Her Man To Remember

by Suzanne McMinn

  “Earlier she thought someone had been in her apartment,” Roman interjected. “And she’s had some odd phone calls.”

  “Any threats?”

  Leah shook her head. I know who you are. I know what you’ve done. As much as he didn’t like it, Roman knew Leah was wise to leave that part out of her statement. It could lead to questions neither of them wanted to answer right now. Not as long as she was living in Thunder Key under an assumed name.

  “All right.” Striker took notes. “About the apartment, you mentioned nothing was taken.”

  “Nothing was taken, as far as I can tell,” Leah answered. “I’m not positive anyone was in there, actually. But I felt as if someone had been there. Things were moved. Everything was just…off.”

  “I’ll take prints,” Striker said. He went on to question her about who else had been in the apartment and to get a description of the man. Roman promised to make a photocopy of his own notes before he left. They contained Leah’s list of friends, places she frequented.

  “We saw the man again yesterday morning,” Roman summed up. “On the beach. He was watching Leah, taking pictures again. And I definitely saw a gun. We know he’s been watching her, and possibly he’s been in her apartment. What we don’t know is why or who he is.”

  “I’ve got a print kit in my cruiser,” the officer said. “I’ll be right back.”

  When Striker finished up in Leah’s apartment, he shook hands with Roman, then Leah, before leaving. He’d taken Leah’s and Roman’s prints as well, and would be coming back later to take the staff’s prints. “To rule them out,” he said.

  “This sucks,” Leah said when the policeman was gone. “Now my friends are being dragged into my problems.”

  Joey came in through the rear door.

  “I need to explain why Officer Striker will be coming back,” Leah said. “To Joey and the other staff.”

  “Explain what?” Joey asked, approaching the bar.

  Leah gave the cook an abbreviated version of the current situation that didn’t include the small detail that Roman was her husband.

  “I hate this,” she finished. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t mind,” Joey said, his worried eyes on Leah.

  “I mind.” She looked more stressed out than ever. “I just want this to end. I want to stop feeling as if I need to be looking over my shoulder, wondering if someone’s there, watching me, photographing me.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a minute. “This is crazy.”

  Roman reached out, took her hand. She lifted pain-filled eyes to him. “You need to take a break,” he said. “You need to get away from the bar, away from Thunder Key.”

  “I agree,” Joey put in. “Take the day off, Leah. I’ll call in some extra help if we get busy.” The look the cook gave Roman now was less wary, more grateful. At least Joey was starting to trust Roman.

  As for Leah…

  “Okay,” she said after a long beat.

  Maybe, just maybe, she was beginning to trust him after all.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Leah said when they arrived at their destination, several Keys over on the Overseas Highway.

  Roman took her hand in his as they walked past topiary dolphins and mermaids that lined the paved entrance to the marine park. The place teemed with families as the gates opened for the day.

  He seemed content to fall into the moment, and that scared her. A complex braid of thoughts and fears tumbled around her head and she had no idea how she could forget them, even for a few hours.

  “Are you sure you’re a financial stuffed shirt from New York City?” she asked, surprised by Roman’s choice in activity for the day. But it hadn’t been his first surprise. He’d started off by stopping at a roadside ice-cream stand.

  “No day can be all bad that starts with ice cream,” he’d said, handing her a cone filled with two heavy scoops of chocolate ripple. She’d taken a lick of the sweet concoction and his eyes had rested on her mouth for a long beat until he’d started the car again.

  Little bird wings had fluttered in her chest.

  They’d made the drive from Thunder Key with the windows wide open. The air was perfect, the oncoming storm brewing in the Atlantic having brought the temps down from the usual August heat to something almost springlike. The only detour had been a Key deer-spotting expedition onto No Name Key where the endearingly diminutive animals were easy to spot on the gulfside shoulder of the road, munching bougainvillea flowers.

  “Do you see a financial stuffed shirt here?” Roman said now, looking around theatrically as they lined up at the marine park gate. “I’m a footloose soon-to-be beach bar owner from the Florida Keys. I don’t even wear a watch.” He nodded at his bare wrist. “No cell phone. No laptop. I have ice cream for breakfast and nachos for lunch.”

  “What do you have for dinner?”

  Leah’s belly turned over at the look in his dark, dangerous eyes that suggested she was on the menu. Oh, God. She found him so attractive.

  He didn’t blink an eye as he paid an outrageous sum for their entry into the park.

  “It’s crowded,” he commented. “When a storm starts heading in, the tourists don’t head out?”

  “Not right away. They won’t go anywhere unless they’re sure it’ll really hit us,” Leah said. “Do you know how much money people spend for a vacation in the Keys?”

  It was hard for her to remember that money was no object to Roman Bradshaw. If she’d known they’d be coming to the marine park, she’d have grabbed a local paper and scanned it for coupons. The tourist papers and brochures frequently included discounts to the islands’ attractions.

  He might not be a financial stuffed shirt these days, but he was obscenely rich nonetheless. She still couldn’t imagine how she had fit into his top-flight Manhattan lifestyle.

