Her Red-Carpet Romance

by Marie Ferrarella

  She didn’t know.

  She only knew that she missed Lukkas something awful. Especially at night. Somehow the dark just made the longing worse. Even her own home felt strange to her.

  Without Lukkas to fill the spaces of her evening—which she had gotten extremely used to in a short amount of time—her house felt extra empty, extra lonely.

  “I need a dog,” she said out loud, her voice echoing back at her as she locked the front door, then walked through the house, turning on lights in each room she came to.

  She’d put in another extralong day at the studio today, getting everything prepared for Lukkas so when he got back, he would be ready to roll. She absolutely loved the fact that she had gotten really good at anticipating his needs and requirements when it came to working with him.

  The other part of it, anticipating his needs as a man... She was more than happy about keeping her finger on that particular pulse, as well.

  It was past ten o’clock. She was exhausted but too wired to sleep. A vague hunger nudged at her, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten very much.

  She went into the kitchen and opened her refrigerator. It all but mocked her as she stared unseeingly into its interior.

  Nothing seemed to move her or to tempt her taste buds. There were several things she could whip up—chicken Parmesan took her less than twenty minutes and she had both the chicken and the extras that went with it. But the idea of cooking for herself held absolutely no appeal for her.

  Because she knew she had to eat something, Yohanna took out a cherry-flavored yogurt, uncovered the top and then, picking up a spoon, started to eat it as she leaned over the sink.

  It took a few moments for the scenario to sink in. And horrify her.

  “My God, I’ve become one of those women who eats out of a container while standing over a sink,” she muttered, appalled.

  She hadn’t been like that before Lukkas had entered her life. She’d been independent and had made her peace with living a solitary life while making the most of it. Now all the freedom in the world couldn’t begin to make up for the loneliness that was gnawing away at her.

  She missed Lukkas. Missed him so much that it physically hurt.

  How had she gotten here? She had absolutely no right to think that Lukkas was going to be a permanent person in her life. She had to live in the moment, not the future. Lukkas was kind, handsome, fun and very approachable. But the man’s heart, she sternly reminded herself, still belonged to his late wife, and if she thought there was a way she was going to burrow into that heart and stake a claim to it, then she was going to be horribly disappointed.

  She knew that.

  Telling herself anything else was just delusional and putting off the inevitable.

  Her spoon hit bottom. Somehow she’d managed to consume the yogurt without even realizing it. Or tasting it.

  Listlessly, she threw out the container.

  Her landline rang just then. She instantly brightened, pushing aside the darkness that threatened to swallow her up.

  Yohanna pulled the receiver out of the cradle and put it to her ear. At this point she’d even welcome a call from her mother. Anything to keep her mind from sliding back down into the darkness.

  She yanked the receiver up so quickly, she didn’t even look at the name on the small screen identifying the caller.

  “Hello?”

  “How’s everything going?”

  Her face broke out in a wreath of smiles. Lukkas’s voice had a way of reassuring her.

  She dutifully gave him a quick summary. “The schedule’s coming together. Everything’s going to be ready for your review when you get back.” Which she hoped was going to be sometime tomorrow—the sooner the better.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  She thought that was rather an odd statement to make—he didn’t usually question what she said—but she gave him the reassurance he was looking for. “I wouldn’t tell you if I wasn’t,” she pointed out.

  “What if I get back early?”

  Oh, please get back early, she silently prayed. “It’s actually ready right now, so you can come back anytime you want,” she told him.

  “Sounds good,” he told her.

  The doorbell rang just then.

  “What’s that noise?” Lukkas asked.

  “That’s just someone at the door.” She was perfectly willing to ignore whoever was there since the most important person in her world was on the phone with her.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” Lukkas asked her.

  “I’m busy,” she told him, her voice soft and low. “Talking to you.” The doorbell rang again, splicing into her sentence.

  “Whoever it is sounds as if they’re going to be persistent,” Lukkas observed, and then advised, “Maybe you should call your security service, just in case there’s a problem.”

  “I don’t have a security service,” she reminded him.

  She closed her eyes as the doorbell rang yet again. There was only one person who didn’t give up after a couple of tries.

  “It’s probably my mother,” she said with a sigh. “Hold on.”

  With that, still holding the receiver in her hand, she went to the front door and opened it.

  “I’m not your mother,” Lukkas said, closing the cell phone he had in his hand.

  She let her portable receiver slip through her fingers. It fell on the floor. She hardly noticed. Overjoyed that he’d come back early, she threw her arms around Lukkas.

  “What are you doing here?” she cried.

  “Currently?” he asked with a straight face. “Having the air squeezed out of my lungs,” he answered with a laugh.

  Suddenly realizing that her arms had all but tightened into a viselike grip, she loosened her hold on him.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, because I’m thrilled to have you back, but what happened? You weren’t supposed to be back for at least one more day, if not more,” she told him.

