Ladies' Man

by Suzanne Brockmann

Ellen didn’t move.

  “That’s you,” Sam reminded her. “Break a leg.”

  “Ellen Layne?” the woman bleated again, and Ellen turned away, heading for the door.

  She glanced at him over her shoulder just before the door closed, and Sam could see her emotions swirling in the depths of her eyes.

  His own feelings were so strong, so overpowering, he had to hold on to the support pole for a moment to maintain his balance. Damn, this infatuation was the most powerful he’d ever felt.

  Maybe because it was more than mere infatuation…

  Sam tried to push that thought out of his mind, not wanting to acknowledge it, not wanting to give it more definite shape and meaning. He thought about what T.S. had told him instead. Maybe T.S. was right. Maybe the crush Sam had on Ellen was spinning out of control due to her rejection. She didn’t want him, so of course he wanted her even more than ever.

  He kept his gaze moving, feeling the familiar knot of anxiety in his stomach as a scruffily dressed man came into the room. He relaxed slightly as he saw the messenger’s envelope the man was carrying. Still, he watched the man until he passed out of sight.

  The door opened and Ellen came out, talking with the woman who carried the clipboard, smiling and laughing.

  Sam’s chest felt as if it were expanding. He smiled almost involuntarily and felt a burst of that same happiness, that joy, he’d felt in the limo, this time merely at the sight of her.

  And he recognized the symptoms even though he’d never truly experienced them before.

  He was falling in love with Ellen Layne.

  The security guards and police officers were nearly as numerous as the party guests.

  Ellen glanced around the private dining room at the Cafe Allessandra, a tiny Italian place on Restaurant Row, aware of Sam standing on the other side of the room. He wasn’t exactly watching her, but she knew, just as she was aware of every move he made, that he was equally aware of her.

  He wasn’t going to let her forget about that night of passion they’d shared. That was what he’d really meant to say the day before at the audition.

  She’d managed to avoid him successfully all last night and then all that day, but when Bob had called to announce that his contract dispute with the network had been settled, that he was throwing an impromptu dinner for his staff, Ellen had leapt at his invitation to join him. She hadn’t been able to stand the thought of staying home alone with Sam, with only Jamie and Lydia to chaperone. Not only that, but it was, as Bob put it, the perfect time for Ellen to meet his stage manager, Leonard Jennison. Poor Bob had no idea how totally wrong he was.

  Still, Ellen was here, despite Sam’s objections.

  But Bob had reassured him as to the safety. Since his contract was settled, he’d told the studio about the death threats, and they had sent six of their security guards to the shindig as extra protection. With Sam and Hyunh along, that made eight law enforcement officials to the twenty partygoers. All of the exits were carefully guarded. Even Sam had to agree that they were as safe as they could possibly be.

  Bob made a point of seating Ellen next to Leonard Jennison at the dinner table, and she could feel Sam watching, sizing Jennison up, taking in Bob’s attempts at playing Cupid.

  She wasn’t surprised when Sam intercepted her on her way to the ladies’ room.

  “He’s too old for you,” he said without even saying hello.

  Ellen didn’t bother to pretend that she didn’t know what he was talking about. “If you want to know the truth, he’s a year younger than me,” she told him.

  “I was speaking figuratively,” he said. “In terms of attitude. He acts old. Too old for you.”

  “He’s a nice guy.”

  “I’m nicer.” Sam pushed open the door to the ladies’ room and looked quickly inside, checking for lurking stalkers. It was empty.

  Ellen had to laugh. “I’m not so sure about that. I’m betting Leonard’s never even touched the ladies’ room door in his entire life, let alone opened it.”

  “Since when is that the definition of nice?” Sam asked. “It’s just a room.” He opened the door and stepped inside, taking her hand and pulling her in with him. “I can even go inside, and I’m still nicer.”

  “You’re more entertaining, that’s for sure.”

  “Well, okay.” Sam smiled at her. “That’s a start.”

  He was certainly nicer to look at too.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” Ellen said.

  He leaned against the hand dryer. “Just think of yourself as being extremely safe.”

