Ladies' Man

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “I don’t know. They will tell me when the time is right.”

  She opened her eyes to see that Sam’s were closed. But as if he sensed her watching him, he opened his eyes too. The sudden brilliance of blue was startlingly beautiful. She was close enough to see that his eyes were blue and only blue. There were no flecks and streaks of green and gold, like Jamie’s eyes. “Haven’t they even given you a hint?” she asked the caller.

  “All that is certain is the probe.”

  Shoot, not the probe. Ellen didn’t want this freak talking about the probe. First came talk of the probe, then came the list of probe-able human body parts. He seemed really to enjoy running down that list and including all kinds of unpleasant euphemisms. She shivered slightly, and Sam gazed at her searchingly, concern in his eyes as he slipped his arm around her shoulders, holding her even closer. “We can hang up,” he said soundlessly.

  She shook her head, but she didn’t pull away from him. “Did you send those pictures?” she asked the caller.

  “I do their bidding.” In the background she could hear the blare of a siren getting louder and then fading away.

  “Look, it’s a yes or no question. Did you or didn’t you send me those creepy pictures?” Her voice rose sharply.

  “Death and life,” he said, almost chanting. “Death and life. One leads to the other.”

  “Yeah, life to death, and not the other way around.” But Sam was shaking his head slightly, warningly. Ellen took a deep breath and tried to make her voice sound calm. “Why are you calling me?”

  “Where do you want them to put the probe?”

  “Lord, will you stop with the probe crap,” Ellen said.

  “Where do you want them to put the probe?”

  Ellen lost it. “How about up your nose with a rubber hose, nutball?”

  On the other end of the phone there was silence. A long, shocked silence. And then the foul language started. Again it was almost like a chant, a series of meaningless syllables that were strung together.

  Sam reached across Ellen and with one finger cut the connection.

  She dropped the receiver as if it were tainted, and didn’t fight him as he wrapped her in his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured, kissing her hair as she buried her face in his shirt. “God, Ellen, I’m so sorry. Dammit, I wish we’d been hooked up to trace that call. I wish we’d gotten that on tape.”

  “I’m going to have to do that again.” She closed her eyes tightly. As long as she kept her eyes closed, she could pretend that she wasn’t sitting there with Sam’s arms around her, with his fingers in her hair, his hands running down her back. “The next time he calls, I’m going to have to talk to him again so we can try to trace it, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah.” Sam swore softly. “And all we’ll probably find out is that he’s calling from a public phone—which we already know.”

  Ellen opened her eyes. “We do?”

  He nodded, looking down at her. “Didn’t you hear the street noise? He was calling from some corner pay phone.”

  “Now that you mention it…”

  The hard lines of Sam’s face softened into a smile. “Up your nose with a rubber hose, huh?”

  Ellen found herself smiling back at him—until he brushed her hair back from her face, his fingers gentle against her cheek.

  Then, suddenly, she realized his mouth was no more than two inches away from hers. His smile faded, too, and his eyes seemed almost piercing in their intensity. And then the two inches became one, and one inch became none as she lifted her mouth to meet his in a kiss.

  Lord, she’d missed him this past week.

  He kissed her just as he had that very first time in the limo—possessively, hungrily, proprietarily. His kiss was thoroughly consuming, and Ellen let herself be swept away, leaving the unpleasantness of that phone call and all of the threats and dangers it implied far behind.

  All that existed was Sam.

  His mouth was so sweet, his lips so demanding, she couldn’t pull back. She didn’t want to. It wasn’t until his hand swept up her body, cupping her breast through the cotton of her T-shirt, that reality intervened.

  She pulled back and pushed herself off the couch, practically throwing herself to the other side of the room, well out of his reach.

  “Lord,” she said, holding on to the back of a chair for support. “Don’t do that.”

  He stood up too. “Don’t do what? Kiss you back when you kiss me? You’re kidding, right?”

  Dear God, she’d kissed him. She was the one who’d lifted her mouth that last fraction of an inch and kissed him. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not.” He stepped toward her. “Ellen—”

  She backed away. “Don’t. Don’t get too close.”

  “Why? Because you’ll kiss me again? That sounds like incentive for me to get as close as I possibly can as often as I possibly can.”

  “Please,” she said, keeping the chair between them. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  Frustration and desire burned in his eyes. “You may not have meant for it to happen, but it was the most honest interaction we’ve shared since we said good night a week ago Friday.”

  She flushed. “That was a mistake, what we did that night—”

  He lowered his voice, and the effect was even more dangerous than if he’d raised it. “The hell it was. It was perfect, and you know it.”

  “It was a mistake because I misjudged you,” Ellen told him. “You weren’t supposed to want more than one night.”

  The look in Sam’s eyes was unreadable. “You know, you said you’d never done that kind of thing before—have a one-night stand with a stranger. But now I’ve really got to wonder.”

  Ellen was outraged, but her flare of temper didn’t last. It was quickly doused by a flood of shame. He had every right to think ill of her. “I haven’t,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t.”

