Helga peered out from behind the chain lock on her hotel room door at the large man standing there. Marte’s son. “Of course,” she said with a smile to hide her lie. Had they met? Yes, obviously they had.
“Desmond Nyland called me, ma’am. He thought you might appreciate some company for lunch.”
“Oh, is it that time already?”
“Yes, ma’am. If you’re not ready, I don’t mind waiting out here.”
Don’t leave without your room key, notepad, and purse. The note was right there, right in front of Helga’s nose. “Let me just get my purse,” she told him. Stanley. Stanley, Stanley, Stanley.
She closed the door and went to the dresser, quickly leafing to a fresh page in her notebook. “Stanley,” she wrote, and stuffed her pad into her purse, along with the room key. On second thought, she took the pen and wrote the name on the palm of her left hand. “Stanley.”
She checked her hair and her lipstick in the mirror and went out the door.
“Got your key?” Stanley asked, holding the door open a crack.
Helga opened her purse. There it was. Good. She held it up for him to see and he closed the door tightly.
“Don’t you have better things to do with your afternoon?” she asked.
“Actually, ma’am, I do have to eat and . . .” He smiled tightly. “Let’s just say I welcome the distraction.”
Hmmm. “Do I know you well enough to comment that that sounds as if you’ve got woman trouble?”
He laughed. “I don’t think anyone knows me well enough to say that to me.”
“Not even your mother?”
“With the sole exception of my mother. You’re right. But she’s been gone a long time.”
“She helped save my life,” Helga told him. “Did I already tell you that? She and Annebet and your grandparents, too. When the Nazis began rounding up the Danish Jews, they took us in. Hid us. For weeks. It was doubly dangerous because Hershel—my brother—and Annebet were working for the resistance.” She pushed the down button for the elevator. “Did your mother ever tell you about that time?”
“Not a lot. And I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “We can’t take the elevator. If the power goes out . . .”
“Of course,” she said. “What was I thinking?” She followed him to the stairs.
He held the door for her. “Did you say your brother’s name was Hershel?”
“Yes.” She held tightly to the bannister as she started down the stairs.
“Hershel Rosen?”
“Yes.”
“My aunt Anna told me about him,” Stanley said.
“Really?” Helga stopped on the landing between flights of stairs, and Stanley courteously let her pretend that it wasn’t because she was out of breath. “Did she tell you they had been married?”
“Well, considering she called herself Anna Rosen, I guess I’d always just known—”
“Anna? Not Annebet?”
“My mother sometimes called her by her full name, you know, when they were arguing, but her prescription pad said Dr. Anna Rosen.”
Helga wasn’t sure whether she wanted to laugh or cry. Anna had been Hershel’s sweet name for her. She started down the stairs again. “No wonder I could never find her. I searched for a Dr. Annebet Gunvald.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I should have known,” Helga said. “Anna Rosen. What did she tell you? About Hershel.”
“That she’d married him when they were both pretty young,” Stanley told her. “That they didn’t have your parents’approval. That he was Jewish. When I was a kid I used to go with her to synagogue. She claimed she was an atheist, but . . . She liked to go. She told me she and Hershel worked for the resistance, that it was pretty unorganized, even after the Germans came looking for the Jews, but that everyone in town stepped forward to hide their neighbors.”
“Seventy-eight hundred Jews in Denmark,” Helga told him, “and all but four hundred seventy-four escaped to Sweden, thanks to people like your mother and her family.” She smiled. “Do you know when your father—no, your grandfather—came to warn us that the order had come to remove the Jews from Denmark, my father and mother didn’t believe him. They argued for so long that your grandfather was still there when the Germans came pounding on the door. We hid in the basement, and Herr Gunvald went out the back. He came around the front of the house and told the Germans that we weren’t home, that we were vacationing up north. He told them to go away, that he’d been asked to keep the property safe, and he was determined to do so. He threatened to call the police. And do you know, they actually left?”
“I can’t imagine what that must’ve been like to live through,” he told her as he ushered her into the dank restaurant in the basement. She snuck a look at her left palm. Stanley.
“We stayed with Marte’s family for weeks while Annebet and Hershel used their contacts to try to arrange passage to Sweden,” she told him, thanking him as he held out a chair for her at a nearby table.
He glanced around the room as if he were looking for someone before he sat down, too. He was trying not to let it show, but she could read frustration in his body language.
“She’s not here, is she?” Helga said.
He looked startled for a moment, but then he laughed. “No, she’s not.”
“You want to talk about it?”
His smile was beautiful. “The situation is a little, um . . . Well, let’s just say it’s not something I’d share even with my mother.”
