I was grateful for that.
I put the check in my toolbox and went back to work, framing out the doorways on the first floor of my house. I’d been at it for an hour more, maybe two, when I heard a car drive up. I grunted, wondering what Ox had forgotten the first time. But when I turned, it wasn’t an SUV parked in the dirt in front of my house, but a modest Nissan Altima. The driver’s door opened and a long, feminine leg stuck out, followed by another, the small feet encased in simple black flats, the legs bare to the center of the calf. There, a thin skirt flowed in the subtle breeze, fluttering around those strong, slender limbs.
I stepped out of the frame of the house and took a few steps toward the car, my heart stuttering a little when a dark head appeared above the door, sunglasses covering perfect emerald eyes.
“I heard you were building your own house, but I had to see it for myself.”
“How did you know where to find me?”
“I have my sources.” She took off the sunglasses as she approached the house, looking up at the sturdy frame. “You did this all yourself?”
“Everything but the concrete slab. I had to hire someone for that.”
“Impressive.” She focused on me then. “Everything about you seems to be impressive, Mr. Winn.”
“Is that right?”
She nodded, her eyes dropping from my face to the center of my chest, to my narrow hips, before coming back to my face. “Sorry it took me so long to get out here. I had to give a deposition to the prosecutor’s office and hire a new nurse. Things have been a little chaotic, but they’re starting to settle down now.”
“I heard they’re charging him with attempted murder on top of everything else.”
She nodded, her eyes taking on a slightly grieved expression. “The prosecutor says that, because his intention was to have me killed, he felt it was a necessary charge.”
“And the others? Juan Carlos? The fat guy in Mexico City?”
“Arrested. But because most of their involvement was restricted to Mexico, they’ll be charging them there.”
“So, it’s all over.”
“Wrapped up with a bow, as my friend Taylor would say.”
I found myself watching her dress fluttering in the breeze, moving around her like a bouquet of animated flowers putting on some sort of show. The dress was similar to the one she’d worn in Mexico, the one that she’d failed to put underwear under, giving me a show that I still thought about late at night. I wanted to know what was under this dress, but it wasn’t my right to see.
I turned toward the house. “I should get back to work.”
“Do you think I drove two hours just to fill you in on the case?”
“I don’t know why you came, Valerie.”
She grunted, clearly not pleased with that answer. “I think you do. You just don’t want to admit it.”
“And what’s that?”
“I came because I wanted to see you. Because no one else has ever made me feel the way you made me feel in those short twenty-four hours we were alone together. Because I can’t imagine going back to my boring life knowing that you’re out here, that you could be everything I’ve wanted to find in my agonizingly lonely life.”
“I doubt you’ve been all that lonely.”
“I haven’t had anyone I wanted in my life for a long time. Not until you.”
I looked at her, aching inside at the meaning behind her words. “I’m a felon, Valerie,” I reminded her. “I don’t have a job, and I probably can’t get one without a lot of questions. I don’t have anything to offer someone like you but a lot of headaches.”
“From what I heard, you don’t need a job. Besides, I’m rich. I can be your sugar momma.”
I laughed, the image those words planted in my head too rich to ignore. “Is that right?”
“I don’t know where this might go, Oliver. I don’t know if we might not hate each other in a week, if the magic we felt was just brought on by the danger we were in. But I’d like to find out. Wouldn’t you?”
I would. I really, really would. But something still held me back.
“You should know I have baggage. My family has had tragedy after tragedy.”
“We all come with baggage. Hell, my brother and my employee just tried to have me killed for a measly few million dollars. If they’d just come to me and asked…”
I groaned, reaching for her as she rushed toward me. She jumped into my arms and we kissed, that kiss that was both hungry and lingering, both anxious and tender. I’d dreamt of this moment far more often than I cared to admit over the past few weeks. I couldn’t put into words how happy I was to have it come true.
I was intensely pleased to discover she’d chosen to go sans underwear in this dress, too.
“Only for you,” she whispered against my lips.
It was those words, that promise, that sold me.
She was mine and I was hers. And that was enough.
~~~
AKKER
Chapter 1
Eva
It was strange being back in this city. San Antonio was in the past, part of a dream that was closer to a nightmare than anything else. My mom died in this town. My heart was broken for the first time in this town. But it was also the place where my dream of becoming more than just an everyday girl began. And I was definitely more than just an everyday girl now.
Eva Rae. Everyone knew my name. Getting out of the hotel had been a trick. There were fans lined up five-, seven-, ten-deep in front of the main doors. There were more in the alley below my room’s balcony—how they knew exactly which room was mine I had no clue, but somehow they did! I had to talk a maid into allowing me to borrow her car. And her uniform. No one’s going to look twice at a maid wandering around a hotel.
But it wasn’t just the fans I was trying to escape. It was my security detail, too—if you could even call them that. Lloyd and Harry. That was literally their names. I couldn’t make stuff like this up if I tried. And, like their theatrical counterparts, they weren’t exactly the brightest bulbs in the package.
