Still, when her parents had been killed in a yachting accident on the Riviera, they had left her, their only child, a vast fortune, along with a firm of Boston lawyers and advisors to take care of it for her. It was Sami who had insisted upon a foundation to oversee generous grants and munificent contributions to needy charities.
She tried again. "Look, give me another chance. I promise I won’t go near that man’s place again."
"This isn’t kindergarten, Miss Adkins. It’s no use. Saying you won’t do it again won’t make everything all right. Not even a lawyer like that one over there could keep you from spending at least a little time in the holding cell."
Sami’s heart was hammering so loudly she couldn’t hear. "Who?"
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Daniel Parker-St. James. Our state’s big-time attorney-at- law. Haven’t you heard of him? He’s always in the news, one way or the other, either in the society columns, with some classy lady, or on the front page, with his big cases. He’s brilliant, and takes on only the toughest, usually those that involve the mega-bucks. I’ve seen him in action, and he can be a deadly opponent in the courtroom. I sure wouldn’t want to go up against him."
Sami’s desperate gaze followed the direction of Sergeant Johnson’s thumb to the same man whom her eyes had been drawn to again and again. There could be no mistaking him. Distinguished-looking and distinctively dressed, he didn’t need the large black-and-brown marbled glasses he wore to give him an unassailable air of authority. He gave the impression of absolute control.
Before anyone could stop her, Sami launched herself from the chair and rocketed across the room, hurling her body against the man whom she now saw as her savior. "Please, oh, please, you’ve got to help me."
Startled as Daniel Parker-St. James couldn’t help but be, he nevertheless took Sami’s airborne weight easily. "It’s all been so terrible. These people don’t understand that I can’t be locked into a cell, even for a little while. Please make them understand. You’ve got to!"
"Sergeant!" The man standing next to St. James roared. "Come get your prisoner under control."
It required no thought whatsoever on Sami’s part to realize what she must look like in her scuffed sandals and dirty clothes, with her hair in wild curls about her head and her feathers probably out of place. But she was operating in a mode of pure terror and couldn’t stop to think of the consequences.
Tightly gripping the lapels of the attorney’s impeccable linen suit in her visibly trembling hands, she attempted to explain. "You see, there’s this weasel-faced man who’s involved in killing baby seals, and he’s bald-headed, but it wasn’t my fault, and then this lady with all these fox heads came along, and I was trying to reason with him about those poor babies—think how their mothers must feel—and she said I attacked him, but I didn’t. No real fashion sense at all."
Daniel Parker-St. James had remained remarkably silent during Sami’s assault on him, while his dark, intelligent eyes stayed intently on her. And when Sergeant Johnson approached to take her away, St. James held up one commanding hand to stop him.
"And now they want to l-lock me up, but they don’t understand that I can’t be put into a c-cell. There wouldn’t be any air. They’re so small, with no windows, and the walls m-move in on me. I’d be trapped. There’s no escape, don’t you see! I would die." Crystalline tears formed in Sami’s enormous golden eyes and spilled down her face, now ashen-colored from fear.
St. James spoke to the man beside him, all the while running his hands up and down Sami’s bare arms, trying to calm her. "What have your men done to her, Charles? She’s scared to death and close to hysteria."
The man to whom he spoke turned an angry eye on Sergeant Johnson. "I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. What’s the story here? Is she on drugs? Did you have to get rough with her? What?"
Sergeant Johnson sighed wearily. "None of it. She just seems to have this thing about being locked up. Her name is Sami Adkins, and she was arrested for simple assault. Although I didn’t see that much evidence of it, she must have done a pretty good job, because the man she allegedly assaulted is afraid of her."
"Let’s get these handcuffs off her," St. James said.
With a glance at his superior, who nodded his assent, Johnson released the cuffs.
Sami barely noticed as she focused solely on the man who she still tightly gripped. And she went with him when he led her to a side office. Her only concern was not to let go of him, not to let herself be separated from him. He was the only solid thing in her world at the moment, and somehow she knew she had to keep hanging on to him.
