Ladies' Man

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Ellen stood up and cleared her throat. Maybe if she acted absolutely cool, he’d believe that she intended to keep their relationship strictly one of business from now on. Maybe if she kept her distance, she’d believe it too.

  “Why don’t you come with me, Detective? I’ll introduce you to Lydia and Jamie.”

  We have a suite of rooms up on the third floor,” Ellen continued as Sam followed her out into the hall and toward the marble staircase. Everything about her—her tone of voice, the way she was walking, the formal set of her head—was that of a tour guide rather than a lover. Former lover. Past tense. It was more than clear that Ellen had no intention of reprising that role.

  Sam felt a flood of frustration. What had he done that was so wrong? What had he said to make her so certain that she didn’t want a relationship with him?

  The sex had been great. He had no doubts about that. But even he knew that physical compatibility wasn’t enough to base a relationship upon. And the sex wasn’t the reason why he’d been so intent upon seeing her again. Well, okay, in all honesty, it did have something to do with it. In fact, he’d wanted desperately to make love to Ellen again from the moment he’d stepped out of that limousine, a week ago Friday. But even more than he’d wanted that, he’d wanted the easy company, the laughter, the friendship they’d shared.

  “Ellen, before we talk to your kids, I was wondering…” Sam saw her stiffen at his words, and he felt a flare of impatience. “What? Did you think I was going to ask if you wouldn’t mind slipping into the linen closet to get it on with me? Jeez,” he exhaled in frustration. “You know, I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I’m not a complete idiot. As much as I’d like to occupy the same three square feet of confined space with you again, give me a little credit to recognize what’s appropriate and what’s not, considering I’m working and your kids are around.”

  She flushed. “I’m sorry. I’m…a little tense.”

  “I noticed. I was wondering if it was humanly possible for you to clench your teeth more tightly together,” he told her. “You’re so tense, I’m getting a headache.”

  That produced a wan smile.

  Ellen was really freaked out about this whole stalker situation. And being forced to see him again was only making it worse. She stood there, in the hall, arms folded across her chest as if holding on to herself, and Sam felt the sharpness of his frustration melt into something warmer, something sadder. She looked so vulnerable. He wanted to put his arms around her and comfort her, but he knew that touching her was the last thing she’d want him to do.

  Instead he made himself smile. “Hey,” he said. “Lighten up, all right? The stalker’s the guy who’s hassling you, not me. I’m the good guy, okay?”

  She nodded. “I know you are.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Now, what I was going to ask was whether you thought it would be all right if we told your kids the entire truth about what’s happening here—about the death threats and everything. I don’t want to scare them, but it’s important that they know why they’re absolutely not allowed to leave this house alone.”

  Ellen nodded again. “Yeah, I think we should tell them, but maybe downplay the fact that this guy could be after me. I mean, we don’t really know that. He could be after Bob.” Her sense of humor made an attempt at a comeback. “He should be after Bob, what with those tacky dumb blond jokes he made on his show last night. Lord, after that, I’m tempted to dye my hair back to its regular color.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Sam smiled ruefully. “People—especially crazy people—fixate on the strangest things. It’s possible that without blond hair, you won’t be the lady in the detergent commercial anymore—at least not to the stalker. He may lose interest.”

  “Or he might immediately kill the evil brunette imposter for taking the place of his blond goddess.”

  Sam laughed. “And then there’s always that possibility.”

  “No, I think I want to catch this guy,” Ellen said. “If we don’t catch him, I’m going to spend the rest of my life checking over my shoulder, too spooked to stay home alone. I’ll have to move into the freshmen dorm with Jamie when he goes to college. Something tells me he won’t be too happy about that.”

  We. She’d said, “If we don’t catch him.” It was only one little word, but it made Sam happier than he’d been in over a week. We. He liked the way that sounded. “We’ll catch him,” he said. God help him, he would make damn sure of it—if it was the last thing he ever did.

