“My night-light was my best friend. It was in the shape of a Saint Bernard.” A fond memory entered her mind. Her father had gotten it for her to help her get over her fear of the dark. “If it wasn’t on, I couldn’t sleep.”
“Let me guess. You were a city kid.”
She was and she was proud of it. “Born and bred,” she affirmed.
Still, even city kids went to the country sometimes, he thought. He remembered his own childhood, squeezed in the backseat between two siblings and what felt like fourteen pointy elbows, desperately trying to look out the window to see where they were—and if they had gotten there yet.
“No long, grueling cross-country trips when your family went on vacation? No camping out or traveling through more desolate areas on your way to somewhere else?” he asked.
She shook her head. There had been no vacations in her childhood. “My father was a workaholic. The word vacation wasn’t in his vocabulary. But he liked to take me to the local amusement park whenever he could,” she told Lukkas in case he thought that she’d been deprived as a child. “We went on long bike rides, played ball in the field behind the high school. I didn’t feel as if I was missing anything,” she said, anticipating his possible next question. “It was a good childhood as far as it went.”
The look on his face said he found that an odd way to put it. “And that was?”
“Until my dad died when I was twelve.” An ironic smile slipped over her lips. “After that, my mother went to work and I helped out around the house to try to take up the slack. There was no time for vacations,” she assured him.
Hers had been a no-nonsense kind of upbringing from that point on. Her mother had done her best, but there was no way she could have filled the void that her father had left behind.
Something in her voice had Lukkas asking, “You were close to your father?”
“I was,” she admitted freely. Her father had understood her, had allowed her to be who she was. If he were still alive today, he wouldn’t be trying to set her up with the sons and nephews of some of his friends the way her mother felt she had to. “He told me I could be anything I wanted to be—as long as I was organized,” she added with a laugh.
The sound of her laugh had Lukkas envisioning sunrises over fields of flowers. He smiled. “Is that how it all started? You being so very organized?” He embellished in case she didn’t realize what he was referring to.
She nodded. “Yes, that’s how it started. What little girl doesn’t want to please her father?” Not that it took much. A clean bedroom; her homework done before dinner. These were all things that garnered her father’s praise. She missed hearing it. “After he died...for a long time after that I secretly thought if I could just be organized enough, he’d come back.” She laughed shortly, shaking her head. Had she ever really been that young and naive? “Drove my mother crazy. She’d put something down and before she could blink, I had it back in its place ‘where it belonged.’”
She thought back to those days. “I guess to her I was bordering on OCD,” she admitted, smiling to herself as she remembered a couple of incidents that had driven her mother particularly crazy. “Before you ask,” she continued, “I got over it—partially because I knew what my little organizational campaign was doing to my mother. I knew that she missed my father, too. I didn’t want to add to her sadness by making her think there was something wrong with me.”
Yohanna understood that she had been monopolizing the conversation. And sharing much too much.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “I have a habit of babbling.” She felt herself flushing a bit. “You should have stopped me.”
The extra color in her cheeks intrigued him. “Why? You gave me some insight into what makes you tick. I thought it was interesting.”
And what makes you tick, Lukkas? Yohanna found herself wondering. What can I ask you without making it look like I’m being overly nosy?
“Besides,” he continued with just a tiny bit of triumph in his voice, “it distracted you.”
“Distracted me? From what?”
He gestured toward the window on her left. “We’re airborne and you didn’t have to squeeze your armrests until they all but fell off.”
He was right. They were flying and she hadn’t even been aware of the takeoff.
Yohanna looked through her window now. Staring, she could just barely make out dots of lights scattered about in no particular pattern—she assumed they were coming from homes built along the terrain—far below her.
His question about her fears of the dark had taken her back into the past and she’d gotten so wrapped up in revisiting memories of her father, she hadn’t even noticed the change in cabin pressure or the powerful surging feeling of ascent.
Still, she felt she had to at least pretend that she had conquered her feeling about takeoffs and didn’t need to white-knuckle them anymore.
“Or here’s a thought,” she suggested. “Maybe I’ve just conquered my fear of flying.”
An amused smile played along his lips. “There is that. Looks as though we’ll make a real world traveler out of you yet, Hanna,” Lukkas predicted.
* * *
They landed in Bedford a little more than an hour later.
Feeling the downward shift, Lukkas opened his eyes. That was when he realized that he must have fallen asleep sometime in the past fifteen minutes or so.
The long day he and Yohanna had put in had finally caught up to him.
Stifling a yawn, he stretched as best he could in the limited amount of space he had, and then rotated his neck a little. It felt stiff. Served him right for falling asleep sitting up.
Turning his head toward Yohanna, he was surprised to see that she had fallen asleep, as well. Apparently the long day had caught up to her, too.