  “Hey.” He leaned in and placed a light kiss on her mouth, and his eyes turned sober as he seemed to sense her momentary hesitation. “Let’s go have fun. If you get tired, we’ll sit down or just go back. Deal?”

  “Okay,” she agreed, but she realized she felt less tired already. Which probably had something to do with the way Roman’s eyes made her feel every time he looked at her. Alive and full of…hope.

  But she was so afraid to hope.

  He didn’t give her any more time to think for the next several hours. The marine park was built on the site of several abandoned quarries, but was now home to a saltwater lagoon containing everything from dolphins to sea lions. After winding their meandering way past shark, turtle and ray tanks, they settled in for the dolphin show. Roman slung his arm casually around Leah’s shoulders as they sat near the front, and he laughed when they got sprayed by a dolphin that leaped in the water right in front of them.

  At the sea lion exhibition, he dared Leah to join the kids hugging and kissing the friendly creatures, and he snapped photos of her with the throwaway camera he’d picked up in one of the park shops.

  “I’ll take one of you together,” a smiling mother, who’d just finished snapping photos of three giggling girls, offered.

  Roman immediately handed the camera over, put his arms around Leah’s waist and pulled her saltwater-damp head against his broad chest as the woman took their picture. Leah tried not to think about the fact that this was just more of that fragile facade from this morning.

  They weren’t really two lovers out for a day of magic in the park. They were two strangers, torn apart by time and fate and something else dark and hidden.

  They dried off as they ate a late lunch in a park café where a slideshow of Keys images played endlessly against a side wall. There were photographs mounted under glass on every table.

  “So tell me, Roman Bradshaw Version 2.0,” Leah said, keeping her voice casual even as she delved into a serious topic. “Why did you come to Thunder Key?”

  Roman looked at her for a long moment. He pushed back the plate of food he’d nearly finished. “After I lost you, I tried to go back to work, but it was…emp
ty. It had meant so much to me, building the company my family founded. Or I thought it did. I grew up in the business.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t miss it at all.”

  “But why…here? Why Thunder Key?” Returning to the place where they’d honeymooned couldn’t have been easy for him. “It just seems as if that would be painful to you.”

  “It hurt like hell,” he said, and Leah felt her heart move into her throat. He was being honest with her, and that couldn’t be easy, either, considering the shaky ground their relationship stood on at this point. “But I knew I needed to find a way to heal, to make some kind of peace with myself and move on.”

  Was that where this was headed? Roman would heal, make peace with what happened, move on as soon as the situation was resolved? Just let it be what it was—something we both wanted, needed. That’s what he’d said this morning about their lovemaking.

  Leah bit her lip, watched him a moment.

  “You keep telling me what a bastard you were,” she said finally. Was he protecting her, helping her, to relieve his guilt of the past, or did he still care about her, possibly love her? No matter what he said about not being able to believe she’d done anything wrong, it was also clear he was holding back. She just didn’t know what to think, or feel, and the worse part was that she could so easily see herself falling for him…again.

  “I was attracted to you because you were different, Leah,” he said plainly. “Different from everything I’d known all my life. You were open, affectionate, caring. There was nothing cold about you. My family—cold and rigid doesn’t even begin to describe them.”

  The more Leah heard about his parents, the more she dreaded the possibility of ever meeting them again.

  “They’re not bad people,” he added quickly. “But they’re very conservative, traditional, bound by rules that you didn’t seem to even care about. You constantly amazed me. You had priorities that were so foreign to me, and as a result, we had a lot of conflicts.”

  “What kind of conflicts?” She was curious.

  “Mostly the way we spent our time. Or I should say the way I spent my time. Which was mostly working. You always wanted to drag me off somewhere, forget work, and I always resisted.”

  “You dragged me away from work today,” she said.

  His eyes shone such a deep blue. They crinkled slightly at the corners, and she realized she saw him smile in his eyes before his mouth joined in a slightly wry expression.

  “Tables are turned,” he said.

  “So why tell me all this?” she asked. “I don’t remember it. Why tell me you were such a bastard?”

  He held her gaze for several long seconds. “There’s no moving on without facing the past, Leah,” he said quietly. “For both of us.”

  She sipped her drink. There was so much to the puzzle of their marriage that she couldn’t put together. “So what else did you do in New York? You know, besides work?”

  “Run. We had that in common. I wasn’t much of one for hobbies. Even running was like work. Till I started running with you.”

  “Oh?” She waited, interested.

  “You drove me nuts. You would stop and smell the flowers. Literally.” His hard lips curved a bit again, and heat zinged through her. He had such a killer smile. “You made me do lots of things I didn’t want to do.”

  “Like what? Besides smelling flowers?” The idea of big, bad Roman smelling flowers amused her.

  “Museums, kiddie rides, circuses, you name it, you were always getting me to go somewhere and play. If I tried to say no, you’d make up some stupid holiday and say I had to do it.”

  She remembered the holiday he’d made up to get her to walk on the beach with him.

  “And did you? Do it, I mean?” she asked.

  A shadow shifted across his eyes. “Sometimes.”