  “Safe?” Ellen looked at him pointedly, her gaze traveling slowly down his body, taking in his loosened tie and somewhat wrinkled white shirt, his tweed sport coat, the faded blue jeans that covered his long, muscular legs, his glaringly decorated sneakers. By the time she looked up into his face, that dimple had appeared in his cheek, and his eyes were brimming with both amusement and heat. “I don’t think ‘safe’ is a word I’d ever use in context with you,” she added. “Because after you’re done keeping me safe from all of the bad guys, who’s going to keep me safe from you?”

  Something changed in his eyes at that. “You don’t have to be kept safe from me,” he said quietly. “I swear to you, Ellen, I’m playing totally by your rules. You want me? I’m here. You don’t? I keep my distance. It’s that simple. It’s your call.”

  Her mouth was suddenly dry, and she had to moisten her lips. Her voice trembled. “Well, then, who’s going to keep me safe from myself? Because I do want you.”

  He pushed himself up and off the hand dryer, but Ellen held up her hand as if making sure he stayed at least an arm’s length away. “But even more than I want you, I don’t want to risk becoming involved with you.” She took a deep breath. “I’m finding when it comes to you, it’s hard for me to resist the temptation.”

  “Why is it such a risk for you to be involved with me?” Sam’s voice was low, imploring. His eyes held her hypnotizingly in place. “Come on, Ellen. Help me to understand where you’re coming from.”

  The bathroom door swung open, and Ellen nearly jumped out of her skin. It was Hyunh and she stopped short when she saw Sam. “Oops. Am I interrupting?”

  Ellen forced a smile. “No, actually, Sam was just leaving. He was getting a little too in touch with his feminine side.”

  No one laughed.

  Hyunh looked from Ellen to Sam, and Ellen knew the older woman didn’t miss the intensity of Sam’s gaze or the serious set to his mouth as he said, “This conversation will be continued.”

  “Everything okay?” Hyunh asked as the door closed behind Sam.

  Ellen made herself smile again. “Everything’s…great.”

  Hyunh lifted an eyebrow. “We had an old saying back in Saigon. It translates roughly into something like ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire.’”

  Ellen laughed. And then, to her horror, her eyes filled with tears.

  “Oh, boy,” Hyunh said sympathetically. “You got it bad for this one, huh?”

  Ellen nodded. Yes. She had it bad. For Sam.

  Sam saw Tran Minh Hyunh come out of the corridor that led to the ladies’ room. The Vietnamese woman leaned over next to Bob and spoke softly in his ear. They both looked up, directly at him, and then Hyunh headed back toward the ladies’ room.

  Bob stood and sauntered around the table toward Sam. “Me and you. Right now,” he said, his usual friendly warmth decidedly absent. “Private meeting in the men’s room.”

  Sam moved down the hall, several steps behind Bob. Ellen still hadn’t come out of the ladies’ room, and he hesitated outside that door. “Is Ellen all right?”

  Bob turned to face him. “You tell me. She was really upset about something, and Hyunh took her home.”

  “What?” Sam pushed open the ladies’ room door, receiving a startled squeak from a gray-haired woman putting on lipstick in front of the mirror. He went inside anyway and quickly pushed the half-open doors to the stalls. Ellen was def
initely not there. “Where the hell is she?”

  “Sorry, Verna,” Bob called to the gray-haired woman as he pulled Sam not too gently out of the room. “They went out the back door.”

  Sam shook off Bob’s grip, moving quickly toward the back exit. It was supposed to have been left locked. “I have to go after her.”

  But Bob blocked his path, suddenly looking more like an ex-Marine than a popular late night talk show host. “She’s fine. She’s safe. Hyunh’s with her.”

  But Sam wasn’t buying that. “Man, you don’t understand.” His heart was pounding and he couldn’t keep the fear from creeping into his voice. “I listened to this guy talk to Ellen on the phone. This is one crazy mother—”

  Bob took a slender cell phone from his jacket pocket and flipped it open. He pressed a speed dial number and waited a few seconds. “Hi, it’s me,” he said into the phone. “Are you safe?”

  He held out the phone to Sam.

  “We’re in the limo,” Hyunh’s voice said through the miniature telephone. “We’re halfway home. I’ve already called the house. Pete will come out to meet us while Barney stays in the house with the kids. We’ll call you when we’re safely inside.”