He sat her down, taking the death grip she had on his lapels and transferring it to his hands. Speaking in a low, tranquilizing tone, he said, "Now . . . I want you to take several deep breaths, Sami, and believe me when I say that everything’s going to be all right. I’m going to help you, and I won’t let anyone hurt you. Do you understand?"
"But Sergeant Johnson said you only took the biggest cases, and I don’t have any money!" In her desperation, she was thinking of the contents of her purse, instead of her many massive bank accounts. She rarely thought about them.
"Don’t worry about the money. Right now, I want you to calm down and tell me what happened, and then we’ll see about getting you out of here. "
Gripping his hand even more tightly, she looked into his eyes. "But can you do that? Sergeant Johnson said there was no way I could keep from having to spend time in a c-cell." Her tense body shuddered, and St. James’s mouth tightened grimly.
"I can do that. Now tell me."
His eyes were the darkest blue she had ever seen, almost navy, with a black center, yet they reached out to her in some indefinable way and steadied her. So she told him, and although her explanation tended to be somewhat incoherent at times, he would quietly insert a question here and there, leading her back on track, until eventually she had told him about the events of the afternoon.
Daniel Parker-St. James was not only brilliant; he evidently knew people in the right places who could cut through red tape like a knife going through soft butter. Before Sami realized it, she was about to be arraigned, without once having set foot inside a cell.
A new thought rushed through her tired brain, and she turned to St. James with fresh alarm. "But I don’t have any money for the bail! What am I going to do? If I don’t give them the money, they’ll keep me here."
"Sssh. It’s all right." His hand cupped her chin, stilling her, making her look into his eyes, which were so warm and reassuring. "I’ll stand bail for you. It won’t be that much, and you can pay me back when you can."
She couldn’t seem to slow her mind down, couldn’t grasp what was happening. "But you’ve done so much already, Mr. St. James. How can I ever thank you?"
A curious look crossed his harshly handsome face. "By calling me Daniel."
In the end, it was all very matter-of-fact. The judge read Sami her rights again, asked if she understood the charge against her. She opened her mouth, intending to tell him about the baby seals and the lady who wore fox heads, but Daniel reached out and gently touched her arm. She closed her mouth. The judge then set a bail of two hundred fifty dollars.
A few minutes later, standing outside the courthouse, Sami told herself she could afford to relax now. The nightmare was over, and she was safe. But she couldn’t relax. And she didn’t feel safe.
She heard Daniel say. "If you’ll give me a number where you can be reached, someone at my office will set up an appointment for you, so that we can go over your case before your trial."
"Wait!" He couldn’t leave her now—the only person in this whole nightmare who had the power to make her feel safe. "Where are you going?"
He looked amused. "I’m going home. Can I drop you somewhere?"
"No! I—I mean, I can’t go home." She had just remembered that Jerome had said he would be picking up Michelle for a dinner date after school. He had winked at her, saying, "Don’t wait up fo
r me," knowing that she was rarely asleep before dawn most nights anyway. Even though they had separate apartments, Jerome usually checked in with her once or twice a day to make sure she was okay.
"What do you mean, you can’t?"
"I, er, I don’t really have a place to go." That was the truth. She didn’t have a place she could go where she wouldn’t be alone.
"Your arrest form said no permanent residence and listed the YWCA. Aren’t you staying there?"
"Well, umm, not exactly. I’ve been living in an old warehouse, but I don’t want to go back there tonight."
"You’ve been living in an abandoned warehouse?"
Sami paused. She hadn’t said the word abandoned, yet there was no one there at the moment. If that didn’t exactly mean abandoned, surely it could fit the definition of empty. "Yes. It’s empty. Look . . . couldn’t I come home with you?"
She had no idea why she said it. But she couldn’t shake the idea that with him, she’d be safe.