He was about to gently shake her by the shoulder to wake her when something had him pausing for a second.
Pulling back his hand, he just looked at Hanna for a long moment. She’d been a ball of energy today, never questioning anything he told her to take care of, just finding a way to get it done and quickly.
He knew she’d come to him without any experience in the world where he had made his mark and yet she’d adapted so well and so quickly, it was hard to believe she hadn’t been part of the film industry from the very beginning.
And there was something more.
Looking at her like this, her features soft and at rest rather than animated, he could see why his director had thought she was an actress. Aside from being exceptionally attractive, there was something about this young woman...an inherent sweetness that instantly transcended any awkward period that usually existed between strangers as they slowly got to know one another.
Hanna had something, a quality that effortlessly and instantly broke down barriers. That same quality made her someone he instinctively knew he could not only count on but that she could be a confidante, a friend who wouldn’t let him down. Someone who would keep his secrets and be there to lend him silent—and not so silent—support when that was what was called for.
Whoa, Lukkas-boy, you’re tired and getting carried away here. She’s here to take Janice’s place, not Natalie’s, he reminded himself, afraid of where this was all taking him.
Shutting down any further reaction—unwanted reaction, he underscored—buzzing around inside him, he put his hand on Hanna’s shoulder and shook it ever so slightly.
When she went on sleeping, he did it a second time, a little more forcefully this time around.
“Time to get up, Hanna—unless you want to spend the night on the plane,” he told her.
The sound of Lukkas’s voice wove its way into the dream she was having and, along with the jarring motion she felt on her shoulder, abruptly made her come around.
Blinking, Yohanna opened her eyes. She was disorien
ted for a moment.
“You fell asleep.”
It wasn’t an accusation but a statement of fact. Nevertheless, it still made her feel like an idiot who had dropped the ball. On the job a little more than two weeks and she was already falling asleep around the boss.
Not exactly a good thing to have happen when it came time to review her job performance.
“I’m sorry. I guess I was more tired than I thought. Are we still in the air?” she asked. Blinking again to clear her vision, she tried to focus as she looked out the window. An array of lights, both near and far, greeted her.
We’re home, Toto, she thought with just a touch of whimsy.
“I guess not,” she said out loud, answering her own question. And then another thought struck her. “I didn’t hold you up, did I?”
“We just landed,” he told her. “You slept through that like a baby. See? I told you that you’d get used to it.”
She was never one who accepted any form of flattery as if she deserved it. “We’ll see how I do when I’m awake,” Yohanna replied.
She started to get up and found that she couldn’t.
“Um, you might want to unbuckle your seat belt,” Lukkas suggested, pointing toward the belt that was still quite buckled in place. “I don’t think you’re quite strong enough to take the plane with you.”
Chagrined, she pressed the release button on the belt—and found that although the buckle made the appropriate noises, it wouldn’t separate itself from the metal tongue that had fit so easily into the slot an hour ago.
She tried pressing it again and was on the receiving end of the same result.
Lukkas was already on his feet. When he heard her murmuring in frustration under her breath, he turned around to see what was wrong. He was surprised to find that she was still seated.
“Problem?” he asked.
“I think the seat belt doesn’t want me to leave,” she quipped drily.
“Let me have a look at it.” Sitting next to her again, Lukkas tried to depress the lock and found that it just wouldn’t budge. “Let’s try this again,” he said, seeming to address the words to the inanimate object rather than to her.
His hands on the seat belt, he applied more pressure as he tried to work the ends apart.
That had him accidentally brushing against places that he wouldn’t have normally been in contact with—but he had no choice.
Yohanna shifted a little, not because she felt cramped, but because, as Lukkas was trying to free her from the uncooperative seat belt, he seemed to be unaware of the fact that his hands were brushing against her thighs, which in turn caused a heated chain reaction within her.
She was doing her very best not to notice.
She was failing.
Yohanna bit the inside of her cheek, struggling to think of other things.
Struggling to regulate the way she was breathing, as well.
Maybe if she didn’t like the man as much as she did, if she actually disliked him, she could easily block the warm shock waves he was unsuspectingly causing to dance all over her body.
But she did like him and consequently she did feel something spreading through her. Something she knew she shouldn’t be feeling—definitely something she couldn’t react to.
She vehemently didn’t want to be one of those women; women who slept with their bosses as casually as they changed their clothes.
For his part, Lukkas was trying his very best not to notice that, try as he might not to, he kept brushing his hand against her, fleetingly touching her in places reserved for a lover’s caress.
Tendering an apology might be too embarrassing for her, so he pretended not to be aware of it.
But he was.
Exceedingly so.
He could feel the charged electricity crackling between them all the way from the roots of his hair up to the very tips.