“Ah,” Helga said. “You slept with her. That pretty pilot, right? What happened? Didn’t you tell her you’re in love with her? Of course not. Men always leave out the most important details.”
Stanley didn’t blink. “Might I recommend the curried vegetables over noodles? There’s a buffet line, I can get us both plates. It’s quicker than ordering.”
“Don’t worry,” Helga said. “I won’t tell.”
She probably wouldn’t even remember by the time he came back with their lunch.
By 1220, Alyssa was feeling solid enough to give lunch a try.
But the sight of Sam Starrett and Jules Cassidy sitting together in the hotel restaurant, deep in discussion, made her blood run cold.
What was Starrett up to? God, he was probably setting Jules up for something. This had to be some kind of cruel con, some kind of payback or revenge trick—all because she’d seen him cry.
Didn’t it?
Except she was watching Starrett’s eyes as she walked toward him. She saw when he first noticed her. He looked up and a myriad of emotions crossed his face. Apprehension and embarrassment, anger and even fear—she saw it all before he quickly looked away.
He actually thought she was going to walk up to him and rub in his face the fact that she’d seen him crying.
She knew better than to do something like that.
Didn’t she?
Confused, she made a sharp detour and went to the table where piles of wrapped sandwiches were on ice.
She couldn’t deal with this. She couldn’t deal with Starrett looking that nervous at the sight of her, couldn’t deal with not knowing for certain if she had been about to fling his tears right back in his face.
Dear God, she could actually imagine herself doing it. All Starrett would have had to do was greet her with some stupid-ass comment about the clothes she was wearing, and she would’ve lashed out without thinking. “Poor baby, are you going to cry over that now, too?”
When had she become such an insensitive monster?
Whatever had made Sam cry, that was none of her business. It was off-limits. Using it to try to hurt him was going too far. He didn’t seem to know where to draw the line in the war they had going between them, but damn it, that didn’t mean she had to sink to new depths.
Yes, his tears were none of her business.
Unless, of course, he’d been crying over her.
Kind of the way she’d cried over him just this morning.
“You, um, g
etting that to go?”
He was standing right behind her.
Alyssa braced herself before she turned to face him.
“I, uh, wanted to apologize for, um, shouting at you that way in my room,” he said, not quite able to meet her eyes. “You caught me at, um, you know, a disadvantage there, and I, uh, I kind of freaked out.” He cleared his throat. “I know you thought I was going to hit you, but, Jesus, I would never do that, Lys.” He looked directly into her eyes. “I would never hit you. Never.”
“Oh,” she said, surprised. “No, I didn’t think that. Not at all. I didn’t . . .”
He nodded. Forced a smile. “Well, good.”
“Why were you sitting with Jules?” She wanted to know, and she figured what the hell, she might as well ask. Especially when he was standing right in front of her, completely stripped of his arrogance and his cock-of-the-walk attitude.
Well, maybe not completely stripped. He had enough in him to bristle slightly. “Don’t get any ideas. I’m not crossing over to the other side or anything.”
She tried to swallow a laugh and failed. “Sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s just, out of all the men I’ve met in my life, you’re about the most unflinchingly heterosexual.”
He laughed softly. “Thank you. I know you don’t mean that as a compliment, but thank you anyway.” He looked down at the sandwich she was holding, gestured toward it with his chin. “Are you taking that with you? Do you mind if I, uh, walk with you?”
Alyssa nodded, unable to trust her voice.
“You want a soda to go with that?”
“Water,” she said, and he grabbed two bottles from a bin of ice as they headed out of the restaurant.
“It’s good and cold,” he said, bracing open the door to the stairs for her with his shoulder. He held both bottles of water in one hand. He had big hands with long, graceful fingers. Strong hands that always bore some kind of cut or bruise—a fingernail turning colors from getting jammed, or a scraped knuckle. She tried not to look at his hands, tried not to think about the way he’d touched her with those beautiful hands just last night.
“You might want to drink one now,” he continued. “Two minutes out of the ice and it’ll be tepid, like everything else around here. This f—” He stopped himself, cleared his throat. “This, uh, damned heat, you know?”
She looked at him. “Are we actually talking about the weather?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we are. I thought I’d start with the fucking weather, maybe touch on what you’ve been up to the past six months, and, shit, work my way up to the conversation I just had with Jules over lunch. See, I had it all figured out that we’d talk for a while, and then I’d bring up your partner. And I’d tell you that I got a chance to talk to him a little and he’s an okay guy, and you’d be like ‘Jules and you? Wow, Roger, there’s a friendship I never dreamed would happen in a million years.’ ”
Alyssa had to laugh at his imitation of her. It was pretty accurate, down to her habit of using his given name.