He took off his glasses, and inserted them into his breast pocket. "That’s impossible," he said seriously. "Something like that is never done. It’s just not proper. Lawyers need to keep their personal and professional lives separate. That way, they don’t lose their objectivity, and they can do the best job possible for their clients."
"Oh, it’d be just for tonight," she hastened to assure him. "I promise I won’t be any trouble. You wouldn’t even have to feed me."
He ran his eyes over her delicately boned frame. "When is the last time you had a good meal?"
Sami tried to think. She had awakened earlier this afternoon, around her usual time, at one o’clock, and had been so eager to start her newly thought-of cause that she had skipped breakfast. She couldn’t remember whether she had eaten the night before or not, but then, she never could. It wasn’t that she didn’t like to eat. It was just that she kept forgetting to. Answering truthfully, she said, "I’m not sure, but I think it was last night."
Daniel looked profoundly shocked at the thought of someone’s not eating for nearly twenty-four hours, and since Sami wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad, she hurried on, pleading, "Oh, please. You won’t even know I’m there. I can sleep on the floor in a corner somewhere. It’s just that I don’t think I could stand to be alone tonight." Her voice had started to quaver at the thought.
"Sami—"
"Daniel." His name was all she had left in her.
He was silent for several long moments as he studied her pale face and the fear in her golden eyes. He sighed. "I guess I can’t very well have a client of mine waste away with hunger before I can even get her to trial. It wouldn’t be proper."
Chapter Two
Daniel’s house, when she first saw it, reminded Sami of her parents’ house in Boston—very grand and supremely formal—and her first thought was that she had gotten herself into another situation that she wouldn’t be able to handle.
On closer inspection, however, she was able to see a difference. Daniel’s house was very much like Daniel himself, Sami decided as she wandered through it at his direction; the decor was sophisticated, refined, and quietly tasteful.
True, most of the rooms were formal. Rich traditional fabrics covered plush oversized custom sofas and Regency wing chairs. Queen Anne furniture was mixed with Chippendale and subtly complemented with Oriental accent pieces. But there wasn’t the touch-me-not quality of her childhood home—or the darkness. Stately windows allowed the last of the afternoon sun to pour in, and sun-touched colors complemented the richness of the various woods.
And maybe the real difference was Daniel himself. Or, to be more accurate, her reaction to Daniel. Now that there was no immediate reason to fear being put in a jail cell, she had begun to notice him as a man, and not just as the lawyer who had rescued her from her nightmare of terror.
Sergeant Johnson had said that Daniel could be a deadly opponent, and, as kind as he had been to her, she could well believe it. His lean face was chiseled into assertive and interesting planes, his glossy hair shone opaque, nearly black, his chin had a determined and an arrogant thrust, his lips were full and firmly sculptured, and his eyes . . . well, his eyes she had already taken note of. They were that intriguing dark blue color, and they were looking at her, evidently expecting some kind of a reaction to the grandeur around her.
Sami gave a halfhearted smile. "Nice." If Daniel thought it was strange that someone who looked like a street urchin and lived at the YWCA did not appear overawed by his home, he didn’t say so. "Do you live here alone?"
"Yes. I have daily help, but they leave at six o’clock every evening."
"Don’t you get lonely?" she asked curiously.
He smiled slowly, causing shivers to run up her spine. "I’m not always alone."
Sami looked at him and thought, I bet that’s the truth. With his looks, money, and self-assurance, the only problem Daniel would have with women would be scheduling the overabundance of them. Despite the hot August evening, he still had his coat and tie on, and he looked as cool and unwrinkled as a well-dressed mannequin in an expensive men’s shop.
Sami had had men after her for as long as she could remember. But none of them had been able to hold her long enough to get underneath her beautiful skin and find out what she was really all about. No man had ever been allowed close to her. No man had ever made love to her.
Yet as inexperienced as she was in sex, she sensed that Daniel could be devastating to a woman. As correctly proper as his behavior had been with her thus far, she somehow knew that he had a sexual expertise that far exceeded anything she had previously been exposed to.
