He frowned, remembering. “Yes.”
“He has aspirations of becoming a stand-up comic. Actually he’s a systems analyst, but he’s been performing at some local improv clubs, which led to a chance to perform at The Comedy Store in L.A. tonight. He mentioned last night that he was really nervous, and he asked Connie to go along for moral support. She accepted, threw some things in an overnight bag, and they left at midnight. For luck.”
“For luck?” Derek repeated, looking confused.
“That’s what they said,” Summer answered cheerfully, reaching for her coffee. “Don’t you ever do anything impulsive, Derek? Just for the fun of it?”
“Not very often,” he answered flatly.
She nodded as if in perfect understanding. “I suppose it would be too dangerous in your former line of work.”
His brows drew sharply downward. “What?”
Her eyes wide and guileless, she replied, “Why, the spy business, of course. You weren’t just teasing me about that, were you, Derek?”
“Oh, that.” He drained his coffee cup. “What do you think?” he asked smoothly, setting his cup back on the table and eyeing her enigmatically. “Was I teasing you?”
She smiled. “I don’t think you quite know how to tease, Derek.” He did, of course. He’d teased her delightfully about having been a spy. Was that when she’d started to like him so much? Or had it been from the moment she’d set eyes on him?
“Maybe you should teach me,” he suggested smoothly. “You seem to be an expert at it.”
She only shrugged and smiled weakly, still wrestling with her own mental questions.
A waitress approached quietly to refill Derek’s cup. Derek waited until the woman had left before asking, “Is Connie dating this Pierce guy?”
“She’s been out with him a couple of times. She’s not dating anyone seriously.”
Derek looked grim as he pushed away his well-cleaned breakfast plate. “One of our cousins told me that Connie’s been sleeping with anything in pants since her divorce. Is that true?”
Summer dropped her fork. “What a tacky thing to ask me! As if I’d tell you the intimate details of my best friend’s love life. It must have been Barbara who made that catty remark to you. Connie’s told me her cousin Barbara is a self-righteous snob.”
Derek looked pained. “Barbara is a very respectable woman who has raised two exceptionally well-behaved daughters. She has been genuinely concerned about Connie and was hoping I could exert my influence over my sister.”
“Connie doesn’t need your influence, Derek,” Summer informed him flatly. “She’s doing just fine. When you showed up this morning to take her to breakfast, I thought you were finally going to try to be her friend. But if you were only going to start lecturing her again, I’m glad she’s out of town.”
“I wasn’t going to lecture her,” he snapped irritably. “I was going to tell her I was sorry about the way we parted last night. Still, she needs someone to make her see that she’s wasting her life: a dead-end job, endless parties, kooky friends and a dump of an apartment furnished with junk the Salvation Army would probably reject. What kind of life is that for an attractive young woman with Connie’s intelligence?”
“I’m trying very hard not to take your incredibly arrogant and condescending remarks as a personal insult,” Summer said, holding on to her temper with an effort. Strange, she fumed, she didn’t usually have a problem with her temper. She usually found a reason to laugh when others got angry. But she could find very little humor in Derek Anderson’s reference to Connie’s “wasted life.” Instead, she felt vaguely hurt and disappointed, as if he’d been talking about her rather than Connie. Had she been so foolish as to begin to hope that her attraction to Derek might lead to something more? If so, his words had shown her how silly that expectation had been. Summer had lived with disapproval for most of her life; she had no intention of getting involved with any man who could not accept her—or her friends—just as they were.
“If you’ll remember, I work at the same dead-end job, I go to the same endless parties, I have the same kooky friends and I live in the same dump of an apartment furnished with the same Salvation Army rejects. And I’m perfectly content, thank you—even though I don’t have an older, wiser brother to exert his influence on me. Thank God.”