“And I’d say,” he continued, “kind of casually, that Jules and I actually have a whole hell of a lot in common because, you know, we’re, um . . .” He took a deep breath. “See, we’re both in love with you.”
Alyssa bounced her sandwich on the landing and scrambled to pick it up again. She looked at Sam, and she knew that he’d said exactly what she thought she’d heard him say.
“Of course, you had to go and ask why I was sitting with Jules, which made me have to deliver the . . . the . . . punchline, I guess you’d call it, earlier than I wanted to.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, hardly able to breathe.
“You’re sorry that I’m in love with you, or—”
“I’m sorry I blew your timing,” she said.
She could see hope in Sam’s eyes. It was growing with each second that went past.
“So you’re not sorry that I’m in love with you?” he asked. “Sorry if I’m getting obnoxious about this, but I want to make sure I understand what you—”
“How could you love me?” Alyssa asked. “You barely know me.”
Sam shook his head. “No,” he said. “I know you. I know enough. And I want to know more. I want you to get to know me, too. And I know what you’re thinking—this is just me wanting you back in my bed tonight, but it’s not that. I want to spend the night with you, but I want to spend it talking.” He cut himself off. “Okay. Right. That’s a fucking lie. I’m dying to make love to you again, but I want to do it when you’re sober. When you know exactly what you’re doing. And if it’s a choice between spending an hour talking or spending an hour making love, I’d pick the talking. Of course, I’d rather spend two hours with you and—”
Someone was coming. Sam must’ve heard the door open. It was Gilligan and Izzy coming up from the restaurant, arguing about baseball.
He took her hand and pulled her up the stairs with him, careful to stay ahead of the two SEALs and out of their line of sight.
He let go of her as he opened the door to the lobby, as he led her across to the stairs heading up to her room. His room, too. They were in the same tower.
He took her hand again as he took the stairs at a pace that was extremely aerobic. But she was damned if she was going to let him see she was struggling to keep up. And he knew it, too, the jerk.
He loved her. Alyssa didn’t know what to think, what to say, what to do. She wasn’t quite sure how to feel—if she even wanted Sam Starrett to love her.
If she even believed him.
“Sam,” she said as he pulled her out into her hallway. Her room was three doors down, and he stopped in front of it.
He didn’t let her speak. He kissed her. But it was completely different from the Sam plus Alyssa equals nuclear meltdown type kisses he’d given her in the past.
It was the sweetest, most devastatingly gentle kiss she’d ever shared with anyone. He brushed his lips across hers in a way that could only be described as tender. He coaxed her mouth open, and . . .
It was over much too soon.
“I love you,” he whispered. “I want as much from you as you’re willing to give. So if you have any desire at all to turn this thing—I don’t know, what do you call it, this get trashed and go slumming thing you do with me every six months?—into something more regular, I’m right here. I’m ready. I want to have dinner with you after this is over. I think the situation here is coming to a boil within the next twenty-four hours. And by the way, I could use your help with the practice—we’re going to be back at it in three hours.”
She nodded. “I’ll be there.” That was the easiest of his questions to answer.
He smiled ruefully as if he could read her mind. “I’ll let you think about dinner,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be in public, if you don’t want anyone to know you’re seeing me—I don’t give a damn about that. We can keep it completely backdoor. We could get room service. You just have to promise to dress for dinner. And promise not to let me take your clothes off—at least not until the second course.”
Sam kissed her again, deeper this time, but just as slowly and thoroughly.
“Thanks for hearing me out,” he said, handing her one of the bottles of water.
And he turned and walked away.
Alyssa couldn’t believe it as the door to the stairs closed behind him with a very solid thunk.
He had three hours before he had to report, and he’d just walked away?
She stood there for a moment, waiting. Certain he was going to come back.
But he didn’t.
She went as far as the stairs and even opened the door, but he was definitely gone.
Alyssa laughed in disbelief. One more kiss like that, and she would’ve invited him into her room.
She’d all but decided that this was just another ploy to get back into bed with her. I love you. Yeah, right.
Except it was working. He had to know it was working. He was on the other end of those kisses. There was n
o way he couldn’t have known that by kissing her that way he’d made her melt.
But he’d walked away.
I love you.
Oh, my God.
“He’s getting impatient,” Bob told her apologetically.
Gina wiped her face. Jeez, she hadn’t even realized she’d started crying. Her heart was pounding, drumming in her ears. “It scares me to death when he does that.”
Snarly Al had been kicked out of the cockpit and into the main cabin of the plane. She could hear him still shouting, hear the babies and some of the passengers start to cry.
Troubleshooters 03 Over The Edge Page 37