And in spite of this knowledge, she found that she had an unexplainable urge to muss him up a bit, to run her hands through the glossiness of his hair, to take off his coat, tie, and shirt and see if his chest was covered with a mat of dark, curling hair. What a thought! She turned abruptly away.
He led her upstairs to a guest bedroom charmingly furnished with an eighteenth-century four- poster bed and a matching dresser and highboy. Printed curtains covered the two windows, and a satin coverlet was spread over the bed.
"You’ll be staying in here tonight. Perhaps you’d like to freshen up before we dine?"
Food was the last thing on Sami’s mind. First was the feeling of fear she couldn’t seem to shake, and second was Daniel himself. "Actually, I’d like a bath. I feel rather hot and dirty."
"It’s through that door on your right," he directed.
Sami walked in to look around, but she came quickly back out again. "Don’t you have something bigger?"
"That’s not a small bathroom, Sami. What’s wrong?"
He was right. Even though it was about six times smaller than the bathroom in her loft, it wasn’t small by most standards. It was just a smaller area than she wanted to be closed up in at this moment, but that was something she couldn’t explain to him.
Averting her eyes, she carefully avoided his question. "What about your bathroom. Couldn’t I use it?"
"How do you know it’s any bigger?" he asked wryly.
Sami knew intimately the type of house Daniel lived in. After all, she owned the mansion in Boston, plus a summer "cottage" on the fashionable East End of Long Island that could easily house eight families. The fact that she hadn’t been back to either of them since she moved to St. Paul didn’t alter anything.
"Just a guess." She shrugged. "A house of this size is bound to have a huge master suite."
He gave her another one of his slow smiles. "As it happens, you’re absolutely right. Come along. I’ll show you."
They walked down the wide hall until they came to a set of double doors at its end. Throwing them open, Daniel allowed Sami to precede him into a bedroom that reflected the decor of the rest of the house, with perhaps a touch more masculinity apparent in the discriminating selection of the large pieces that appointed the room. Excruciatingly neat, the room had one entire wall of museum-quality paintings.
But it was bigger than
the other room, and she felt immediately more comfortable in it. Sami stepped out of her shoes and dropped her carpetbag carelessly on the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she observed Daniel picking them up. Without comment, he lay the purse in a chair and very tidily placed her shoes beneath it.
Sami strolled through another set of double doors and discovered that the bath was indeed more spacious. Burgundy carpet carried through from the bedroom into the bath, and a shining oval tub was sunken into the middle of it. Gold-plated faucets and whirlpool jets equipped it, and dark blue towels, the exact shade of the cover on Daniel’s bed, lay folded and waiting nearby. It struck Sami as being too sterile, too inviolable, and she thought longingly of her own tub—a huge, high-backed red tub that sat on clawed feet in the middle of a screened-off area in her loft.
Nevertheless, Sami turned to Daniel and said gravely, "This will do very nicely."
The corners of his mouth twitched. "Good. I’m glad you found something you approve of."
A surge of guilt assailed Sami, and she tried to reassure him. "Oh, you have an extremely nice home. I’m sorry if I gave you any other impression. After all, I’m very grateful. You practically saved my life. It’s just that it’s . . ."
"Yes?" He raised his dark eyebrows.
"Well, it’s a little stuffy," she mumbled apologetically.
"Stuffy?" His voice sounded louder than it had a minute before.
"Formal," she amended.
"Uh, is there anything else you need or want before I leave you to your bath?"
"You wouldn’t happen to have any bubble bath, would you?" she inquired hopefully.
"I’m afraid not."
Sami nodded forgivingly. "That’s okay. I didn’t think you would." Stripping off her headband, she threw it nonchalantly across the room and ran her hands through her mass of hair.
Daniel cleared his throat. "Well, if that’s all, I’ll leave you now. I’m sure you can find everything you’ll need."
Bells of alarm went off in her head at the thought that Daniel was really leaving her this time. "Wait!"
For the Love of Sami Page 2