  Ellen took a deep breath, risking another glance up at Sam. He was gazing at her, his eyes much too warm. She started to walk again, heading down the long hallway toward Jamie’s and Lydia’s bedrooms. She could hear the familiar sounds of her children—Jamie’s Super Nintendo and Lyd’s saxophone. Fortunately, this old house was well soundproofed or they would have heard them down in Bob’s office too.

  “Hey, Lyd,” she said, knocking on her daughter’s door. “There’s someone here I want you to meet.”

  Lydia came to the door, her alto sax still attached to her neck strap. She had that hostile, don’t-bother-me-now look in her eyes, but it faded almost instantly when she caught sight of Sam.

  “Whoa,” she said, gazing at him with her usual lack of shyness. “Who are you?”

  “Wait a minute,” Sam said to Ellen. “This is the girl from the commercial.”

  “Yeah,” Ellen told him. “She’s my daughter, Lydia.” She turned to Lydia. “This is Sam Schaefer.”

  “Sam,” Lydia repeated, the last of her hostility vanishing as she gave her mother a questioning look, a look filled with silent messages. “This is Sam? Phone call Sam?”

  “He’s a detective with the New York City police,” Ellen told her.

  “A detective? No way!”

  “Way,” Ellen said. “He needs to talk to you and Jamie.”

  Lydia looked from Ellen to Sam and back again. “Why? Is something wrong?”

  Sam gazed at Ellen’s daughter. She looked like Ellen only skinnier and smaller. She was a cute version of Ellen’s grown-up beauty. Her hair was longer and light brown, her eyes the same dark chocolate color as Ellen’s. But she didn’t smile half as much. Of course, lately, Ellen wasn’t smiling too often either.

  But man, this complicated things. Sam didn’t even know for sure that the stalker was after Ellen and not Bob, and now they could throw Lydia, also a possible target, into the celebrity pot.

  “You didn’t tell me Lydia was an actress too,” he said.

  “Actor,” Lydia corrected him with a stern look. “It’s sexist to say ‘actress.’”

  “Sorry.”

  “She’s the reason I was in the right place at the right time for that commercial,” Ellen told him.

  Sam nodded. He remembered her telling him that was how she’d won the part.

  “Lyd got the part of the daughter, and I went with her into the city for the shoot. The actress—actor,” she quickly corrected herself with a glance at Lydia, “who was cast as the mother was a no-show. It turns out she was in a serious car accident, but we didn’t know it at the time. The director’s assistant was running around trying to find out what had happened to her, and I stood in for the mother during one of the rehearsals to help Lyd out with her blocking. The director liked what I did, and the rest is history.”

  “Have you seen the commercial?” Lydia asked Sam.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Isn’t Mom cute in it? It’s her first one.”

  “Yes, she’s very cute,” he said, glancing at Ellen. She was working hard to ignore his words. “How many commercials have you done?” he asked Lydia.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. A half a dozen local spots—you know, nonunion work. And in the past few years, I’ve had three SAG jobs—which is really good since I don’t live in New York City.”

  Sam looked at Ellen. “SAG?”

  “Screen Actors Guild,” she interpreted
.

  “Oh.”

  “Jamie’s done even more than me,” Lydia told him. “That’s because he still looks like a little twerpy kid. He can do a great whining nine-year-old.”

  Sam turned to Ellen again. “Jamie does commercials too?”

  She nodded. “As a matter of fact, we all have an audition tomorrow at the same casting agency. Although at this point I’m considering canceling.”

  “What?” Lydia’s voice went up an octave. “Why?”

  “You don’t have to cancel,” Sam told her. “If you change your plans, if you let yourself be intimidated, then this guy automatically wins.”

  “What guy?” Lydia asked.

  “Please go find Jamie,” Ellen asked her daughter, “and meet us in the yellow room? I’ll explain what’s going on.”

  EIGHT

  I can’t believe I’ve been living here in this house and I didn’t have a clue any of this was going on,” Lydia lamented. “I mean, I knew about that gross phone call, but other than that, I’ve been drifting around here, totally serene.”

  “I knew everything,” Jamie announced.

  “That’s ’cause you’re a twerp.”