  “So, what makes me different?” Sam’s gaze was probing, searching her eyes, trying to read her mind. “What makes me eligible for only one night, even though I’ve made it clear I want more than that?”

  “I’m not ready for…someone like you.” Someone who would take her heart and run. She edged toward the door. “Please, let’s not complicate things,” she added.

  “Ellen, I’ve got to be honest with you—things have been complicated beyond belief since you told me you didn’t want to see me again. I don’t know why you won’t give us a chance. I see you and I still want you,” he said, his husky voice nearly breaking with desire, “and I look into your eyes and I know you still want me. And I just can’t figure this out.”

  “I didn’t come to New York looking for a summer fling.”

  “You came looking for a change, though,” he reminded her. “A temporary change of pace. You told me yourself you’ve been alone for four years. We could change that right now. We could be having a truly great summer if you would just relax and let it happen.”

  “I can’t. We…we come from such different worlds.” She was unwilling to tell him the whole truth—that she was terrified of falling in love with him, of leaving her heart behind in New York when she returned to Connecticut at the end of the summer. She didn’t know how to have a light romance, a summer fling. She had never had a relationship where she’d held back, where she hadn’t given all. Even during that single night she’d spent with Sam, she’d given away a little too much of her heart. She knew that now as she stood there gazing at him, wishing she were enough of a fool to throw her caution to the wind and herself into his arms.

  But she was only a bit of a fool. She was smart enough to know that even if she were ready for a relationship again, she wasn’t going to become involved with a too handsome, too young, too charismatic ladies’ man who would probably pull a Richard and cheat on her further down the road—provided he stuck around long enough for there even to be a road. Add on top of that the fact that come September they’d live over a hundred miles apart….

/>   No, mistakes were made to learn from, and Ellen was determined to learn from her failed marriage if it was the last thing she’d ever do.

  Bob had mentioned introducing her to his stage manager, a nice, friendly, funny, thirty-something man who’d been widowed for nearly four years. He even lived in Connecticut, down in Westport, about midway between New York City and Ellen. Bob had mentioned him a week ago. He sounded perfect. So why hadn’t Ellen done anything about it? Why hadn’t she asked Bob to invite the man over for dinner?

  She was looking into the neon blue eyes of the reason why.

  Sam looked unhappy and subdued. He looked as if he were about to say something more, but instead he just shook his head. “I better go. I’m already late for a meeting at the precinct.”

  Ellen tried not to watch him walk away.

  And failed.

  NINE

  Sam was sweating. He had every right to be hot. The casting agency was crowded, the current heat wave was sending the mercury up near one hundred degrees, and the building’s wheezing old air-conditioning system was being pushed as far as it could go with no obvious effect.

  But Sam’s sweat was the cold, nasty kind. The kind that came from nerves and stress.

  Outwardly, he knew he looked calm and relaxed. He knew he was good at throwing off an air of solid confidence. Inside, he was coming up with a huge list of all the awful things that could go wrong before they were back in the safety of Bob’s house.

  Compiled with the things that already had gone wrong that day, it was a load of anxiety worthy of the coldest of sweats.

  Someone had followed them as he and Ellen and the kids had left the house. Sam had spotted the tail almost right away as they’d walked the few blocks over to the agency’s office. But he’d never managed to get a clear look at the man’s face. Even more frustrating was the fact that his backup team lost the guy.

  Sam had wanted nothing more than to circle around behind the son of a bitch and catch him off guard, but he couldn’t do it himself. And there was no way in hell he was going to leave Ellen and the kids alone. Still, his inability to act had frustrated him beyond reason. He wanted to catch this creep and make the glimmer of fear he could see in Ellen’s eyes disappear for good.

  She’d told him that their worlds were too different. Wasn’t that the truth? His world was filled with scumbags like this one, scumbags who frequently tried to invade her world.

  And then, of course, there was the tricky little matter of education. Her world was also an academic world. She spent her time bringing a higher level of learning to some of the brightest students in the country. She had more degrees hanging off the end of her name than everyone in Sam’s family combined. She spent most of her time in the idyllic scholarly peace of a college campus.

  Sam, on the other hand, lived in a world where his job entailed tracking down a deranged killer who didn’t even know how to spell the word that he specialized in—death. Of course, Sam wasn’t that strong a speller himself, never had been. It hadn’t bothered him before. But now he felt self-conscious about it—as if somehow that made him no better than the man he was after. God help him if he ever had to write Ellen a note. He was going to have to start carrying around a pocket dictionary.

  Sam looked at his watch. They’d been there for nearly an hour, waiting for their turn in the audition room. Ellen sat with Lydia and Jamie on a row of chairs against the wall. They were quiet, reading something Lydia had called “sides” that looked like a two-page script.

  The room they were waiting in was little more than a wide hallway. There were several doors off the hallway, all of which remained shut, opening and closing only under the power of a stout woman with a clipboard and a piercing voice. The doors opened, the woman used her megaphone voice to bleat out a name, an actor went in, and the doors shut—sometimes not even for a full minute. Then the doors opened again, the actor was expelled, another name bleated, and another, different actor went in.