Slipping out of my room was a cinch. I just kept my back to Harry, allowing him to believe it was the maid’s ass he was staring at. In reality, she was lounging in her bra and panties watching the television in my suite’s living room. Getting out of the building was a little more difficult, but again, thanks to the maid, I was able to use her employee card to get through electronically secured doors that led to the parking garage next door. I hadn’t driven myself anywhere in several years. The studio always provided me with a car. But this… the memory of this kind of freedom was almost overwhelming. It took me back to the days just after my sixteenth birthday when my mom took me to take my driving test. She was more excited than I was when I passed!
Remembering that, though, took me down a road of thought I didn’t particularly want to travel. Mom was already sick by then, already hiding symptoms from my dad and me. We wouldn’t know for another two years just how bad it was—I don’t think even the doctors truly appreciated how bad it was at that time—but when we did learn the truth, it put a tint on all those moments, changed all our memories, made us realize how hard it must have been for her to hold on to all that truth for so long.
I was seventeen when my mother died. Worst year of my life. The only good thing that ever came out of it was Brock, but then… well, that ended badly, too.
So many memories in this damn town!
My parents and I moved to this city when I was fourteen. My dad worked in construction, and for a long time we went where the jobs were. He got a steady job with an oil company here, working on an ongoing project to build a new office for the CEOs. Kept him employed steadily for more than five years. Longest we’d ever lived in one town. Then Mom got sick, and things got complicated. I was supposed to go to college, supposed to follow Mom’s footsteps and go into journalism. Ended up skipping the whole college thing altogether. Hell, I barely finished high school! How could I go to class and concentrat
e all day long while my mom was lying on the couch at home, coughing up blood all day long? I’d rather be with her, rather spend every moment I could with her before the end. And that’s what I did.
It was during a trip to the emergency room—Mom was dehydrated and needed fluids—where I ran into Brock for the first time. He was there with a broken wrist. Something about playing touch football with the wrong buddies after a night of drinking… something along those lines. He was a senior in college at the time, getting ready to take his LSATs. I was two weeks from walking the stage in high school. Not the ideal age gap, my father constantly reminded me. But there was something about him, something about his hazel eyes with all those green and gold flecks, something about his wide chin and that goofy smile he was never afraid to turn on me. He was one of the best-looking guys I’d ever met.
We were going to be together forever.
The pipe dreams of the young.
I moved my foot off the accelerator as I cruised in front of the house where I’d lived with my family all that time ago. The new owners had let it fall into a bit of disrepair. The gutters were hanging off, and the bricks needed to go a round with the power washer. But the windows were the same, and the narrow porch where Mom liked to sit in her final days, loving the feel of the warm breeze on her always cold skin. I remember how impressed I was with that house when my father first brought us here. What a lifetime ago that was!
I wondered what the people living there now would think if they knew Eva Rae once slept in one of those bedrooms, once bathed in the hall bath, that Eva Rae once cooked for her mother in the kitchen and had dance parties in the living room. Would they put more effort into caring for the place then?
I pressed my foot back on the accelerator and let the car take me away, my hands guiding it places I really didn’t want to go. But that was what this trip was all about, wasn’t it? A walk down memory lane? The new movie was due out in a month and the producers wanted a media blast, including pictures of me in my old hometown, visiting some of my old haunts—though most of the locations on the list were places I’d never been in all my life!—to play on the tagline for the movie: “Sometimes true happiness can only be found at home.”
Not my idea.
Daddy and I left San Antonio years ago, abandoning this place once my career and promise of something better walked into our lives. Not that we forgot Mom. We took her with us in her pretty little urn.
How she would hate that!
After my mom died, after Brock pulled me out of the black hole I fell into in the days afterward, I needed to find something to do with the rest of my life. I thought about college but was overwhelmed by the hoops I’d have to jump through just to prove I could take the most basic classes. I thought about technical school but couldn’t find a career class that really appealed to me. And then I was approached by this guy. I thought it was a joke, but Brock checked it out and insisted it was genuine. He talked me into it.
How ironic! My career never would have existed if not for Brock. But it was my career that took him away from me.
I often wondered how my life would be different if I’d never known Brock, if my mom had never gotten cancer, if my family had never moved to San Antonio. Then again, I couldn’t imagine my life without these things in it. They were what made me who I was.
And who was I?
I was Eva Rae, supermodel turned actress turned musician. That’s who I was.
I slowed the car again as I passed the apartment building where Brock and I had lived. Briefly. We were together a total of two years but had just moved in together when I went to Los Angeles for a photoshoot. I think our cohabitation lasted all of six weeks. It wasn’t supposed to end that quickly, but I got a bigger offer and Brock swore… But promises are made to be broken. That’s the one lesson I’d learned over and over again in Los Angeles.
The building didn’t look right. It took me a moment to realize a large section of it had been rebuilt sometime in the past eight years. Not recently. As the daughter of a guy who worked in construction most of his life, I could see the difference in the color of the brick, in the wear of the wood, but I could also see the effects of weather and time on both. These renovations must have been done at least five years ago, maybe more.
