“No thanks, Alex. I’m perfectly capable of finding a job on my own. After all, I found you, didn’t I?”
“Samantha?”
“What?”
“Do you want me to drop out of the wedding party? I will if you want me to.”
Chapter 14
Samantha’s glance met his and she knew he was being sincere.
“No,” she decided, her heart aching at the prospect of having to stand up with him at Marianne’s wedding. “No, that wouldn’t be fair to them. Besides, we’re adults, right? Surely we can survive together for a few simple hours.”
She said it without real conviction. She had a strong urge to knock him over the head with something and bring him to his senses, even now. Instead, she left him standing there under the pergola alone.
Nearing the house, she knew she couldn’t face her room and the packing up to go again so soon. There were plenty of other loose ends to tie up, though. She went into the study and shut the door.
Taking the check register out of her desk, she began poring over the unpaid bills, thinking she could at least get him caught up before she left. She happened to glance down at the floor and noticed a crumpled piece of paper that hadn’t made it into the wastebasket. She picked it up, curious. Smoothing it out, she soon discovered it was a check, made out to her for thirty-six thousand dollars.
The door flew open and Alex came in, looking fearful and repentant. The check was still in her hand, so she balled it up and flung it at him.
“What’s this, Alex? Do you want me to go as badly as this?”
He hung his head in guilt.
“You’re a nice girl, Samantha. I just felt like I should do something for you.”
She rose from her chair.
“I’ll finish packing, and then you’ll be well rid of me.”
As she tried to pass, he grasped her arm gently, careful not to hurt her.
“You’re just a child, Samantha. Don’t you see how impossible this is?”
Throwing caution to the winds, Samantha flung her arms around his neck and forced a kiss on him.
How could she go? How could she go, with him thinking she was a child?
Her fingers found the front of his shirt and she ripped it open, sending buttons flying everywhere. He groaned, molding his body to hers.
“Child, am I? We’ll see about that.”
She snaked an arm around his waist and slid her hand down over his ass, caressing him and kissing him wildly as he surrendered to her. She felt - for once in her life - that she was going to make a difference, was going to force things to turn out the way she wanted them to.
Never before had she felt so bold and uninhibited, so at the mercy of her desires.
Samantha’s lips found his throat, his perfect chest. Before she knew what she was doing, she had his belt buckle in her hands and was tugging and fumbling at it.
He swung her up into his arms and carried her over to his bedroom door. He kicked it open and deposited her on the bed. She reached for him, pulled him down on top of her, and assaulted him with more kisses, her mouth oh, so hungry for his.
Urging him onto his back, Samantha straddled him as she’d done that morning in Waikiki, her palms on his warm, solid chest. She ground her hips into his, feeling again the length of his manhood, alive with a will of its own.
Her lips felt tender and swollen from so rough a kiss. Samantha bit his earlobe gently and found her voice.
“How can you call me a child, Alex? How can you call me a child after we’ve been lovers?”
She slid her hand down the length of his body and ripped down his zipper, and then she started shoving his trousers down over his hard hips and muscular thighs. His eyes were suddenly alight with a burning desire, and Samantha sat up and opened her blouse to give him a sample of what would soon follow.
He reached for her, just as she knew he would, but she caught his hands in hers, pressing them against her breasts, loving the feel of his warm touch.
“Say it, Alex,” she instructed, her head dropping back as she arched closer. “Take it back.”
“Oh, God, Samantha, please don’t tease me.”
“Come on, Alex. I need to hear it.”
“All right,” he groaned in compliance. “You’re not a child.”
Looking pleased, she cocked an eyebrow.
“Is that all?”
“You’re not fired, okay? You don’t have to go.”
Her smile burst forth before she could check it, and she bent down to stroke his cheek lovingly.
“I knew you didn’t mean it, Alex. Now what else?”
Without warning, the light suddenly went out of his eyes and he turned away, his face hardening in determination.
“Don’t do this to me, Samantha. Can’t you just feel it? Does it really need to be said?”
Her voice broke.
“Yes.”
He pulled her head down for a kiss, then in a soft, clear voice, he spoke.
“I can’t. Not yet.”
Sitting bolt upright, Samantha wriggled from his grasp and slid down off him.
Now her eyes kindled with a new kind of fire and she hastily re-buttoned her blouse.
“Now what?” he demanded.
“I have my problems, Alex, but being a tramp isn’t one of them. I’m not about to sleep with a man who doesn’t care about me.”
“This is stupid,” he protested, sitting up to gather his clothes about him.
Samantha’s whole body still trembled, so she backed away.
“I do care about you,” he insisted, searching for his buttons. Then, remembering they were gone, he yanked his shirt off and flung it to the floor.
“You think I’m just some little piece of ass, here for your convenience? Well, you’d better think again, my friend, because I’m leaving you.”
His eyes flew open in disbelief and he rushed to her and caught her up in his arms.