  Except there wasn’t really that big a difference between the first actor and the second. Everyone in this room—with the exception of Sam, the lady with the clipboard, and several stage mothers—was either a thirty-something light-haired woman, a freckle-faced boy, or an on-the-verge-of-beautiful young teenage girl.

  Farther down the hallway a group of balding, overweight men wearing business suits and eyeglasses were all sitting or standing outside of another closed door.

  It was weird, but it was good. Unless the stalker was a woman, a kid, a young girl, or a balding, overweight, business-suited man, Sam would have no problem spotting him the moment he appeared.

  “What do you think of your first cattle call?”

  Sam turned around to see Ellen standing behind him, close but not too close. He had a feeling she wasn’t going to get too close ever again. He’d barely slept at all last night, aware that she was lying in her bed, in a room up on the next floor, so close and yet so far away.

  “This actually would be pretty amusing,” Sam said, “if I didn’t have other things to think about.” He gestured to the door. “What goes on in there that they have to close the door so tightly?”

  Ellen smiled. “Well, for one thing, there’s probably a window air conditioner that’s keeping the room nice and cool, because the client’s in there. He or she is paying the casting agency big bucks to parade a bunch of quality talent—that’s us—in front of them. We go in, and the clients—sometimes there’s a group of them—are sitting behind a table. There’s a video camera set up, and we look into the camera, give our name, our agent, and whatever other information they ask us to give. Sometimes they say ‘Thank you,’ and we leave without even reading the sides. Sometimes they have us read the lines three or four times. Sometimes they like what we do and they laugh—if it’s supposed to be funny, that’s really good. But sometimes they barely even glance up, and spend the entire time we’re there talking to someone on their cell phone.”

  Sam scanned the crowd, noting the new people who arrived, watching them sign in at the different tables around the room. “Man, that sounds awful.”

  Ellen looked back at Lydia and Jamie, still sitting in the folding chairs against the wall. “Yeah. It’s really an interesting business. The amount of rejection you face is huge. I’m kind of awed that both my kids have stuck with it for so long.”

  In between the careful, calculated sweeps Sam made of the room, searching for anyone different, anyone who looked out of place, he glanced at her face.

  “I wanted to tell you that I’ve crossed Richard off my list of suspects,” Sam said quietly.

  Ellen’s dark eyes widened in surprise. “Richard? Was a suspect?”

  Sam slipped his hands in the pockets of his jeans as he leaned against one of the round support pillars that dotted the room. He met her eyes only briefly before he focused a portion of his attention on a man who had just gotten off the elevator. But the man was accompanying a ten-year-old freckle-faced boy. Sam watched as they went to one of the tables and signed in.

  “It’s standard procedure,” he told her, “based on the fact that most violent crimes are committed by someone who was close to the victim. In cases like this it would be crazy not to check out the ex-husband.”

  “And Richard checks out okay?”

  Sam nodded. “He’s been in San Francisco since the beginning of June.”

  “I could have told you that.”

  “We verified with the San Francisco police that he really is in California.”

  She was watching him closely, and when she spoke, her words surprised him. “Are you still upset by what happened before?”

  At first he didn’t understand what she was referring to. Then he realized she had to be talking about the way they’d been followed and the clumsy attempt—and failure—to apprehend the stalker. He’d been really upset, but he hadn’t thought anyone had known. He’d purposely played it super cool.

  She looked away, as if aware she’d somehow given away too much. If she�
�d been watching him closely enough to know that he was, indeed, quite upset…

  “Ellen, do you like me?”

  His question surprised her and she glanced up at him. He could see the uncertainty in her eyes as she hesitated to answer him.

  He made another sweep around the room before he glanced back at her. “It’s not a trick question. I think you like me, and I just wanted to know if I was right or not.”

  Ellen nodded, giving him a ghost of one of her usual ebullient smiles. “Yes, I like you.” She looked as if she were going to add something else, but then she stopped, a slight flush tingeing her cheeks.

  Sam waited until she looked up at him again, and then he said, “I like you, too, you know. This thing between us—it’s more than just sex. I wanted to make sure you knew that.”

  “Are you telling me that you want to be…friends?”

  “I think maybe what I’m telling you is that we are friends already. Despite the fact that you’d rather not be.”

  Ever since he’d kissed Ellen the day before and she’d had a near heart attack, he’d realized he was pushing too hard, hoping for too much. And as much as he wanted to leap headlong into a sexual relationship with this woman, that wasn’t all that he wanted. He wanted to be with her. And he’d achieved that. He was living in her house, which provided a lot of opportunities to be with her. And given a little bit of time, he would build on their friendship—this strong sense of like that he knew was between them. And once that happened, it was only a matter of more time before the nearly overpowering attraction they felt became impossible to ignore.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he told her quietly. “That’s something else I wanted to make sure you understood.”

  “Ellen Layne!” called the woman with the clipboard.