  “I’m a twerp? I don’t think so, butthead.”

  “I hate when you call me that!”

  “I know. Butthead.”

  “Excuse me,” Ellen said loudly. “You’re both twerps and buttheads, okay? Or at least you will be if you keep acting like this. Just stop the fighting, all right?”

  “Yeah,” Jamie said. “This is like that Star Trek episode where the Klingons are suddenly beamed aboard the Enterprise, and this really tacky special effect light-being feeds off of all the fighting, and Captain Kirk and the Klingon commander have to pretend to be friends to make the alien go away.”

  “You mean ‘The Day of the Dove’?” Lydia snorted. “It’s nothing like that at all. It’s much more like the really spooky one where the spirit of Jack the Ripper gets into the Enterprise’s computer and—”

  “Nope,” Ellen interrupted. “It’s like ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’—the episode where the really scary alien’s face on the view screen turns out to be no one more dangerous than little Clint Howard with a bald wig on. The terrible threat is nothing more than a bluff, and everyone sits around at the end drinking tranya and laughing. That’s what this is going to be like.”

  Sam was trying very hard not to laugh. Ellen glanced at him and couldn’t keep her own smile from slipping out. For the briefest of moments, she forgot and she let herself gaze into his eyes. The connection was instant, but it was more than just molten-hot. It was warm too. And it was terribly hard to look away.

  But she did, shaken by the weakness of her resolve, ashamed at how much she still wanted this man. When she looked at him again, she forced herself to focus on his gorgeous face, the casual perfection of his hair, the width of his shoulders.

  She may have wanted him, but that wasn’t a sign of weakness on her part. Ellen couldn’t blame herself for being human. No woman alive between the ages of one and one hundred wouldn’t have wanted Sam Schaefer in one way or another.

  No one was immune to his charisma. Not even Lydia. He’d managed to wrap Ellen’s perpetually bored daughter totally around his little finger.

  Ellen watched as Sam spoke to both Lydia and Jamie, giving them the list of rules they were going to follow to ensure everyone’s safety until the stalker was caught. Jamie was listening intently—that was no surprise. He was still young enough to have a sense of unreality about the entire situation. To him this was nothing more than a giant game. She knew that over the next few days she’d find him slinking about the house, playing detective—baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes, water pistol clutched in his hand as he peered out the windows, looking for any sign of someone watching the house.

  Ellen made a mental note to make sure the water pistol stayed empty. Bob would definitely not be into Jamie dripping water on his expensive antiques.

  “Do you have any questions?” Sam asked her children.

  Lydia, ever the actor, was playing the part of the complete, concerned grown-up. “I just made arrangements to take lessons from Casey Redmond, the sax player from Bob’s house band. We were going to meet at his place, across town. Should I ask him to come here instead?”

  “Definitely.” Sam took out his notebook, making note of the name.

  Lydia was fascinated. “You don’t think it could be Casey, do you?”

  “Right now I only know that it’s not you or Jamie or Ellen or Bob or me or T.S. or Hyunh and her security team, but that’s where my list ends. Oh—my mom and dad. They’re on my list too. I don’t think either of them are the stalker.”

  Lydia giggled.

  “But anyone else—particularly someone you’ve met recently—they’re a potential suspect, yeah. So I’m going to need you both to think really hard and make me a list of all the people you’ve met or talked to over the past few weeks. Can you do that for me?”

  Lydia nodded, her eyes glued to Sam’s face. “Sure. I’ll do it right away.”

  No, Lydia definitely wasn’t immune to Sam’s charm. Now, there was a thought that was frightening. Sam and Lydia. But their age difference was hardly much larger than the difference in Ellen and Sam’s ages. It would be no more appropriate for Ellen to go out with Sam than it would be for Sam to go out with fifteen-year-old Lydia.

  Ellen forced herself to look at Sam’s feet, at the sneakers he was wearing. They were big and bold cross-trainers, with lightning bolts and stripes of black standing out against the white of the shoe. They were something Jamie would wear. They were unabashedly young looking.

