It was one thing to share a friendly ride home, but dinner would change the entire tone. Dinner—especially an intimate picnic for two in the back of the limo—would add a gossamer-fine layer of romance onto the evening. And once it was there, it couldn’t be removed without crumbling and ruining everything it touched.
Dinner would be a major mistake.
Ellen stepped off the escalator. She could see Bob’s limo waiting outside the glass doors. “Oh, good, it’s already here.”
As she approached, Ron, the driver, quickly slid out from behind the steering wheel and opened the passenger door.
“You’re not going to believe who we’re driving home tonight,” she said to him. “This is T. S. Harrison.” She turned to Sam. “Ron’s bought all your books—including your most recent hardcover release. Now, that’s a dedicated fan, don’t you think?”
“Pleased to meet you, sir.”
“Actually, my name’s really Sam Schaefer,” Sam said as he shook Ron’s hand. “I’m not—”
“T. S. Harrison is a pseudonym,” Ellen told the driver as she climbed into the limo.
Sam climbed in after her and Ron closed the door behind him, sealing them into the muted, shaded privacy of the limousine’s belly. The limo had two soft bench seats, facing each other. He could have sat across from her, but he didn’t. He sat down next to her. Now, why didn’t that surprise her?
“You know, there was something I wanted to talk to you about without Bob around,” Ellen told Sam. “I know you’re going to be writing about Bob, and I know that his experiences in Vietnam are an important part of what makes him the man he is today, but—”
“Ellen, I have to tell you—”
“No, wait, let me finish, please. I was there when he came back from Vietnam. I was only twelve years old, and I didn’t know much about it at the time, but Bob suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome, and when I say suffered, I mean suffered. I remember days when he just disappeared—my mother was his oldest sister, and he was living with us because no one else wanted him. I would have to search the woods around our house, looking for him, and…” She took a deep breath. “It took him a lot of hard work and a long time to deal with everything that he went through, and I just…I’m very protective of him when it comes to this, so I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t you dare push him too hard with your questions. In fact, maybe what you should do is just talk to me, ask me about what he did in Vietnam. He lived with us for five years, and I learned how to get him to talk to me about it. It was pretty awful, and I’d just as soon he never had to think about any of it ever again.”
He was silent, just sitting there looking at her, a bemused smile playing around the edges of his mouth. “Bob’s a lucky man to have you on his side,” he finally said.
Ellen held his gaze. “He may have been my uncle, but he was also my best friend. It’s been a while since we’ve been close, but…” She smiled. “When you get to know him, when you find out the road he’s taken to get where he is today, you’re really going to be impressed.”
Sam smiled too. “Yeah, I’m looking forward to reading the book, but I’m not going to write it. I’m not really T. S. Harrison.”
It took Ellen a moment to make sense of his words. “You’re not?” If he wasn’t T. S. Harrison, then…“Who are you?”
“Like it says on the police badge—Sam Schaefer, NYPD.” His blue eyes were filled with chagrin. “I told you in the bookstore, T.S. is a friend of mine. My best friend. Bob asked him to pick up Alma, and he agreed before he remembered his kid had a ballet recital. So he called me. I tried to tell both Bob and Alma that I wasn’t T.S., but they wouldn’t listen.”
Ellen had to laugh. “I thought you were just being modest and cute—you know, telling me at the newsstand that you know T. S. Harrison really well, and then, surprise, you do know T.S. intimately—in fact, you’re T.S.”
“If I were T. S. Harrison, I would have told you who I was right away,” Sam countered. “I would have used it to get your phone number—you better believe that, ba—” He stopped himself. “I was going to say ‘babe,’ but I knew if I did, I’d get lambasted.”
“Ooh, a fast learner. I like that in a man.”
He grinned. “Although being lambasted still sounds incredibly tempting.” His eyes narrowed. “Tell me the truth—would you have given your phone number to T. S. Harrison?”
Ellen adjusted the air-conditioning vent away from her face. “T. S. Harrison already has my phone number, because my phone number is Bob’s phone number—at least for the next few months.”
“You’re avoiding my question.”
She smiled. “I know.”
“Do you forgive me for not being T.S.?”
“Actually, I’m glad you’re not T.S.” She was relieved that this man, with his quicksilver smile and bedroom eyes, wouldn’t be spending hour upon hour in her uncle’s house. “But I’d appreciate it if you could tell the real T.S. all that stuff I just said, you know, about Vietnam?”
Sam nodded. “I will. How about if I have him call you directly too?”
“Thank you.”
The phone rang; it was Ron calling from the front seat. Ellen put him on the speakerphone.
“Where to, Ms. Layne?”
She glanced at Sam. “Where are you headed?”
“Hopefully to dinner with you.”
Ellen looked into Sam’s Paul Newman–blue eyes and made herself face the awful truth. Now that she knew he wasn’t T. S. Harrison, and now that she knew he was a police detective and not some weirdo who hung around airport newsstands, she had to admit that she truly liked him. He was funny and smart and incredibly attractive. She wanted to have dinner with him. She wanted to spend an evening with the dazzle of that charisma focused on her. She wanted to be just a little bit wild. She wanted to take this lighthearted flirtation one teeny little baby-step further.