I wondered why. Part of the work was done exactly where our apartment had been. Even if I had the nerve to go knock on the door, the place wouldn’t be the same as it was all those years ago. The apartment I knew was long gone.
Maybe it was for the best.
I put my foot on the gas and took off a little faster than I intended to, causing a car behind me to honk. He’d been trying to pass me. I waved him on, taking a deep breath as I told myself to stop being stupid.
“The past is the past, Eva,” I said, speaking aloud in the hopes that my heart would actually hear it.
My real purpose for being out today—for all the trouble of sneaking out—wasn’t to take a drive down memory lane but to make an appointment at a security firm downtown. As a celebrity, I often got death threats and visits from stalkers, things that Lloyd and Harry should be capable of handling. At least in theory. But more recently I’d been getting more personal threats. Texts coming to my personal cell phone—a number no one should have but those closest to me—packages left at my front door, notes stuffed under hotel doors. It’d been going on for a little more than a month, and it was beginning to spook me more than I cared to admit. When I brought it up to my manager, he blew it off, insisting I didn’t need any more security than I already had. I hated to disagree, but…
It was my life. Not Danny’s.
I pulled to the curb outside the address given to me by another actress in the business exactly four minutes before my appointment. Still dressed in the maid’s outfit, I snatched up my pocketbook and headed for the door, already impressed by the marble floors of the large lobby and the Tiffany crystals on the low-hanging chandeliers. Any business that not only put their wealth on show but used it to cater to every potential client—male or female—had to know what they were doing. That was my hope, anyway.
“I’m here to see Oxley Winn,” I told the man behind the front desk. “We have an appointment.”
The man looked from me to the name on his list, then back to me.
“Sorry, sweetheart. Mr. Winn doesn’t have time for practical jokes.”
“It’s not a joke.” I took off my sunglasses and shook my hair free of the bun I’d twisted it into. “See? I have identification, too.”
The man’s eyes widened. “I know you! Why, you’re… you’re Eva Rae!”
“That’s me. And I’d like to see Mr. Winn, if that would be possible.”
“Of course, ma’am. Of course!”
The man picked up the phone and spoke quickly into it, saying things I couldn’t quite catch. I stepped back and looked around the large lobby, watching people come and go. There were offices at the back of the lobby from which people stepped out every few minutes. Then there was a bank of three elevators on the left side of the room, each one depositing two or three people every few minutes. A waiting area at the front of the room was occupied by half a dozen people in various degrees of professional clothing. And then there was the private elevator at the very back of the lobby that roused some curiosity.
It was a busy place. Another good sign.
“Mr. Winn will be escorting you up personally, Ms. Rae,” the man told me as he set the phone down. “If you’ll just sign in here, and put this badge on your lapel…”
I took the thin plastic badge and carefully hooked it to the collar of the maid’s uniform, both wishing I was in my own clothes, and grateful that I didn’t have to hook this thing to one of my very expensive silk blouses. I fiddled with the thing for a long minute, trying to get it just right. You’d think someone who wore mics attached to her lapel a great deal of the time would be able to put this thing on fairly easily. But no. To my credit, there was almost always someone else putting these things on for me.<
br />
I was still fiddling when I heard this deep, masculine laugh float across the room. Something about it stirred a memory, forcing me to look up. Coming off the middle elevator was a ghost from my past. It’d been eight years, but he looked so much the same that my heart jumped into my throat. For a long second, I think I stopped breathing.
He was dressed in a suit, one of those that has to be specially tailored, the material sent from Italy or France. He was muscular but slender, built sort of like the actor Chris Evans, but he looked more like a young Robert Downey Jr. Dark hair buzzed around the sides, but a little longer on top. A strong but narrow jaw. High brow. Big eyes that both saw through you and saw everything about you all at the same time. Handsome as all hell!
It wasn’t fair that he still looked so much the same as I remembered him.
I slid my sunglasses back on, hiding for a moment. But then I realized I wasn’t the one who should be hiding. How dare he just walk back into my life after all this time? How dare he just be there, laughing and flirting with some middle-aged redhead like nothing mattered? How dare he be normal and happy after walking out of my life eight years ago? He should still be pining for me, shouldn’t he? After all, a part of me was still pining after him!
Without thinking about it, without one iota of thought as to what I planned to do, I stormed across the room in my cheap, borrowed maid’s uniform, my outrage building with every step. Eight years was a long time to allow resentment to grow!
“How dare you?” I demanded.
He looked up, those hazel eyes just as beautiful as I remembered them. “Excuse me?”
Something about the way he said it just set my blood to boiling. Like he couldn’t even remember me. Me! Eva Rae! I was unforgettable!
“Has it really been that long? You’ve forgotten me already? I mean, yeah, eight years might be a long time, but you’d think you’d remember the girl you abandoned, the girl you made promises to and then just disappeared like none of it had ever mattered! Did you really think it didn’t matter? That it wouldn’t break my heart into a thousand pieces?”
Caballo Security Box Set Page 16