Anything For You (Harlequin Blaze)

by Sarah Mayberry

  But rational thought had not taken long to return. So, Sam had gone back to his apartment to try and get his head together. Was that any more or less shocking than her retreating to the bathroom and hiding under the shower for half an hour? How long had he hung around for, waiting for her to come out and talk to him? What must he have been thinking when she rolled away from him and hightailed it out of there?

  It was hard to admit she’d behaved poorly, but she knew she wasn’t exactly standing on a pedestal in this situation. And that was before she even took in to account the fact that she was the one who’d instigated the whole thing in the first place. Granted, he had put his hand on her breast. And rubbed her nipple with his thumb. But she was the one who’d turned into a tigress and ripped his clothes off. And grabbed his erection like a joystick, refusing to let go. And raced ahead to the finish line thanks to years of pent-up fantasy and anticipation.

  So, really, they were kind of at a draw in the self-recrimination and blame stakes.

  Which only left the small, insignificant task of how she was supposed to face him again. Because he must know. Her reaction had been such a giveaway. How could he not know?

  Forcing herself to get out of her car, Delaney decided to give herself a small break. Probably she wasn’t going to come up with a world-class solution to any of her major problems right now, with her body still humming from Sam’s expert touch. The one really, really important, vital thing that had to happen was that she and Sam talk about what they’d done, get things out in the open and deal with the resulting issues. Even though she was in the process of edging him out of her life, she wasn’t ready to lose him just yet. Not like this. She refused to let a few minutes of sexual heaven destroy a friendship that had survived all other obstacles.

  Her heart in her mouth, Delaney pushed open the door to their offices and tried to look normal. Whatever the hell that was anymore.

  “Hey, Delaney, you dirty dog,” Debbie said meaningfully as Delaney paused to collect her mail.

  A bone-deep heat rushed up Delaney’s chest and shoulders and into her face. Debbie knew. How did she know? Had Sam told her? Why would he do that?

  “Wh-what?” Delaney managed to stammer.

  “Look at you—I guess Jake must be as good as all the rumors say,” Debbie said, eyebrows wiggling salaciously.

  Delaney blinked. What in the hell was the other woman talking about? Jake? Who was Jake?

  In a flash, her brain caught up. Debbie was talking about Jake, the printing rep. The man she’d had dinner with last night. The man with the take-no-prisoners tongue. Riiiiiiight.

  “So how was it? Did you go somewhere nice?” Debbie asked, all avid interest.

  “Um, yes. Dinner was just…. fine,” Delaney said, momentarily stumped for a way to deflect the other woman’s curiosity. But maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing if the office staff thought she had something going on with Jake. It might stop them from taking one look at her and realizing that she’d shagged Sam senseless that very morning.

  Summoning a strained little smile, she flicked her eyes across to Sam’s office. To her relief, it was clearly empty. He hadn’t arrived yet. Good. She had some time to get herself together, put her game face on. When he asked her what was going on, why she’d thrown him to the ground and had her way with him, she was going to need all her hard-won sangfroid where he was concerned to convince him that the reason she’d jumped him had been hormonal. Or astrological. Or political—whatever worked, in fact. Anything but that she was in love with him, and had been all her adult life.

  Her relief at his absence lasted about an hour. Then she began to feel uneasy. Was he not coming in at all? Had she scared him so much that he was now too terrified to set foot in his own workplace?

  Just before lunch time, Sam hobbled in, a graze on his left cheekbone, his knee a bloody mess of scraped skin. Delaney sat in her office, her heart pounding at about a million miles an hour as she watched Debbie cross to the kitchenette to collect the first-aid kit. Taking a deep breath, Delaney pushed herself out of her chair and intercepted the receptionist as she returned to Sam’s side.

  “I’ll do it,” she said, relieving Debbie of the kit. She’d cleaned Sam’s cuts and grazes so often that she practically had a medical degree, and it was good to have something to break the ice before they discussed what had happened.