“I wasn’t trying to criticize you, Summer,” he said hastily, visibly uncomfortable. “What you do is your business. I just hate to see Connie, well—”
“You’re only going to make it worse, Derek, so I think you’d better drop it,” Summer told him, trying to sound cross though her irrepressible sense of humor was already diluting her unaccustomed anger, as it had so many times in the past. She rested her elbows on the polished tabletop and tapped her fingertips against her cheek, drawing on that comfortable humor. “Unless you want me to retaliate by telling you what I think of your life?”
“You don’t know anything about the way I live,” he informed her. “You’ve done nothing but poke fun at me and look down your up-tilted little nose at me since we met last night, simply because I wear conservative clothes and think there should be more to life than parties and games.”
“And Connie and I think that life is short, so we should make every effort to enjoy it,” Summer retorted, thinking of how easily her own life could have ended in that accident five years ago. How a shattered knee and equally shattered dreams could have led to a life of bitterness had she not resolved then to hang on to her humor and her sense of fun, no matter what else might befall her.
“Are you telling me that you enjoy the job you’re in now?” Derek asked skeptically.
“I enjoy the paycheck very much, such as it is,” she answered glibly. When he didn’t reply, she prodded. “That was another joke, Derek. Should I cue you when to laugh?”
“I didn’t find it particularly amusing,” he replied. Actually, he’d been wondering what would happen if he tried to shut her smart little mouth with a kiss. He emptied his second cup of coffee, set the cup aside and straightened his glasses with a blunt fingertip. “I think we’d better talk about something else.”
And he’d better keep reminding himself that this infuriatingly attractive young woman was off-limits, he added to himself grimly. There seemed to be little chance of her being equally attracted to a man she found so annoying and amusing. She’d made it pretty clear that he wasn’t her type. Could he convince her that she was wrong? Did he want to try?
Talk about something else? Like what? Summer almost sighed, thinking of the many differences between them. One, in particular, was weighing on her mind. “Connie told me that you’re a real sports enthusiast. She says you’re quite a competitor. What types of sports do you enjoy, Derek?”
He shrugged, then realized that she was trying to make innocuous conversation and answered more fully. “I’m not quite as active as I used to be, but I still try to stay in shape. Working out bores me, so I get my exercise through participation in competitive sports. And I run every morning.”
“Do you still run in marathons?”
Derek eyed her curiously. “Connie has told you a bit about me, hasn’t she?”
Did he think his sister completely ignored her brother’s existence? Summer wondered. “Of course she has, Derek. She talks about all of her family.”
He looked thoughtful but answered her question. “I haven’t run in a marathon since I came back to this country. I don’t have the time to train properly since I’ve been so busy establishing my business.”
“Do you miss it? Are you sorry you didn’t become a professional athlete?”
“No. I’m doing exactly what I want to do. Sports are only a form of recreation for me. I get enough competition from the occasional tennis and racquetball game to satisfy my competitive urges.” He smiled a little, knowing how Connie talked about him.
Summer toyed with her fork, remembering Connie had mentioned that Derek usually dated women who were as athletic as he was. According to his sister, a typical
date with Derek usually consisted of working up a sweat on a tennis court. Connie had been sneering at the time, and Summer had laughed. She didn’t find it quite so funny now that she’d actually met Derek. She thought of the woman Connie had most recently mentioned in connection with Derek.
“Connie tells me that you’ve been seeing Senator Payne’s daughter since you’ve moved to Sausalito,” she heard herself saying, surprised that she’d actually brought the subject up. “I met her at a party once. She’s quite beautiful.”
He lifted one eyebrow behind his glasses. “Yes, she is. I took her out a few times, but we’re not seeing each other now.”
Summer leaned both elbows on the table and rested her chin on her linked hands, gazing at him. “Why ever not?”
“Summer—”
“No, really, Derek, I would think she’d be exactly what you’d be looking for in a corporate wife.” Her humor had resurfaced, for some strange reason, the moment he’d informed her that he was no longer seeing Joanne. She decided not to dwell on reasons as she continued to tease him.