  “Look,” Sam said, trying hard to stay in control. “Just tell the driver to turn around and come back and pick me up. Please.”

  “I’m with Ellen,” Hyunh said. “I’m counting on you to stick close to Bob. I’ll call when we’re safely inside the house.”

  The connection was cut, and there was nothing for Sam to do but hand the telephone back to Bob. He wanted to fling the damn thing against the wall, but he didn’t.

  Bob pushed open the men’s room door, gesturing for Sam to go ahead of him inside the blue-tiled room. Sam caught sight of himself in the mirrors above the sinks, and he knew that everything he was feeling, all the frustration and fear and despair, was written clearly on his face.

  “So, what exactly did you do to Ellen?” the older man asked. “Or maybe I should be asking what she did to you?”

  Sam turned on the water in one of the sinks and, pushing up his sleeves, let it run on his wrists, trying to cool himself down. “It was mutual. Or so I thought.”

  “I was going to bring you in here and tell you if you so much as looked at her the wrong way, I was going to kick your ass from here to Outer Mongolia.” Bob examined his teeth in the mirror. “But you look like your ass has already been kicked.”

  Sam dried his hands on a paper towel and threw it with unerring accuracy into the garbage can across the room. “I have to get back to your house.”

  “Hyunh thought that Ellen needed some time without you hanging around.”

  Sam’s temper flared. “What Ellen wants is for me not to hang around for the entire rest of her life. There’ll be plenty of time for that after this case is over. Until then, I’m going to make damn sure she’s safe.”

  Bob placed himself squarely between Sam and the door. “You know, if I were you, I’d try to figure out why she’s running so scared. A little finesse might work a whole lot better than repeatedly trying to force your perspective on her. I don’t know how much she’s told you about her divorce—”

  “I know about Richard.” Sam gestured toward the door. “Do you mind letting me pass?”

  “Do you know that she had to marry him?”

  That stopped Sam. “No. I didn’t. You mean…?”

  “He got her pregnant. He was older than she was—older than me, in fact, although I’m only eight years older than Ellen, so that’s not saying much. But he was…how shall I put this politely? A slimeball. Oh, he was successful and handsome and well educated, but when I met him I knew he was the kind of guy you couldn’t trust any farther than you could throw. I begged Ellen not to marry him.”

  “But she did.”

  “She couldn’t see past the designer haircut and the capped teeth.” Bob leaned back against the door. “She figured they were going to get married after she graduated from college anyway—this just pushed everything up a few years.”

  “At least he did the right thing by her,” Sam pointed out.

  Bob snorted. “What? Marry the girl he got pregnant, and continue sleeping with any other women stupid enough to glance in his direction?”

  Sam was silent.

  “She needs to know that this time around she’s making her own decisions. She needs to feel that this time she’s got a choice.”

  “Whoa,” Sam said. “Wait a minute here. This time around?”

  Bob got a little bit taller. “Your intentions are honorable, aren’t they, Schaefer?”

  Sam stood his ground. “My intentions are to keep this thing we’ve got from dying before it has a chance to get off the ground. My intentions are to see where this thing can go.” Intentions. Honorable. God. Bob made it sound as if he expected Sam to marry Ellen.

  Except, oddly enough, the idea didn’t make his blood run as cold as it had when he’d thought about the M-word in the past. Instead it brought to mind images of waking up with Ellen beside him in bed—guaranteed. It brought to mind images of them both helpless and giddy with laughter, clinging together. It brought to mind images of Ellen talking to him long into the night, warmth and a beautiful softness in her exquisite eyes as she leaned close to kiss him.

  But who was he kidding? Ellen didn’t want to talk to him, let alone marry him.

  And then Sam stopped thinking, because from out in the restaurant came the sounds of a muffled explosion and shattering glass and the hubbub of raised, excited voices.

  Sam pushed past Bob and threw open the door. He could smell the pungent odor of smoke as he ran down the corridor, Bob on his heels. The private dining room was thick with it, and he could see flames dancing up along the heavy curtains that lined the windows. People were pushing past him, coughing and choking, trying to get to the exit.