“Oh, God, Samantha, you can’t,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You can’t leave me.”
“I don’t trust myself to stay and work here, Alex. Things have gone way too far for that. I’m not about to throw my life away being somebody’s mistress, waiting, wishing...”
Her voice had trailed off and her eyes locked with his. She could still taste his breath on her lips.
He shut his eyes, a pained expression on his face.
“Baby, you don’t understand,” he told her in a sorrowful voice. “I made a vow to myself.”
“Yeah? Well, so did I, Alex. So did I.”
With that, she fled the room and went to pack the rest of her stuff.
She was still without a solid plan for the future, but was no longer afraid to face her parents. On the other hand, she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to go home to them, either, but she drove that thought from her mind as she tried to finish.
A few hours later, there was a knock at her door and Alex entered with a cup of hot tea.
“Mrs. K. asked me to bring this to you,” he said, placing the cup on the nightstand. “Looks like you’re nearly done.”
His tone sounded falsely nonchalant and she noticed that, now the shoe was on the other foot, he didn’t seem quite so smug any more.
“I wasn’t sure what to do with the Titian painting, so I just left it,” she told him.
“I’ll send it to L.A. for you, along with the dressing table,” he offered.
Samantha gazed up at him, faintly surprised. “You’re giving it to me?”
“I bought it for you.”
“Just to use, right? Don’t you want to keep it for your next assistant?”
He looked away. “I haven’t had much luck with assistants. I don’t think I’ll hire another one.”
She picked up the teacup and sipped at it. Poor Alex, he sounded lonely already.
“What’ll you do when I go?” she asked gently. “What’ll you tell Paris?”
Alex smiled bravely. “I don’t know. I don’t suppose I’ll have to tell him anything, do you? Marianne will take care of all that, won’t she?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t think I’ll be going back to my old life,” she told him, setting the cup down. “I don’t feel much like living with my family, and I don’t see how I can go on being Marianne’s friend if she’s married to your best friend. I mean, that would be kind of awkward and uncomfortable, don’t you think?”
Alex took her hand. “Then stay with me, Samantha. We can put this mess behind us and be friends again. You won’t even have to work for me. You won’t have to do anything.”
“What good would that do?”
“You’d be here,” he said helplessly. “You’d be here and I could still see you and talk to you. If you go, who’ll I talk to?”
“You don’t understand, Alex. I couldn’t possibly live here and pretend I’m not attracted to you. It’d drive me crazy, being so close to you and not being able to love you.”
Gathering his courage, he smiled weakly and nodded, patting her hand.
“You’re right, Samantha,” he conceded. “You’re right. You go ahead and go. The last thing in the world I want to do is make you unhappy.”
He lifted her hand to his lips and then let it go, and before she knew it, he slipped from the room and was gone.
At breakfast the next day, Samantha summoned the courage to tell him she was ready to leave. They decided she’d leave all of her things with him, except for the two suitcases and her carry-on bag. Alex promised to send her things to her as soon as she got settled someplace, and within the hour, they were headed back over his bumpy driveway for the airport.
Once out on the highway, Alex glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. For a moment, he said nothing, but then he started to speak.
“I thought I could take this,” he said mournfully, running a distraught hand through his hair. “I thought I could take this if I had to, but I can’t. I can’t let you go, Samantha.”
He slowed the Jeep to a crawl, and then he pulled over onto the shoulder. Switching off the ignition, he bent his head to the steering wheel and wept.
Samantha, not unmoved herself, waited quietly for him to finish, waited for him to speak again.
“Please don’t leave me, Samantha. You know how I feel about you. Can’t you just trust me?”
“We’ve been over all this, Alex. Whatever happened between you and your wife was a long time ago. Why can’t you get over it?”
His head still bent, he spoke in a barely audible voice.
“I made a vow, Samantha, never to love another woman as long as I live.”
“Why? Because Jennie cheated on you? We’re not all like that, some of us have morals.”
He shook his head.
“It’s not because she cheated, Samantha. It’s because of what I did to her when I found her with that man.”
Chapter 15
Alex swallowed hard, his face becoming strained, his pupils fixed as he recalled that dark day so many years ago. Samantha watched his face as he slowly formed the words to begin.
“Things hadn’t been going well for a long time-at least a year,” he told her. “Hell, we were just a couple of stupid kids. We didn’t know what we were doing. This one day, I got home early from work and I saw this UPS truck parked in the driveway.
“Somehow, I just knew. As quietly as I could, I unlocked the front door and crept into the house. The minute I got inside, I could already hear them going at it, my wife moaning her head off in our bed. In our bed. You’ll never know what that did to me.
“I’ve never felt such rage before. I never would’ve guessed I had it in me to want to kill another human being, but that did it for me. Something just snapped, and I went to the hall closet and grabbed my shotgun, then I went up the stairs as quietly as I could.”
Without meaning to, Samantha gasped, her eyes wide and staring. Alex turned his face toward her, an ironic little smile playing on his lips.