“Summer, this is really none of your—”
Her face was all innocence when she interrupted him again. “After all, she’s cultured, refined, educated, athletic. Exactly what you’ve tried to mold Connie into being. She has a career. I’ve seen her paintings, and they’re quite interesting, though not exactly my style. Of course, she is thirty. Still, more and more women are having children after thirty these days.”
“Summer?”
“Yes, Derek?”
“If I promise to stop criticizing the way you live, will you shut up?”
She laughed, inordinately pleased that the suggestion of a smile was back in his silvery-gray eyes.
“Why, yes, Derek, that sounds like a fair deal to me.”
Derek kept a hand at her elbow as they left the restaurant soon afterward and walked to his tasteful gray Lincoln. A protective hand. Summer thought with resigned amusement. Of course he would be the type to want to assist the slender young woman with the bad limp—even if he did disapprove of her. So, as usual when something made her uncomfortable, she cracked a joke. “You know, with all its hills, San Francisco is a great place for me to live. I just keep my gimpy leg uphill and I walk almost straight. Of course, going the other direction is—”
“Don’t do that,” Derek cut her off sharply. “Don’t make light of your injury.”
Summer sighed. “Oops. I forgot to cue you again. It was a joke, Derek.”
“It wasn’t funny.”
She sighed again, wishing once more that she wasn’t so foolishly attracted to this man who seemed to disapprove of everything she did.
Derek hesitated before starting the car. “It’s a beautiful day. Would you like to go for a drive with me, maybe take a stroll through Chinatown or visit Golden Gate Park?”
“Thank you, Derek, that sounds lovely, but I can’t,” Summer answered regretfully. “I have plans for today. I really should be getting back home.”
She wondered if the brief flicker of expression that crossed his face was disappointment. She found herself hoping that it was.
At her door she thanked Derek politely for buying her breakfast and promised to have Connie call when she returned from Los Angeles the next day.
“Thanks.” Derek stood awkwardly just inside the apartment. Why was he so reluctant to leave? he asked himself. What would she do if he were to kiss her? He’d been aching to taste her smile since the thought had occurred to him at breakfast. Even before that.
Summer wondered if she should offer him a cola or something. Derek seemed almost reluctant to leave, and to be honest, she wouldn’t mind spending a little more time with him. She had about half an hour before Clay picked her up for their late-morning appointment at Halloran House. Giving in to temptation, she said, “Would you like to stay for a little while? We could… we could get to know each other a little better. After all, you are my best friend’s brother.”
“Summer—” Derek bit off whatever he’d been going to say, looked at her in silence for a long time, then reached out to touch her cheek. A butterfly touch that elicited a fluttery little response somewhere in the pit of her stomach. She stared at him, wide-eyed, as his head lowered very slowly. He was going to kiss her, she thought in startled wonder. Why? Did she really want him to?
God, yes.
She felt his breath on her parted lips. And then the telephone rang.
Derek jerked his head up and around, staring at the instrument as if he’d like very much for it to explode into oblivion. Feeling much the same way, Summer cleared her throat and limped to the end table where one of the apartment’s extensions sat. “Hello?” she asked a little hoarsely. “When, tonight? Sure, that sounds like fun.” She felt Derek move restlessly beside her. “Yeah, Clay’s supposed to pick me up in about a half hour. I’ll tell you about it tonight. See you at seven. Bye.”
Derek looked particularly stern when she turned uncomfortably back to him. “Uh, Derek—Well, darn,” she muttered as the telephone rang again. She looked at him apologetically.
“Look, I’d better go. I’ll see you later, okay?” Derek ground out, heading for the door. She had men standing in line for her, he told himself angrily. Damn.
Her hand on the telephone receiver, Summer swallowed a sigh. “All right. Thanks for breakfast, Derek.”
He only nodded as he walked out of the apartment. Summer picked up the telephone, explained that Connie wasn’t home, promised to relay a message and hung up.