  Indicating Sam should head for his office, Delaney followed him in and waited while he propped himself on his desk. Both of them were very careful to avoid eye contact, looking anywhere but at each other.

  “What happened?” Delaney asked as she knelt to inspect his knee. It looked a lot worse than it was, she judged.

  “Got slammed doing a boardslide grind.” Sam shrugged.

  Delaney knew this meant Sam had been trying to slide his skateboard down the handrail on a flight of stairs. It was highly dangerous, but a spectacular stunt if pulled off. Unfortunately, most of the time it ended in a spill.

  “Hmm,” she said, tipping some antiseptic onto a square of sterile gauze.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing. Except that you could have killed yourself,” she said, pressing the soaked gauze onto his wound.

  “Ow!” Sam howled, flinching away.

  “Don’t be such a sook. I have to clean it up so I can see where the gravel is,” Delaney said matter-of-factly.

  Despite everything that had happened between them, it felt good to wrap her hand around his calf and return his foot to its resting place on her bent thigh. His skin was warm and his muscles firm. She’d wondered for so many years what it would be like to sleep with Sam. She’d imagined his hands on her body, tried to envisage the length and breadth of his erection, what it would feel like inside her. Nothing had prepared her for the reality. He had been…perfect. Everything she’d ever fantasized about and more.

  Belatedly she became aware that she was panting. Swallowing loudly, she concentrated on dabbing at the blood on Sam’s knee. She was playing nurse, for Pete’s sake—how could anyone get turned on with a bloodied, dirt-encrusted knee in their face?

  Get a grip, Delaney, she told herself. She was supposed to be doing damage control, not revealing even more of the tragic inner workings of her warped mind.

  Using the tweezers from the first-aid kit, she began picking small bits of dirt and gravel from the wound.

  “Thanks for doing this,” Sam said after the silence had stretched for an uncomfortably long time.

  “Part of the deal, isn’t it?” Delaney said. “You bang yourself up, I pick up the pieces.”

  The tension in the room stretched even tighter. Why had she said that? It was so loaded! And why use the word bang, of all the possible alternatives available in the English language?

  She covered her unease by pouring more antiseptic onto the gauze.

  “This is going to sting again,” she said.

  Sam flinched as she cleaned the last of the dirt away.

  “Why does that stuff have to hurt? Can’t they come up with something that cleans and takes the pain away?” he complained.

  “Am I going to have to get you a lollypop?” Delaney asked, and Sam cracked a smile.

  For a second their eyes clashed and held.

  Here it comes, thought Delaney, taking a deep breath. Brushing her hands down the front of her thighs, she pushed herself to her feet. She wanted to be standing when they had this conversation, for some reason. Perhaps in case she needed to bolt for the door.

  “Well,” Sam said, standing also. Then he glanced down at his knee, bending it a few times. “Feels good, thanks.”

  He reached out a hand toward her, hesitated a second, then completed the move, patting her on the shoulder in an awkward, avuncular gesture of thanks. Then he walked around his desk, slid into his chair and flicked his computer on.

  Delaney stood frozen for a moment, not quite comprehending what had just occurred. One second they’d been on the brink of discussing what ha
d happened that morning in her apartment, and the next Sam was acting as though it was just business as usual.

  And perhaps, for him, it was.

  She had a sudden out-of-body flash of how they must look, Sam staring determinedly at his computer screen, her standing, stunned, in front of his desk.

  We’re never going to talk about it. Delaney suddenly understood. He wants to just pretend it never happened.

  Operating on automatic pilot, she gathered the debris from her Florence Nightingale routine and exited his office. Dumping the gauze in the bin and returning the first-aid kit to its place under the kitchen sink, she walked, zombielike, across to her office.

  She couldn’t believe they weren’t going to talk about it. They’d been friends for sixteen years, and they’d just had wild, impetuous, animal sex on the floor of her apartment. And apparently that didn’t even rate a mention, not even a few bare words to sign it off or wrap it up or explain it away in some way.