“Yeah, you have every right to look at me like that, Samantha. It was animal - brutal - what I did next.
“I slowly climbed the stairs, listening to my wife moaning away the whole time like that guy was the best lover she ever had. And when I pushed open the bedroom door, they didn’t even hear me, they were so into it. They didn’t even look up until they heard me racking the shotgun. Well, that got their attention in a hurry.”
“Oh, Alex.”
“I said the same thing you said, Samantha. ‘The UPS man?’ I said. ‘The UPS man?’”
He shuddered involuntarily and Samantha placed a soothing hand on the nape of his neck. He bent low over the steering wheel again, shame-faced and disgusted with himself.
“I didn’t know what kind of man I was until that day.”
“What did you do, Alex?”
“I stuck the gun in that bastard’s chest and gave him five seconds to run.”
There was a kind of smile on Alex’s face she’d never seen before, a smile of mixed regret and glory.
“You should’ve seen him then. He snatched up his clothes and lit out of there like his ass was on fire.
“When I turned back to that slut Jennie, she’d managed to pull a tee shirt over herself, and believe me, that’s just about the only thing that stopped me from shooting her in her tracks. I leveled the gun at her, and I stepped over the bed, pinning her up against the wall.”
A sob broke loose from his throat.
“I hate myself for what I did next.”
“You don’t have to tell me, Alex. Not if it hurts this bad.”
“Yes I do, Samantha. Yes I do. Then you’ll see why I can’t waste any more time trying to love you. Not when there’s not a scrap of love in my soul to begin with. Not when you find out how fucked I really am.”
He gulped for air and gathered his wits about him, then he continued.
“She was crying by then, Jennie was. She was begging me not to kill her, and to tell you the truth, I really kind of enjoyed that. It was thrilling to see her beg after what she’d done to me, and I wanted to prolong it, so I made her get down on her knees.
“And she did, Samantha, she did. And I made her open her mouth, and when she did, I stuck the barrel of my gun in it.”
“Oh, no, Alex.”
“‘You want to live?’” I screamed. “‘You want to live, you worthless slut?’
“She said she did, so I told her she’d better open her eyes and look at me, then. When she did, her eyes were so pleading and helpless it almost pissed me off more than anything else.
“‘I want you to suck on this gun,’ I told her. ‘And bitch - you’d better make it believable, or I’ll blow your goddamned head off right here and now.’
“Jennie just stared at me, so I screamed at her again to snap her out of it. ‘Do it,’ I screamed.”
“What happened, Alex?”
“She took the gun out of her mouth and then she said no, just like that, in a quiet kind of voice. And then she stuck the gun back in her mouth, shut her eyes, and quietly waited for me to kill her.”
“Did you?”
“I wouldn’t be sitting here right now if I did, would I?” he asked reasonably. “They’d have locked me up forever, like the animal I am.
“No, what I did was, I flung the gun down onto the bed, gathered up my typewriter and a few of my things, and I left. I left her, I left my house, I left everything. And I never went back. When the divorce papers came, I signed them and mailed them straight back and I’ve never heard another word from
her since.”
He laughed bitterly.
“The joke was on her, though, ’cause I published my first novel about a year later and she didn’t get one damned dime from it.”
He grew quiet and Samantha knew he was staring at her, was waiting for her reaction. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say, so she just sat there, speechless.
“Now you see why I can’t love you, Samantha? I’m afraid of what I’ll become. I know what I am now. I know what kind of man I am. And I know I can’t be trusted not to hurt you.”
She laughed, despite herself, and threw her arms around him.
“Oh, Alex, you idiot.”
“Why do you say I’m an idiot, Samantha? Don’t you see? Don’t you realize the worse thing you could ever do is get with me?”
She bent her head to his and kissed his cheek, feeling the rough razor stubble once more.
“You’re a better person than you think you are, Alex, if it bothers you this much. You did what anybody would do. You were right to have those feelings. The important thing is you didn’t follow through on them.”
“How can you love me, Samantha? How can you sit there and listen to all this and still love me?”
“It’s because I see you in a whole different light. I can’t explain it, Alex. You’re just the most wonderful man I’ve ever met. Now give yourself a break, will you? You deserve to be loved as much as anyone else does.”
He didn’t say a word and Samantha began to realize that perhaps she’d already lost him. Her life seemed to be coming apart in her hands and there was nothing she could do about it.
Too bad she couldn’t take the thirty-six thousand dollars he offered. It would go a long way towards setting her up in her new life, and then she needn’t go home and explain herself to her father. But she was no whore, and there was no graceful way she could possibly accept Alex’s money.
She knew then there was nothing else for it but to leave him, to strike out on her own and depend on nothing more than her own resourcefulness to get by.
She couldn’t think of anything else to say to him, but at least now she knew it wasn’t she who he despised, but himself.
Tropical Temptation Page 16