  Sam turned back to Bob. “Get these people to the back door,” he shouted over the confusion. “Try to get a head count!”

  Bob nodded, and Sam turned back to the room, covering his face with the tail of his shirt. The window had been broken, and something, some kind of smoke bomb perhaps, had been thrown into the room. But a smoke bomb wouldn’t account for the flames.

  As far as he could see, no one had been hurt.

  Yet.

  He looked up at the ceiling. Why hadn’t the sprinkler system kicked on?

  The smoke was chokingly thick, swirling around him, making it hard to tell which direction was up. A woman was staggering nearby, coughing and hacking. Sam grabbed the woman’s arm, pulling her toward the door. God, if there was anyone else in here…

  He felt his way back down the corridor, pushing the woman ahead of him. Somewhere in the building a fire alarm had been pulled, and he could hear its urgent, relentlessly shrill ringing. He stumbled out of the back door after the woman he was helping, the two of them gasping and coughing, pulling in long, deep breaths of fresh air.

  Sam had never thought of the air in a New York City back alley as fresh before, but compared to the smoke, it was glorious.

  “You all right?” Bob asked him.

  Sam leaned over, wracked with coughing. His lungs felt lined with soot and he felt dizzy from lack of oxygen. “Yeah,” he gasped, trying to straighten up, his voice raspy and his throat raw and sore. “Head count?”

  “Short one,” Bob said tersely. “As far as I can tell, it’s Verna. One of my secretaries.”

  Sam swore.

  “Fire trucks’re on their way,” Bob reported, “but it’ll be a good five minutes before they get here. I’m going in to look for her.”

  “No,” Sam said. “I’ll go in, with one of the guards.”

  “Which one?” Bob asked dryly. “The one who passed out or the one who’s sitting on the curb crying?”

  Sam swore again as Bob pushed past him, heading for the door. Thick gray smoke was streaming out, but that didn’t slow him down. Sam had to run to keep up.

  “Stay low,” he ordered Bo
b hoarsely. “We’ll make a sweep of the room, meet at the window, and use a couple of chairs to break the rest of the glass. There’s only about a six-foot drop to the street. If we find her, we can get her out that way.”

  Bob nodded. “You go left, I’ll go right.”

  The smoke made it impossible to see, impossible to breathe. And still the sprinklers hadn’t switched on. If Verna was in the room, she was surely on the floor, unconscious. Sam could hear the flames crackling, feel the heat, see the hellish glow of the fire. His eyes burned and teared and he dropped to the carpeting, feeling his way, searching for the prone body of Bob’s secretary. Please God, let him find her…

  He bumped into a chair that had been pushed onto its side next to the dining table. He knew the window was just on the other side of the table. He could throw a chair or two through it, maybe draw some of this smoke out of the room.

  Sam pulled himself up to climb over the table and—

  A man appeared as if conjured up out of the smoke and flames, like the devil himself. Sam jumped back, startled, but then realized it was a fireman, dressed in a gas mask and raincoat, with a hard, protective hat on his head.

  Sam kept his shirt over his face, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the fire. “There’s still someone in here,” he shouted.

  The fireman nodded and picked up a chair. He was clearly thinking along the same lines as Sam—break the window. But it was funny he didn’t have an ax and—

  He didn’t have time to finish that thought before the fireman lifted the chair above his head and sent it crashing down on top of Sam. There was only enough time to roll with the blow, but it was enough to keep the heavy wood from crushing his skull. Still, the chair connected with his shoulder, the force smashed him down onto the table, knocking the wind from his lungs as the wood splintered. Sam tried to roll away, using his arms to block the man’s next swing, trying in vain to reach for his gun, but unable both to arm himself and to ward off the frenzied attack as the smoke from the fire filled his lungs, choking him.

  He pushed himself back, kicking hard with his feet and legs, kicking up. He felt his foot connect with something soft—the man’s face or neck—but the savage blows kept coming, raining down on his head and chest and shoulders. He felt the jagged edge of the wood tear through his sleeve, cutting his arm. The pain only slightly penetrated the ever narrowing tunnel of darkness that was surrounding him as his lungs ached for air.