  She sank into her office chair and stared at the blank scribble pad on her desk.

  For a strange, vertiginous second she wondered if the whole thing had simply been a figment of her crazed imagination. Maybe in her stress and anxiety over separating her life from Sam’s she’d concocted an elaborate delusion that she’d had sex with him, while in the real world, Sam had simply gotten up, eaten his breakfast and gone to the skate ramp.

  Yeah, right.

  Her body was still tingling from his touch. If she crossed her legs and squeezed her thighs together, she could almost feel him inside her. It had been real. It had been the best damn sex of her life.

  But in Sam’s world it didn’t even rate a mention.

  IN HIS OFFICE, Sam stopped pretending to read his computer screen and put his head in his hands. He should have said something. The words had been there, right on the tip of his tongue. Sorry, and other humble, peace-making words. But he just hadn’t been able to force himself to the point. He’d given her plenty of opportunity to jump in, though. After all, it had taken two to tango. Delaney could just as well have brought it up. But she hadn’t, and that had to mean that she didn’t want to talk about it, too, right? Because Delaney was pretty up front about most things. She always let him know when there was something on her mind. She’d have said something if she was worried or anything, definitely.

  Sam winced at his own willful cowardice and stupidity. Who was he kidding? There was no way Delaney was okay with what had happened between them. They’d had sex. Great, amazing, terrifying sex. It wasn’t something they could brush under the carpet. The earth had practically shifted on its axis.

  But she’d walked out of his office without saying anything. So what did that mean? The only conclusion he could draw was that she didn’t want to talk about it. Or that she’d been waiting for him to take the initiative. But Delaney was no shrinking violet—she always said what she was thinking. Which brought him back to square one—she didn’t want to talk about it. Which meant he was off the hook.

  He should have been ashamed of the surge of relief he felt at this realization. After years of Oprah and Donahue and Sally Jessie Raphael, he knew he was supposed to want to talk and emote and cry and be sensitive and understanding. It was the modern, reconstructed male thing to do. But, frankly, he’d rather wrestle with a two-hundred-pound alligator than start trying to explain the complex, messed-up stuff that had been going on in his head when he reached for Delaney’s breast. He didn’t understand it himself—how could he expect her to?

  The best course was the one they were taking—ignore it, and it would go away. Sure, it would be awkward for a few days, but, after all, it had been a freakish one-off, an aberration. Soon the memories would fade and it would become one of those things that he’d begin to think maybe he’d imagined.

  A vision of Delaney’s passion-filled face flashed across his mind. His hands twitched as they remembered the shape of her perfect behind, the smooth curve of her perky breasts.

  He was a deluded fool. A desperate, terrified, deluded fool. But it was all he had, and he was clinging to it.

  5

  SAM HAD ONLY BEEN HOME for a matter of minutes that evening when a knock sounded on his front door. His pulse kicked up. Delaney. It had to be Delaney.

  He opened the door to find his mother standing on the doorstep. As he took in her stiffly styled blond hair and her face set in its habitual expression of tense resignation, he decided that the cosmos really was, indeed, out to get him. If there was anyone he didn’t have the energy or inclination to deal with right now, it was his mother. Even having to face the music with Delaney would be better.

  “Sam. How are you? I was in the neighborhood, and I thought I should drop by since it’s been so long since you called,” she said. Her eyes were reproachful, a study in suburban martyrdom.

  “Nancy. Come in,” he said.

  His parents had been Jim and Nancy to him since he was about ten. Around the same time that he’d given up on them ever acting like the moms and dads his friends seemed to have. As an adult, he didn’t have a close relationship with either of them, something that suited him just fine. His mother and father had spent too many years either ignoring him or trying to use him as a weapon to hurt each other for Sam to feel any great sentiment where they were concerned. Sure, they were his folks, his blood. That went without saying. If they needed anything, he’d be there for them. But he didn’t crave their counsel, or think of them in times of crisis. They weren’t his friends. They weren’t anything, really—just two people who had lived in the same house with him when he was a kid.

