"Man, and I thought I had it rough these last few years."
Duncan laughed again. In just a few days, she had somehow banished two years of hard work and boredom and trouble from his soul. He wondered if he would ever be able to repay her.
"Wow!" They had just walked out onto Broadway and Harley had come to a screeching halt. "Wow!" she said softly again. "It hasn't changed. It's still just like Christmas."
Perhaps it was the night air, perhaps it was because he felt so amazingly alive, or perhaps it was all Oscar Wilde's fault, but when Duncan turned from the happiness that enveloped Harley and looked at Times Square, he saw it with new eyes. It was beautiful and exciting, even mesmerizing.
She startled him from his reverie by slipping her arm confidingly through his. "Like it?"
"Love … it," he faltered, staring down at her, unable to catch his breath. She was exquisite. And more. In that moment, Duncan finally understood just how dangerous Harley Jane Miller had become. He was amazed. This was impossible. He was incapable … and she was…
Her arm tightened on his. "I'm glad," she said.
Oh God, she was incredibly dangerous. He couldn't take his eyes from her. It was shocking how badly he wanted to kiss her. Some sort of magnetic field was wrapping around them tighter and tighter with each passing minute. His heart was pounding wildly in his chest. He had never wanted anyone as badly as he wanted Harley, here, now, in the middle of this crowded sidewalk.
This was unfamiliar territory. He was used to feeling attracted to a woman and, when she was similarly attracted, taking her to bed.
But what he was feeling for Harley went way beyond attraction to places he hadn't been before and didn't understand and was pretty sure he didn't like. "It's late," he tersely announced. "I'd better get you back to your hotel." He searched the street a little desperately, spotted an empty cab, and summoned it with sheer willpower. Harley was trouble. He had to ditch her fast.
He forcibly entrenched himself in his sane, reasonable, gentleman self on the ride back to the Millenium. He politely chatted with Harley about other Oscar Wilde plays as they rode the hotel elevator to the thirty-seventh floor. He calmly escorted her to her room door. He waited until she had inserted her room card key and had safely opened her door.
"Thank you for a lovely evening," he said, shaking her hand.
He had thought that, at least, would be safe.
He had never been more wrong about anything in his life.
Her fingers, as they trembled against his hand, imparted an electrical jolt that fried his brain and sent all the wrong messages throughout his body. He was standing there, in the Millenium hallway, raising her hand, watching her eyes widen with shock and hunger as he pressed his mouth to the tender center of her palm.
"Duncan!"
It was a whisper. It was a moan. It fulfilled too many of his fantasies.
With a groan, he dragged her against his aching body, one arm encircling her, a hand cupping her head as he lowered his mouth to lips that were parted on a gasp. Glory flooded through him.
She jerked her mouth away, as if she had been burned. She stared up at him with blue eyes that looked as stunned as he felt. "Stop that!" she said a little desperately, just before she wrapped her arms behind his neck and kissed him hard, her body eagerly arching into his as her tongue shocked his mouth.
Hunger that had been gnawing at him for years welled up within him now and burst every blood vessel in his brain. She was writhing against him, her mouth hot and eager on his as they exchanged wet, fevered kisses that left every muscle in his body rigid with a need that was torturous in its intensity.
A door banging closed at the end of the hallway jerked them apart. But her heat still infused him, burning through walls to touch places he hadn't even known existed. And didn't want to know existed. He had to stop. He had to stop this runaway train now before it derailed everything he knew about the man he had always been.
"This is trouble," he said, struggling for breath.
"Yes," she said, the fever still in her eyes, tearing at his resolve.
He groaned. "I have always made it a point to avoid trouble."
"So have I."
She was just inches away. He had never wanted anyone this much. He had never felt so badly out of control. "Then we should stop."
"Absolutely."
"Good night, then."
"Good night."
Neither of them moved.
Duncan's head was spinning high above the clouds. It was of no use to him at all. "I don't want this," he said.
"Neither do I," she said, and he saw the same truth and the same helplessness in her eyes that he felt.
Somehow he managed to take a step back. That helped. He could breathe a little again. "We're both adults. We know how to get the better of our hormones."
"Is that all this is?" she said softly.
"No," he ground out, "that's not all this is."
"I was afraid of that."
"Me too." He stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. "But Harley, I don't do relationship. I don't do commitment."
"I know."
"I am way more trouble than you can handle."
"That's what I figured. So, what now?"
Let me make love to you. Let me sink into your sweet flesh. Let me burn away this agonizing fever and restake my claim on sanity. "You walk into your room and you shut your door and you lock it."
"Right," she said, taking a step back into her room. "You sure about this?"
He smiled then. "No."
She smiled back with the same mirthless amusement. "Good. Neither am I. Good night, Duncan."
"Good night, Harley."
He took another step back, and so did she. Slowly her door closed. He heard her turn the lock and only then could he make himself turn away and begin walking toward the elevator. A sudden attack of vertigo nearly dropped him to his knees, but he kept walking. Sanity and safety lay far away from Harley Jane Miller's hotel room door.