Chewing on her lower lip, she walked into her bedroom, thinking that her impromptu breakfast date with Derek had been unexpectedly nice. They got along quite well when they weren’t talking about Connie. Or Summer’s limp. She wondered why her self-directed jokes bothered him so much. Most people thought the comments were funny and admired her for being able to laugh at life’s misfortunes. Obviously, seeing her scars had bothered Derek so much that he didn’t even want to discuss them. Her hand went unconsciously to her knee. Derek wasn’t the first man who’d been turned off by her scars and her limp, she reflected grimly.
She tried to divert her thoughts by remembering how easily she and Derek had conversed, almost like old friends. Then she told herself that he would probably have even more to talk about with a woman like Joanne Payne, the senator’s lovely daughter. The thought made her feel depressed again.
As she gathered the things she would take with her to Halloran House, she tried to tell herself that she couldn’t care less whom Derek dated. There was certainly nothing between Summer and Derek, other than their mutual involvement with Connie. Perhaps he was a little attracted to her, as she was to him, but that was all there was to it.
“It’s just that I think Connie’s wrong about Derek,” she told the enormous Winnie the Pooh bear that sat beside her bed. “He’s a pretty nice guy, even if he is a little stuffy and arrogant, and all he needs is to fall madly in love with someone who’d keep that lovely smile in his eyes.”
Now what had put that thought into her head? “I wasn’t talking about myself, of course,” she assured the sympathetic bear, patting his one-eared head, her fingers lingering on the heavy stitches that repaired the gash where his other ear had once been. “I’m waiting for a hero, remember? Derek might look kind of heroish, but he’s just too… too proper. He’d… he’d probably bore me to tears inside a week.” Now why didn’t she have more conviction in her voice?
And why were her thoughts lingering on the brush of his lips against her scarred knee and the look in his eyes as he’d been so close to kissing her just before the telephone had interrupted? She wondered if she felt relieved or disappointed that the phone had stopped that unwise move.
Disappointed. Definitely disappointed.
SUMMER HAD CONSIDERED going to church Sunday morning, but for some reason she hadn’t been able to go to sleep until very late the night before and she overslept. In an attempt to lighten her mood, which was rarely that gloomy, she turned on
her radio and dressed in a bright purple sweatshirt and her most comfortable jeans. By early afternoon she had thoroughly cleaned the apartment and was restlessly trying to think of what she wanted to do for the remainder of the day. She could call a friend and go shopping, or there was a barbecue that she’d been invited to attend. She’d gone to a movie and then out for drinks with two women friends the night before—it had been that invitation that had interrupted yesterday when Derek had been about to kiss her—and her friends had assured her that the barbecue party would be “crawling with hunks.” So why didn’t she want to go? She dropped onto the couch and rested her chin in her hands, wondering why none of her usual pastimes held any appeal for her that day. When the telephone rang, she lifted the receiver with a spark of optimism, hopeful that the call would provide the answer to her boredom. “Hello?”
“Summer, it’s Derek.”
“Derek!” She wondered at her sudden surge of excitement, then scolded herself as she realized why he was calling. “Sorry, Connie’s not back yet. She probably won’t be home until late.”
“I wasn’t calling to talk to Connie,” Derek replied unexpectedly. “I wondered if you have plans for the afternoon.”
“I was just trying to decide. Why?”
“Would you like to come to my house for a swim? We can throw some steaks on the grill afterward for dinner. I’d like to talk to you about Connie.”
Her initial pleasure at the invitation evaporated with his explanation. “I thought I’d made myself clear about the subject of Connie, Derek. I like her, I think she’s getting along fine and I refuse to help you interfere in her life.”
Derek’s sharp exhalation was clearly audible through the telephone line. “Summer, I’m not asking you to help me interfere in her life. Connie’s my sister, and I’m tired of feeling like there’s a war going on between us. You’re her best friend, so I thought maybe you could help me find a way to make peace with her.”
“The only way you’re going to be able to do that is to accept her just as she is,” Summer answered bluntly.
Hero in Disguise Page 4