This reaction was purely physical and only happening because he hadn’t been with a woman since his wife’s death. He had never been one of those people who felt some unbridled need to sow wild oats fast and furiously anywhere and anytime he had the opportunity.
To him, relationships were tantamount to the experience, and he hadn’t had a relationship since Natalie had died in that senseless crash.
Sitting back, he shook his head. “It’s really stuck.” He rolled the problem over in his head. “I guess I’m going to have to take drastic measures,” he told her.
And just what did he mean by “drastic”?
“You’re not leaving me here, are you?” she asked, looking at him uncertainly.
“As a sacrifice to the airplane gods?” he asked with a genuine laugh. “No, what I meant by that is that I’m going to have to cut the belt. Wait here,” he told her, getting up again.
“It’s not as if I have a choice,” she called after him, frustrated and annoyed that she couldn’t free herself without all this extra added effort.
She heard Lukkas laugh in response.
* * *
He came back ten minutes later, a pair of heavy-duty shears in his hand.
“I was getting worried,” she confessed. “You were gone longer than I thought you’d be.”
“You’d be surprised how hard it is to find a pair of scissors on a single-engine plane,” he told her.
He sat to be closer to her when he made the necessary surgical cut. “Okay, now hold still,” he instructed just before he got started.
“The idea of dancing around the cabin has a certain drawback at the moment,” she told him, watching as he slipped one of the blades underneath the contrary seat belt.
She held her breath as she saw him grip the scissor handles and very slowly cut through the belt.
The latter was thicker than she had thought and the process was a slow one because, she assumed, he was trying not to cut her, as well.
In what felt like an eternity later, the two sides of the seat belt finally separated, freeing her from her gripping prison.
“You’re free,” he declared. “This makes you my very first official damsel in distress that I’ve rescued.” He frowned as he looked at the severed belt. “Sorry you had to go through that.”
“As long as you got me free, that’s all that matters,” Yohanna told him, very relieved that it was all over with and that she could finally get off the plane. “Thank you!”
Impulsively, going with the moment, Yohanna stood up on her toes and brushed her lips against his cheek.
Or at least that was her intent when she started.
Chapter Eight
Caught off guard by her closeness and the feel of something whisper soft and silky against his cheek, Lukkas automatically turned his head toward the source of that softness.
And just like that, it wasn’t his cheek that her lips were touching. It was his lips.
A sense of propriety urged him to pull back. To mumble some sort of an apology even though he hadn’t been the one to initiate the action that lay behind this situation.
But needs that far outweighed that sense of right and wrong prohibited him from stepping away from something he’d been missing these past few years. For the first time in all those months, the loneliness that haunted everything he did, that haunted all his waking hours, actually disappeared. The darkness that had hovered over his spirit moved aside and suddenly, just for a second, as he made this intimate contact with another human being, the sun flooded into every aching corner of his soul.
She tasted of strawberry and sweetness.
Most of all, she tasted of hope and, just possibly, salvation.
His salvation.
* * *
Horrified at what Lukkas probably thought she was trying to do, Yohanna ordered herself to pull back. All she had wanted to do was to thank him. Grant
ed, this extra step had been an impulsive one on her part, but she hadn’t meant for it to turn into anything else, especially not this.
Oh, but it had.
Big-time.
Instead of expressing simple gratitude, she found herself experiencing a wild surge within her veins that she had, until just this very moment, thought was merely the product of overimaginative writers who clearly dabbled in fiction, creating mythical scenarios that could not possibly be achieved in real life.
Except that they could.
Because she was having just such a reaction right now.
She still knew her own name, but as for anything else—where she was, what time it was, things like that—it was all hazy and even now was swiftly dissolving in the heat her body insisted on generating.
Yohanna had no idea how long the kiss continued. One eternity, maybe two. What she did know was that she had never felt this alive before. She felt like someone who could leap over tall buildings, who could do wonderful, wondrous things.
Without being fully aware of what she was actually doing, she slipped her arms around Lukkas’s neck. At that moment she felt his arms tightening around her, felt him bringing her closer so that her body swayed into his. That, in turn, ignited every single inch of her.
She wanted the moment, the kiss, to go on forever. She had never felt this alive before.
And then, as unintentionally as it began, it was over.
One of them had stepped back.
Had it been her?
Or maybe him?
She wasn’t sure. One minute, they were all but bound to one another, utterly connected at the lips.
The next, they weren’t.
* * *
“A simple handshake would have sufficed,” Lukkas heard himself saying.
He’d seen the uncertain look in her eyes and knew he had to set the tone if they were ever going to move past this. If he was being honest with himself, all he really wanted to do was to kiss her again, to take her home and get to know every single inch of her.
Slowly.
Her Red-Carpet Romance Page 8