He hopped a cab, but by the time it reached Charles Street
he couldn't take it any longer. It was impossible to sit quietly, so he paid the driver off and walked the more than twenty blocks home, drinking in large lungfuls of the warm, humid night air. It did nothing to steady him. He kept telling himself that he shouldn't be happy.
But it didn't help. He felt joyful! And he had never been more shocked in his life. Who was this guy? This Duncan Lang was nobody he recognized. He had just agreed not to take the woman of his current sexual fantasies to bed for the next several years of nonstop lovemaking, and here he was brimming over with lust and delirium and joy.
How could he be joyful after saying no to what he wanted more than air? How could he be joyful when Harley had said no, too? How could he be joyful when he was going home to an empty apartment and an immediate future that was pretty much covered in black clouds?
Those were stupid questions. This disconcerting joy was courtesy of the passionate and innately joyful Harley Jane Miller who gave everything that she was in her music and in her kisses. She had held nothing back in that hotel hallway, and Duncan had never experienced that kind of generosity before. He had never been touched by another's soul before. He had never been welcomed with such eagerness or felt such a suffusion of emotion before.
She was wholly unique in his experience and increasingly necessary to his happiness.
She was?
His steps slowed. How had he become so different from the man he had always believed himself to be?
Badly unnerved, he turned onto his street and stopped cold. A car he had never seen before was parked in front of his building, along with all of the regular neighborhood cars that he did recognize.
"Holy moly," Duncan muttered, dropping automatically into a crouch behind a seven-year-old Toyota. He peeked around the hatchback and carefully studied the American sedan and the man sitting behind the wheel. He was watching his building. He was looking up at Duncan's third-floor living room
windows.
Now would be a very good time to be carrying a gun. Unfortunately, none of the cases Duncan had worked on in the last two years had required anything resembling armed protection. Of course, he could always turn around and disappear into the city before the guy spotted him, but how could he know where to hide if he didn't know whom he was hiding from, and why?
He mentally itemized all the things in his pockets: his wallet, a package of tissues, his keys … and his Mont Blanc pen! Perfect.
Moving cautiously, he began slowly creeping up the street, crouched beside the parked cars, until he was behind the American sedan. A rental car. He memorized the plates and the rental I.D. tag, then inched his way forward to the driverside door. His heart was beating uncomfortably in his chest. He snaked his hand up to the door handle.
Then he suddenly stood up and jerked the door open. He pushed his pen hard against the driver's fleshy temple before the man realized he was no longer alone. "Try anything and you're a dead man," Duncan growled. "Put your hands forward on the dashboard where I can see them. Now!"
Sighing heavily, the driver obeyed. Under the dim street-lighting, Duncan could see that he was tall and muscular and dressed in a three-piece suit that almost completely masked the presence of a shoulder holster.
"Who are you and why have you staked out my apartment?" Duncan demanded, still pressing his pen to the driver's temple like a gun.
"You are Monsieur Duncan Lang?" the driver asked. The French accent was a shock.
"I am," Duncan replied.
"Bonsoir, monsieur," said a second Frenchman from behind him.
Oh hell. He hadn't even suspected the driver had a partner, and now a very real gun was pressed to the back of his head.
"Please be so good as to place your hands on the top of the car…" the gunman pleasantly commanded, "after you drop the pen, of course."
This was not good. Duncan dropped the Mont Blanc pen, put his hands on the car's roof, and tried to think of some way not to die in the next few minutes.
"What's all this about?" he asked, his mouth dry, his heart pounding ferociously against brittle ribs.
"Our employer, Monsieur Giscard, wishes you to return at once the diamonds you have stolen from him," the driver informed him. "We have come to collect them."
Duncan swore silently. This wasn't trouble. This was disaster. "You're wasting your time," he said. "I haven't got the diamonds and I don't know who does."
"Really, monsieur, we had hoped better of you than this," chastised the gunman behind him.
"Gentlemen, I am innocent," Duncan stated, his heart racing. "The New York City police have substantiated my alibi for the time of the robbery. When they find the real thief, they will find the diamonds and return them to your employer. Until then, Monsieur Giscard will just have to be patient."
"Alas, monsieur," the driver replied apologetically, "that is a quality which our employer unfortunately lacks."
"In abundance," the gunman added.
"You have my profound sympathies," Duncan retorted, just before he pounded his heel into the top of the gunman's foot and rammed his elbow into the man's diaphragm. He heard a startled grunt and the gun clatter to the pavement as he threw a hard right against the driver's jaw. Duncan hit the ground rolling and came up with the Frenchman's gun locked in his hands. "Ah-ah-ah," he said to the former gunman, who was preparing to lunge as him, "back against the car."
Sighing heavily, the muscular blond complied.
"Really, monsieur," the driver complained, "this is too bad of you. We wished only to discuss the matter of the diamonds and instead you act with violence upon us."
"This is not the American hospitality I expected," the blond complained.
"Nor I," said the driver.
"Excuse me," Duncan said, feeling wildly off balance, "but I think holding a gun to my head is not exactly the way to promote Franco-American relations!"
"Stealing the diamonds of our employer was not helpful either," the driver pointed out.
"C'est vrai," the blond agreed. "If you return them immediately, then the harmony between our two nations may be preserved."