  And his jeans. She tried to picture Richard wearing jeans and a sport jacket to work, but she couldn’t. Of course, Richard was a good ten years older than she was. He was from an even more formal upbringing.

  “Why don’t you get started on those lists,” Sam told the kids. “It might help you remember people you’ve met if you work together—exactly like Captain Kirk and Commander Kang from ‘The Day of the Dove,’” he added with a grin.

  “Let’s do it on the computer,” Jamie said to Lydia.

  “You just want me to type for you.”

  “You like to type. I know, you can pretend to be Lieutenant Uhura.”

  Lydia stood up, giving her brother a thoroughly evil eye. “Lieutenant Uhura wasn’t just some brainless space chick, you know. She was on track to becoming a captain.”

  “Last one to the computer’s a brainless space chick,” Jamie said.

  Lydia snorted. “Oh, grow up.”

  But when Jamie stood up and made a move toward the door, Lydia bolted, beating him there. They disappeared down the hallway, both running full speed.

  “Don’t…” Ellen gave up and finished the last of her sentence in a regular voice, “…run in the house.” She looked at Sam and rolled her eyes. “At least I can take comfort from the fact that they’re not running with scissors in their hands.”

  Sam laughed as he stood up and closed the door to the sitting room. “I’ll need a similar list from you.”

  “You just closed the door,” Ellen said.

  “Yeah, I did that on purpose. I wanted to talk for a minute in private.”

  “About?”

  He smiled ruefully. “Nothing personal. This case—and your kids.” He paused. “They’re great, you know.”

  “Yes, I do know. What about them?”

  Ellen knew what he was going to say before he even said it.

  Sam’s blue eyes were serious. “I think we need to be open to the possibility that Lydia or Jamie might be the stalker’s target.”

  Ellen felt a flash of hot and then cold. She’d known he was going to say that; still, hearing the words spoken aloud made them frighteningly real.

  He sat down on the couch, next to her, and for a moment she thought he was going to take her hand. For a moment she wanted him to. Desperately. But he didn’t.

  “I don’t think t
hat’s necessarily true,” he continued, “but it’s smart to be ready for any possibility.”

  She looked up at him. “You don’t think…?” The phone rang. Ellen looked at it and then at Sam. “That’s Bob’s personal line. Have you set up the equipment to trace incoming calls yet?”

  He shook his head. “That won’t be installed until sometime tonight.”

  “I’m expecting my agent to call,” Ellen said. But she didn’t reach for the phone.

  “Do you want me to answer it?”

  She shook her head. “No.” Drawing in a deep breath, she picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  “He’s back,” the voice said. It was the caller. The stalker. The creep. Ellen looked sharply at Sam. “It’s him,” she said soundlessly.

  “Keep him talking,” he mouthed silently. “Is there another phone in here?”

  She shook her head no. “Who’s back?” she asked the caller. “Who is this?”

  Sam moved to her other side, sitting close, adjusting the telephone and leaning in so that he could hear too. Ellen could feel his leg pressed against hers from his hip all the way to his knee. She could feel his shoulder, too, and his hand around hers as together they held the phone between them. She closed her eyes, too well aware of his mouth only inches from hers. His breath smelled sweet. Coffee and mint. She remembered how delicious he had tasted.

  “There’s no escape—only surrender,” the voice hissed into both of their ears. “Death is coming.”

  Ellen opened her eyes and found Sam gazing at her. “When?” she asked. “When is it coming?”

  “Soon. They have told me. It must be soon.”

  “Who are ‘they?’” Ellen asked as Sam nodded slightly, reassuringly, still looking into her eyes. She held his gaze as if it were a lifeline.

  “They are watching.” The voice tightened, the words coming faster and closer together. “Always watching.”

  Ellen’s own throat felt tight, and she wondered if her own fear could be heard in her voice. She could very well be talking to her executioner. Sam’s fingers tightened around hers as if he were thinking the same thoughts. She closed her eyes, tipping her head slightly so that it rested against his. She needed the contact. She wanted to feel his warmth. “You said death is coming. How will death come?” Her voice sounded hoarse.