Nothing heavy. Nothing too intense. Just dinner.
She wanted to.
And she was going to.
So what if he was too young. Age was a state of mind, anyway, wasn’t it? Look at Alma. Eighty-nine and going strong.
Still looking into Sam’s eyes, Ellen raised her voice enough to be picked up by the speakerphone. “Head for the West Side, please, Ron,” she said. “We’d like to stop at the Carnegie Deli and pick something up for dinner. And then, if it’s all right with you, we’d like the dollar tour of the city.”
“It would be my pleasure,” Ron said and signed off.
Sam smiled, a sweet, crooked, utterly charming smile. “Thank you.”
Ellen felt herself blush as she let herself be thoroughly charmed. “Well, we both do have to eat and…”
Sam was looking around the limo as if seeing the luxurious interior for the first time. “Nice car. I don’t suppose the TV has cable?”
Ellen picked up the telephone. “Hello, Ron? Sam just made the old ‘Does the limo get cable’ joke. How many does that make it? Seven thousand, six hundred and fifty-two times in the past three years that you’ve had this job? Shall we push him out of the car now, or wait until we’re going through the tunnel?”
“Very funny.” Sam took the phone out of her hand, listened to make sure Ron wasn’t really on the other end, and hung it up. Then he just sat there smiling at her.
Now what?
Ellen nervously searched for something, anything to talk about. “So…how did you meet T. S. Harrison?”
“I refused to steal his 1969 Mets World Series autographed baseball.”
“You what?”
He grinned. “We were both in fifth grade. Angelo Giglione and Marty Keller—they were seventh graders, and everyone was scared to death of them—they told me that they were going to beat the crap out of me unless I finagled an invitation to Toby Harrison’s house and stole this baseball he had that all the Mets on the ’69 team had signed.”
“Toby Harrison?”
“Tobias Shavar Harrison. He decided in ninth grade t
o do the initial thing—it was around the time he grew a foot and a half taller and made the basketball team. But back in fifth grade he was fat Toby H., the weird science nerd.”
Ellen tried not to laugh. “I love the way you talk about your best friend.”
“It’s the truth. T.S. would be the first to admit it.”
“So, what happened?”
“So, Marty and Angelo knew Toby was my science partner, and that he’d have to invite me over to his house to get the project done. I think we were building a volcano. Toby was in charge of making diagrams of tectonic plates, and I was in charge of making the volcano—which was easy, since I’d made a model volcano in the fourth grade and it was still out in my garage. We were both in charge of creating the goo that was supposed to ooze down the sides.”
Ellen found herself hanging on to Sam’s every word, like some teenager struck with puppy love. She tried to convince herself that she was interested in the story he was telling rather than the slightly rough texture of his voice and the way his graceful mouth moved when he spoke. It didn’t take much imagination to picture that mouth moving against her lips, her neck, her…
She forced herself to look away from him, forced herself to pay attention to his story.
“So he invited me over,” Sam continued, “and I went, and we mixed all this horrible looking stuff together in his kitchen, and his mom even helped us figure out what we had to add to vinegar to make the volcano bubble and foam, and we had a pretty good time. He was an okay guy for a nerd, you know? He really knew how to make me laugh.”
It was no use. Ellen couldn’t keep from gazing at him, this time into his eyes. She found herself looking closer, trying to see if maybe he wore colored contact lenses. Nobody could have eyes that blue, could they?
“After we finished up with the volcano,” he told her, “I sort of casually asked to see this incredible baseball that everyone knew he had. He took me up to his bedroom and took it out of its case and let me hold it. It was so cool. All those signatures. It was worth a lot of money—well, you know, not by grown-up standards, but to a kid…. I asked him where he got it, and he told me his dad gave it to him.
“Now, when Toby said that, I knew he was full of crap, because everyone knew his dad died in Vietnam before he was born. But then he showed me this letter that his dad had written to him, telling him that his mom was going to hold this baseball for him until his tenth birthday. See, his dad knew he might not come back from ’Nam, so he wrote this letter for this kid that he would never meet.”
Ellen forgot about the color of Sam’s eyes, totally engrossed in the story he was telling.
Sam smiled at her ruefully. “And so I sat there, looking at all those signatures and the mark of the bat where Wayne Garrett had hit the ball into the stands for a home run. And I looked at the letter, and I looked at Toby, and I looked at the way he put that baseball back in its special case, and I knew that Angelo Giglione and Marty Keller were just going to have to beat the hell out of me, because there was no way I was going to take that baseball away from this kid. And there was no way I was going to let anyone else take it away, either. I told Toby everything, told him to lock that baseball up and not to trust anyone.”
Ellen had to ask. “Did they? Those boys? Did they beat you up?”
Sam leaned forward slightly, pointing to a spot on his face just above and off to the side of his right eyebrow. “See this scar? Seven stitches at City Hospital courtesy of Angelo Giglione.”
Ellen had noticed that scar earlier. It wasn’t a very big scar, yet it managed to add character to his face. It added even more now that she knew where he’d gotten it.
“T.S. only had to get five stitches that day.”
“They beat him up too?”