Duncan had the most awful feeling he was losing his mind. "Look, I'll say it again: I don't have the diamonds, I did not steal the diamonds, I don't know where they are now. Tell Giscard he's after the wrong man and ask him to suggest someone else for you to hold up at gunpoint."
"Really, monsieur," the driver said severely, "there is no need to be insulting."
"We wish only to conduct this one matter of business with you," the blond complained.
Duncan now understood why Harley had stood on a sidewalk near Bryant Park and screamed.
"I haven't got the diamonds!"
"Monsieur, we are reasonable men," said the driver.
"We are willing to accommodate you," said the blond.
"We have our orders, monsieur. Return the diamonds or lose your head."
"We would much rather you return the diamonds."
Polite, but deadly. What a lousy combination. "I've got new orders for you," Duncan informed them. "Leave me alone. If I see you anywhere near me or my home or my office again, I'll shoot first and ask questions later. Get it?"
"Got it," the two said as one.
"Good. Now you," Duncan said, pointing the handgun at the blond, "get into the back seat, on the floor."
Sighing heavily, the blond thug complied.
"Adieu, messieurs," Duncan said, pointing the gun at the driver.
"Let us say au revoir," the driver countered just before he put the car in gear and headed toward Tenth Avenue
.
Duncan didn't even give himself time to start shaking. He shoved the gun into the back waistband of his jeans and started running toward Eighth Avenue
. This bore no resemblance to his morning jogs through Chelsea. He ran hard and fast, his heart bursting in his chest. With a decent head start, he might just live long enough to pull a Harley.
* * *
CHAPTER EIGHT
« ^ »
Harley woke up after a night of shockingly sensual dreams, all of them starring Duncan Lang, and wondered if her blush would die away in this century. A shower and a room service breakfast went a long way toward restoring some of her equilibrium. She decided that she and Duncan had acted like two remarkably mature adults last night when they had agreed not to pursue something that definitely should not be pursued. After all, he had his problems and she had hers. He lived on the East Coast and she lived on the West Coast. He was the Playboy of the Western World and she was the vestal virgin of the pop world.
To allow anything to happen, let alone develop, between them was sheer lunacy. She was glad they had both come to their senses last night. She really was.
And she wouldn't think about him. Not at all.
She'd start not thinking about Duncan by calling her mother and—for the third time since her holiday began—allay the newest crop of Barbara Miller's fears for her daughter's well-being.
It took Harley ten minutes to convince her mother that she was not abandoning her career, shaving her head, and entering a New Age temple. She spent another five minutes trying to convince Barbara Miller that she really should not watch the evening television news-magazines. She reiterated the one lie she had ever told her mother—that she was staying with some friends safe and sound in a high-security house on Long Island. Her mother wouldn't be able to handle the truth.
She took five minutes more to check on her mother's health and reassure herself that her mother really was taking her high-blood-pressure medicine regularly, and then spent another ten minutes listening to all the bad news from Sweetcreek Barbara Miller had told her on their last phone call: the farmers were convinced the sunny July days meant drought; the adored quarterback of the Sweetcreek High School's varsity squad had broken two of the general store's plate glass windows during a night of drunken revelry; Abby Chandler had died and her eldest girl had run off with a man ten years her
senior; the begonias were struggling.
Harley finally bid her mother goodbye and hung up the phone with a gusty sigh of relief. It had taken her almost seventeen years to figure out that her mother was happiest when she was worrying about something, anything. In the intervening nine years, though, she still hadn't been able to reconcile herself to a worldview that saw everything as black, or at most gray, rather than red, or orange, or yellow, or anything remotely resembling a cheerful color. If she had believed Barbara Miller's prophecies about her life, she'd be lying hung-over in the back of some biker bar beside some unwashed human refuse she had picked up the night before.
She glanced at herself in the mirror—jaunty short brown hair, a sleeveless red spandex minidress (with matching cowboy boots, of course), freckles free of all makeup—and grinned. Parents—particularly stress addicts—weren't always right.
She picked up the phone and called Annie to check in, and then she strode from her room. It was time to get back out into the city and find more lyrics to write for "Nice Girls Don't."
She walked out of the Millenium lobby into an overcast morning and had her plan immediately torpedoed by two very tall, very muscular men in expensive three-piece suits who bore a disturbing resemblance to her former bodyguards, except these men weren't bodyguards, they were thugs. She might have been cloistered these last nine years, but she could still tell the difference. She was so relieved they weren't some of Boyd Monroe's minions, that she wasn't even afraid when they grabbed one of her elbows each and guided her to one of the concrete planters that lined the hotel's black glass wall facade.
"Bonjour, Mademoiselle Hitchcock," said the burly blond with the limp.
"Won't you sit down?" said the beefy brunette with the colorfully bruised jaw.
"We are two strangers to your fair country," said the burly blond, "in need of your expert assistance."
"We depend upon you, mademoiselle," said the beefy brunette.
"It will take only a minute of your time," said the burly blond.
"Two, at the most," amended the beefy brunette.
"Look," said Harley, jerking her arms free of their massive hands, "what's going on? Who are you guys?"
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