  Lukkas shrugged. “I cut myself a little slack. You’re so efficient that I figured I could do that once in a while. Besides, I missed you,” he told her.

  As he began to lower his mouth to hers, he stopped abruptly when he saw them. “Hey, what’s this? Tears?” he asked incredulously, lightly touching the damp path the tear had created. “I didn’t say that to make you cry.”

  “Too late,” she told him. Up on her toes, she pulled him closer and covered his lips with her own.

  Lukkas meant to only kiss her lightly before he told her why he’d really cut things short and flown back earlier than planned. But when she kissed him like that, it felt as if everything inside him just began to radiate, to glow.

  Accustomed to flying here, there and everywhere at the drop of a hat, fitting in all those different places, belonging nowhere, he hadn’t experienced a feeling of homecoming for years now.

  “Home” was everywhere and nowhere—until now.

  Now she was home, he realized. Hanna was his go-to place. His haven.

  But all of this hit him afterward. After he had kissed her until his lips were all but numb. After he’d savored every inch of her and made love with her not once, but twice.

  Gloriously.

  Recklessly.

  Lying in her bed, holding her to him, Lukkas searched for the right words to convey all this to her. This and more.

  But just when he needed it most, eloquence escaped him.

  “I know it’s only been a few days, but I’ve missed you,” he told her, murmuring the words softly into her hair. At first he thought she hadn’t heard him, but then he felt her curl farther into him, her arm across his chest tightening.

  He felt his whole body quicken in response.

  “I missed you, too,” she told him, her words floati
ng on her warm breath and skimming across his skin.

  He wanted her all over again.

  Lukkas struggled to hold himself in check. He needed to get something out in the open first.

  “Then, why didn’t you call?” he asked. “You didn’t even call when you had updates for me.”

  He’d had to be the one to call, making him feel that he needed her more than she needed him.

  “I texted them,” she pointed out. “And I didn’t want to bother you—or to sound needy,” she finally admitted.

  “You wouldn’t have bothered me,” he told her, wondering where she had gotten that impression. “And I really doubt you could sound needy even if you tried.”

  She was strong and forceful—and soft in all the right places, he couldn’t help thinking.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” Yohanna told him.

  She’d worried about that more than once—that he would see how much she cared about him, how much she wanted to be part of his life. Because of his past and what the loss of his wife had done to him, she was afraid that he would see her behavior as encroaching on him and he would wind up severing all ties with her.

  She didn’t know if she could bear that, even if, ultimately, Lukkas had done it for his own good. She wasn’t that selfless, even if she wanted to be.

  “Does that mean you’d miss me if I were gone?”

  Lukkas’s question brought her up out of her thoughts with a thud.

  It sounded like an innocent question, but she had learned that nothing was really all that innocent.

  Feeling as if she was walking on a thin, scarred wooden plank stretched over a bed of quicksand where one misstep would make her disappear, she asked him quietly, “Are you going somewhere?”

  Lukkas continued to play devil’s advocate. “If I was, how would you feel about it?” he asked. “Would you ask me not to go?”

  Her first reaction was that she wouldn’t ask him not to go, she’d beg him not to. But she couldn’t say that; she didn’t have the right.

  And, after a moment, that was what she told him, as well.

  “If you wanted to go, I wouldn’t have the right to ask you not to.”

  “But if you did have the right?” he asked, continuing to play out the line, waiting for her to tell him what he wanted to hear.

  She was doing her best to hold her emotions in check. To be his assistant, not the woman who was in love with him.

  “I’d want you to be happy. If going made you happy, then I wouldn’t stop you.”

  Lukkas continued watching her face, searching it for a sign. “So what you’re telling me is that you’re indifferent,” he concluded.

  She knew what she was supposed to say, what she should say as his assistant, which was the only official position she held. But despite that, something within her just couldn’t allow her to continue with the charade she was playing.

  “I am so not indifferent,” she said, contradicting his conclusion.

  The look in his eyes seemed to urge her on, so even though she was certain she was probably destroying the tiny piece of paradise she was temporarily claiming as her own, she told Lukkas exactly what was in her heart.

  “If I could, I’d ask you—beg you, really—to stay because when you’re gone, nothing makes sense to me. I know I’ve spent the first thirty years of my life without you and I functioned just fine like that. I got through one end of the day to the other, accomplishing whatever it was I was supposed to accomplish. But now everything’s changed. All I can think of is how many minutes before I can see you again, before you kiss me again. Before we make the world stand still again.

  “I know this isn’t what you probably want to hear and I promise I won’t try to hold you back when you want to go—but please don’t want to go,” she pleaded quietly. “Not yet.”

  He laughed then, and she didn’t know if she was on solid ground or if what she’d just said had struck him as ridiculously funny.

  All she could do was ask.

  “Why are you laughing?” she asked when he continued chuckling to himself.

