you just hang tight and, eventually, the story blows over and something new becomes the focus of every one of those vultures’ attention. Big story or little, the one constant is that they all run their course. I wouldn’t worry about squelching the story if I were you. The story will die a natural death,” he promised.
Still a bit nervous, she ran the tip of her tongue along her lips, trying to moisten them. “So we’re okay?” she asked.
The look in her eyes tugged at something he had been so certain he no longer possessed. His heart.
The smile he gave her said it all.
“We’re more than okay,” Lukkas assured her. “Unless—”
“Unless?” she asked uncertainly.
Here it came. He was going to tell her that if she thought they had a future, then he’d have to bow out because his heart belonged to the woman he’d been forced to bury.
“Unless this is going to scare you away. Every one of those photographers can be pretty intense and intimidating.”
“This definitely proves you’ve never met my mother,” she told him with a laugh. “You want to talk about being intense and intimidating, my mother is the national poster child.”
“I like her already,” he said with a laugh.
Getting into the spirit of the situation, Yohanna grinned. “I will remind you of that statement when the times comes.”
“You do that, Hanna. But right now, we’ve got work to do.” He rose from the sofa. “Your chariot awaits, milady.”
She got up beside him, as well. The feeling of relief she was experiencing was immeasurable. Smiling into his eyes, she laughed and said, “I could really get used to this.”
Chapter Sixteen
A few days later Lukkas had to leave town on business for a couple of days. He went alone, asking her to “hold down the fort.”
She never thought she could miss someone so much.
It felt as if a piece of her—a vital piece—was missing. The only way she knew how to cope with the stark emptiness she felt was to work. Mercifully, there was still a lot to do so she threw herself into it wholeheartedly.
Anything to blot out the ache.
She was so busy prioritizing Lukkas’s schedule for his next movie after the present one wrapped, she didn’t notice it at fir
st.
But she sensed it.
Sensed someone watching her.
It was actually more of an edgy feeling than anything else. For the most part she dismissed it, telling herself she was beginning to imagine things, the way anyone running on little sleep and dark coffee might after going at her present pace for more than a day.
But there were sounds she thought she kept hearing; sounds suspiciously resembling the clicking noise a camera made when a photograph was snapped. But each time she would look up, her gaze sweeping the general area, she wouldn’t actually see anything that was amiss.
She considered telling Lukkas when he called to see how things were going, but she didn’t want him to think she was paranoid. And she definitely didn’t want him to worry, so she went on wrestling with this—at present—unsubstantiated feeling that she was being watched, doing her best to talk herself out of it.
Until she finally caught him.
She was being tailed by a freelance photographer.
“Wait!” she cried as he started to run down her block toward a parked car. “I won’t call the police,” she promised, heading after him. “I just want to know why you’ve been taking pictures. You’ve got me confused with someone else. I’m not anybody,” she told the scruffy-looking man with the very expensive camera.
Apparently schooled by experience, despite the fact that, for the moment, he stopped running, the man kept a safe distance between them.
“You are to Lukkas Spader. You’re the first woman he’s been seen with since his wife died—and he’s produced movies with some really hot little babes in them. If he thinks you’re special, then the public wants to see you. It’s that simple.”
Raising his camera, he snapped three more shots in incredibly fast succession—and then he took off again, leaving her to ponder his words.
She tried to see his license number, but the plate was obscured.
Was the paparazzo right? she wondered as she returned to her house. Was she special to Lukkas? Or was he just with her to help him transition back to the regular world, the world he’d known before he had lost his wife?
Her Red-Carpet Romance Page 16