  “You’ve bought new furniture, I see,” his mother said, eyeing his couches.

  “No. Same stuff as last time you were here,” Sam said neutrally. That had been over a year ago, when Delaney had helped him cook dinner for his mother’s birthday.

  “Something looks different,” she said, frowning.

  Sam shrugged, suddenly impatient to have the pretense over and done with. His mother hadn’t just “popped in” to see how he was doing. They didn’t have a pop-in kind of relationship. She had an agenda.

  “Anything up?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Why does anything need to be up for me to visit my son?”

  Sam bit back a sigh. They were going to do this the long, circuitous way, obviously. “Do you want a drink? I’ve got some wine in the fridge.”

  “A chardonnay would be nice if you have one,” Nancy said. She slid her handbag off her shoulder and dropped it on the kitchen counter. Sam resigned himself to a couple of hours of emotional dodgeball as he dragged the fridge door open.

  “How is the magazine going?” she asked.

  Sam grit his teeth. He wasn’t sure how she did it, but whenever she mentioned X-Pro, his mother managed to imply that the business was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

  “The magazine’s doing fine,” he said. He’d long since given up on the need to prove himself to her.

  She sniffed. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to take from that, but he let it ride.

  “What about you? How’s the garden?” he asked. Nancy had been retired from her job as a secretary for several years now, and the one passion in her life was her garden.

  “Oh, fine, I guess. The back fence is practically falling down. The neighbors are being stingy about fixing it.” She took a swallow from her wineglass.

  “If you need help, I’m happy to come over and take a shot at it. Or if you need help getting someone out to fix it…?” he offered.

  His mother’s lips tightened briefly; he’d touched a raw nerve.

  “I don’t need your money, Sam. I’m not your responsibility. You’ve got enough on your plate, funding this lifestyle of yours.” She cast a disapproving look around the apartment. “We both know that any financial problems I experience can only be laid at one person’s door.”

  Sam stared at the floor for a beat. He didn’t have to be a Mensa candidate to guess where this was going. Hi
s parents’ bone-of-contention du jour was a parcel of shares his father had received in the divorce settlement nearly fifteen years ago. They’d been valued as worthless at the time, and to Sam’s knowledge, nothing had changed over the years. Only in his mother’s mind had the shares suddenly become hot property.

  “My lawyer has drawn up some papers,” Nancy said, rustling around in her handbag until she’d extracted an official-looking envelope.

  “What sort of papers?” he asked warily.

  “I need to get a court order to force your father to hand his financial records over,” his mother said. “This just says that he’s talked to you about getting dividends from the shares.”

  “You want me to sign a statutory declaration so you can take my father to court?” Sam asked flatly.

  He felt the familiar weight of anger and helplessness descend on him. No matter what he did, he could never stem the tide of his parents’ mutual acrimony. As a kid, he’d tried everything, from keeping his room superneat to getting perfect marks at school, to simply not being there. Nothing had ever stopped them from wanting to hurt each other. Just the memory of their furious slinging matches was enough to make his belly tense. It had been years, and still they persisted in taking shots at each other through him.

  “Nancy, I’ve told you a million times. I am not getting involved between the two of you,” he said as calmly as possible.

  His mother puffed her cheeks out, the picture of outrage. “Jim has stolen from me, Sam. He declared those shares valueless at our divorce, but I know he’s been receiving dividends. That money is half mine. I deserve it, after all the years of misery I put up with.”

  “We’re talking a few bucks here. Your handbag cost more, for Pete’s sake,” he said, trying the rational approach.

  He should have known better.

  “It’s the principal of the thing, and if you don’t understand that, you’re more your father’s son than I knew,” she said angrily.

  Words crowded his throat. He wanted to tell her to shut up, to leave, to never come near him again if the only thing she was going to bring to his door was more unhappiness and anger. But he’d heard his parents yelling at one another too many times to give in to his temper. It wasn’t the way he chose to solve his problems or live his life.