“He saw them corner me on the playground after school, and tried to even up the odds. We’ve been tight ever since.”
She resisted the urge to reach out and lightly trace his scar with her finger. She sat back in her seat, putting some distance between them, suddenly aware that for several long moments his face had been mere inches from hers, his mouth well within kissing range.
She wanted to kiss this man.
It was such a strange sensation. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d allowed herself even to think such a thought.
He was looking at her as if he could read her mind. God help her if he could.
But instead of leaning toward her and covering her mouth with his, Sam turned and opened the little refrigerator that was built into the side of the car. “Hey. Look at this. There’re five bottles of champagne in here.”
“Bob’s always ready for anything,” Ellen told him as he took one out and looked at the label. She tried to slow the pounding of her heart. “Emmy nominations. High ratings. Viewer’s choice awards. Academy Award—winning actresses who might need to be personally escorted back to their hotel after his show…Although, you know, he doesn’t drink himself.”
“I’d heard, yeah.” He eyed the glasses and corkscrew that were secured in a nearby compartment. “Do you think he’d mind if we opened a bottle?”
“What are we celebrating?”
“Now, there’s a myth.” Sam unwrapped the plastic from the top of the bottle, exposing the cork. “Who says we need to celebrate something in order to enjoy a glass of champagne? It’s really just beer made from grapes.”
The phone rang, and again Ellen put on the speaker. “Hang on, folks,” Ron’s voice said. “I’ve got a lot of brake lights ahead.”
The limo slowed, all the way to a stop.
As Sam watched, Ellen reached for a button on a control panel, and the opaque privacy panel that separated the back of the limo from the front seat went down. She moved across onto the other seat, sitting sideways so that she could look out the front windshield.
“What’s going on?” she asked the driver.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But it looks as if some people up ahead are getting out of their cars.”
Sam looked at his watch. “There’ll be a traffic report on WINS in just a minute.”
Ron nodded. “I’ve been going back and forth between the stations—nobody’s said anything about this. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything. But from the way this looks, we could be here for a while.”
Ellen turned back to look at Sam as she put the panel back into place. “If there’s one thing I hate about New York City, it’s the relentless traffic. I hope you don’t need to be anywhere soon.”
“No, I’ve got the whole night.” For the first time in his life, Sam was ecstatic about being stuck in a traffic jam.
Who said they had nothing to celebrate?
He smiled and popped the champagne’s cork.
THREE
My all-time favorite movie?” Ellen mused, leaning back against the soft leather of the seat, her sandals off and her feet up on the facing seat. “That’s a hard one. I think it’s a toss-up between E.T., The Sound of Music, and The Usual Suspects.”
Sam laughed as he poured himself another glass of champagne. “I can see your problem deciding,” he teased. “They’re all so similar.”
His feet were up on the seat, too, and Ellen nudged his foot with her toe. “They are. They’re all great movies.”
Sam shifted slightly, moving closer to her so that their feet were touching all the time. “More?” he asked, holding out the bottle.
Ellen shook her head. “No, thanks. At least not until we can get something to eat to go with it.” She looked down at their feet—his were still touching hers—and then up into his eyes.
“So, tell me what made you decide to come to New York City for the summer,” he said with a smile.
Ellen had to laugh. “This is my fault, isn’t it?” she asked. “I touched you first, so now you figure it’s okay to touch me.”
He still didn’t move his feet away. He’d pulled off his white athletic socks when he’d taken off his sneakers, and his feet were warm, with straight, ev
enly shaped toes. But compared to his arms and hands, his feet were lily white, as if he didn’t spend much time with his socks and sneakers off. They were nice to look at, though, and even nicer to feel against her own slightly chilly toes.
He took another sip of his champagne as he gazed at her. “I’d rather hold your hand, but I thought I’d start slowly. You have to admit I’ve shown incredible restraint, considering we’ve been sitting here together for…” He glanced at his watch. “Nearly two hours.”
“Your subtlety has been astonishing,” Ellen agreed, “for a man who claims not to be subtle.”
He reached across her to set his wineglass in an inset holder along the side of the interior, and their shoulders touched. But when he shifted back, he didn’t move far enough away. She wasn’t all that surprised when he picked up her hand and laced their fingers together.
The sensation made her heart accelerate, but she couldn’t seem to pull away. She didn’t want to pull away.
“You seem just a little gun-shy,” he told her softly, bringing her hand up to his lips. “I’m trying really hard not to scare you.”
“I’m not scared,” Ellen said. And she wasn’t. She knew with a certainty that all she had to do was not move, and Sam would kiss her. All she had to do was to sit right there and just look at him, and he would lean over and…
But he didn’t.
He just smiled at her, a slow, steady heat burning in his eyes.
They’d been talking nonstop for nearly two hours as they sat in stopped traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway. Ron had relayed news reports that said a tractor-trailer had jackknifed on the road ahead of them, nearly crushing three cars. Apparently there were three different teams with three different Jaws of Life working to free seriously injured passengers. A bevy of choppers had landed on the highway, too, waiting to airlift the injured to the hospital. The road would be blocked for another hour or so.
Ladies' Man Page 3