  It took him a second to catch his breath. “Call your mother,” he told her.

  She stared at him, certain she must have heard wrong. “What?”

  “Call your mother,” Lukkas repeated, this time far more audibly.

  She could see him asking her to do a great many things for him. But never once would she have thought he would tell her to call her mother, especially after what she had told him about her.

  “Why?” she asked in hushed disbelief. “Why would you want me to call my mother, of all people?” That, in her book, was akin to having a death wish.

  “So you can tell her she can stop trying to set you up with her friends’ sons and nephews. Tell her your fiancé doesn’t like it.”

  Her mouth dropped open and she stared at Lukkas in total disbelief. Now she knew she had to be dreaming—or at least hallucinating. But she hadn’t ingested anything that even remotely had those side effects.

  “My what?”

  “Fiancé.” And then it hit him. He’d left parts out.

  “I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?” It was a rhetorical question. “I’m assuming you’re going to say yes, and I didn’t mean to do that. Of course, if you say no, it’ll shatter me after I spent all this time looking for— Oh, damn,” he muttered as another thought hit him.

  “Oh, damn what?”

  Instead of answering, Lukkas sat up and looked around the room. Spotting what he was looking for, his jacket, which was on the floor right next to the bed, he leaned over to pluck it up and pull it onto the bed.

  Feeling the pocket, he detected the slight bulge and smiled his relief.

  “Still here.”

  Before she could ask Lukkas what he was talking about, he took a small black velvet box out of the pocket, flipped it open with his thumb and held it out to her.

  “Hanna, you brought the sunshine back into my life and I don’t want to go back to living in the dark.”

  He took a breath and said the most important words of his life—for a second time. “Will you marry me?”

  For the second time, her mouth dropped open. She looked at Lukkas, then at the ring and back again.

  “You’re serious?”

  Lukkas laughed shortly. “I’m naked, holding a ring, with my entire life riding on your answer. This is about as vulnerable as I can get. So yes, I’m serious.” He took her free hand into his as he made his case. “I didn’t think I could love anyone ever again, or risk loving anyone again.

  “But you, just by being you, showed me that I could, that my life had meaning again and that it was time to stop sleepwalking through each day. I can’t take the ring back, so it’s yours no matter what your answer is, but I’m hoping that you’ll take me along with it, although—”

  Stifling a laugh, Yohanna put her finger against his lips, momentarily silencing him.

  “I never thought I would ever hear myself saying this to you, but shut up, Lukkas. You’re talking too much and it’s not necessary. That’s a lot of wasted rhetoric. I’ve been yours from the very first day.”

  He still wasn’t going to take anything for granted. “Then it’s yes? I want to be clear on this,” he specified.

  “It’s always been yes,” she said.

  The phone rang just as he reached for her again. Glancing at the phone’s caller ID, she groaned, then picked up the receiver. “Can’t talk right now. I’m getting married, Mom. Call you back later.” With that, she hung up and looked at her husband-to-be.

  “Where were we?”

  “Here, I think,” he said, pulling her into his arms.

  The phone rang again just as he was going to begin kissing her. He intended to create a path that ran the length and br
eadth of her body.

  They ignored the ringing phone.

  She would get back to her mother eventually, Yohanna thought. But right at this moment there was something far more important on her mind. She wanted to make love with her fiancé for the very first time.

  And she did.

  Epilogue

  “You really have outdone yourself, you know,” Maizie whispered to Theresa as wedding guests filed into the rows of seats that had been set up in the garden behind the hotel.

  Theresa was catering yet another affair for Lukkas Spader. This time, though, it was his wedding, and she had pulled out all the stops.

  “Using the red carpet to designate the aisle that the bride comes down was truly a stroke of genius,” Maizie told her with admiration.

  “It just seemed fitting,” Theresa replied in the same hushed tone.

  Satisfied that everything was running smoothly and that her employees had everything under control, Theresa had allowed herself a small island of time to simply enjoy being a spectator at another one of their success stories.

  So far, she, Maizie and Cecilia, in their capacity as Matchmaking Mamas, were batting a thousand.

  “From what Cecilia told me, it seems as if Lukkas first fell in love with Yohanna when they attended the premiere of his movie. I saw that photograph one of those awful pushy paparazzi people had taken of the two of them in a weekly magazine. Lukkas had a smitten face if ever I saw one.”

  Standing beside the two women in the second-to-last row of folding chairs at the outdoor wedding, Cecilia could only agree with her best friends. But she also had a footnote to offer.

  “You want to see smitten, take a look at the bride’s mother. That woman looks as if she’s just died and gone to heaven.” Cecilia nodded at a striking woman in blue standing at the rear of the gathering, just in front of the hotel door.

  Maizie glanced in Elizabeth Andrzejewski’s direction. The woman was positively beaming. “She certainly does look very proud,” she agreed.