  She felt the same shadow fall over herself. “I hardly ever go out,” she told him. “The bar is my comfort zone, I guess. It’s where I feel safe.” Until now. Now she didn’t feel safe anywhere. Even here, on another Key, in a park crowded with children. She found herself wanting to look around, see if a mysterious man with a camera and a gun was watching her.

  “How did your family feel about me?” she asked suddenly. She just had an instinctive feeling about it, from everything he’d said. It was the same feeling she had about cats.

  “They didn’t approve.”

  She nodded. “That’s what I figured.”

  His family wasn’t likely to approve of her now, either. Roman was a grown man and he’d clearly had the backbone to marry her in spite of their objections, but that didn’t make the situation any easier. Now he’d not only married the wrong woman, he was here with her in the Keys. This was some kind of emotional journey he’d made down here to the place where they’d honeymooned, and even he couldn’t know how he’d feel when this was all over.

  He was smart not to make promises about the future to her, and she would be smart to remember it.

  After lunch they stopped in the midway. Roman insisted on spending an inordinate amount of time winning her a stuffed dolphin. “Dolphins mean good luck,” he told her when he finally managed to knock down the required number of smiling ducks off the range. He looked boyish as he did it, and as much as she knew she couldn’t have had much of a childhood growing up in a series of foster homes, she doubted Roman had had much of one, either, in the austere Bradshaw dynastic household.

  Then he’d met her and she’d made him play. Now it was his turn to make her play. Tables are turned, he’d said. He’d told her enough times that he was a bastard, but the truth was he was sweet—in a dangerous, break-your-heart kind of way that was threatening to tear her up inside because none of this was real. It was that facade again. And it could shatter so easily.

  They took a spin in the Ferris wheel. High above the park, the chain of islands dotted out to the gray-blue stormy horizon. And Leah felt as if they were alone for that moment, just she and Roman, on top of the world. Above the storm and everything else unknown that lay ahead.

  Then the wheel spun them back to earth.

  Their last stop was a coin-operated fortune machine labeled Fortune Bob. Roman slipped quarters in the coin drop and Leah’s heart stumbled as she pulled out the slip of paper and read it.

  “‘Fortune Bob says, Accept the next proposition you hear and you won’t regret it,’” she read. She looked at Roman. His eyes flared. “Am I in trouble now?” she asked, her heart in her throat. He could probably propose just about anything and she’d do it, fortune reading or not.

  “Depends on what you consider trouble,” Roman answered.

  Clouds were moving in as they left the midway. It was early evening, but a stormy twilight dusted the sky. A band played music under a canopied stage in the middle of the park.

  “I think I felt a sprinkle hit my nose,” Leah said, turning her face upward.

  “Perfect for dancing in the rain.”

  “We’re going to get soaked,” she said. “Notice how everyone else is heading for shelter.”

  “You’re not going to risk Fortune Bob’s wrath, are you?” Roman pulled her into his arms. He smelled like rain and wishes, and she didn’t care how wet they got.

  She was extremely aware of him. His body, molded to hers, felt unbelievably wonderful, all big shoulders and strong muscles and security. They barely moved, only swayed as the sultry music resonated around them.

  The rain fell harder. “I told you we were going to get wet,” she said, lifting her head to look up at him, still in his arms. But she wasn’t thinking about the rain. She was thinking about the incredible sex they’d shared last night and wondering how the hell she was going to stop herself from doing it again.

  Even now, with his hands on her body, his mouth a breath away, all she could think about was wanting his heat inside her once more. It was as if his taste, his touch, his scent, were threaded into her very soul. And had been for a long t
ime.

  “Leah?”

  She swallowed thickly. “Yes?”

  “Are you all right?”

  No, I’m scared to death of falling in love with you. “I’m tired,” she told him.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, and she didn’t know if he meant the bar or the White Seas, but it struck her that whatever he’d meant, it had been Thunder Key, not New York. Her heart flip-flopped as he reached up, grazed her jaw in a tender caress, then pushed back a tangled, damp tendril of hair off her cheek. Her arms crept up around his neck and he leaned down, capturing her mouth. The proof of his arousal pressed against her.

  Then the sky really opened up.

  He ended the kiss, looked at her for a hot, hungry beat with something fathomless and lost in his eyes. Rain streamed down his face, and it took her a few seconds to realize they were both sopping wet.

  “Run,” he said, and she let out a little scream as they raced across the park to the gates. They reached the car and slammed inside. As they drove away, Leah punched the radio buttons on the dash stereo, adding a soft play of music to the tap and splash of the rain outside the car.

  She laid her head back on the headrest, realizing she really was tired.

  “Leah.” She felt someone touching her shoulder, and blinked. “You fell asleep. I hate to wake you up, but we need to get inside.”

  She looked around, realized they were in front of the main hotel building of the White Seas.

  “I need to check in with the Shark and Fin,” she said automatically. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken an entire day off work. “Make sure everything went okay today.”

  Hotel attendants appeared as if by magic to whisk the car away. Roman and Leah walked inside, protected from the rain by the covered lobby portico. He led her through the marbled entrance area, then out to the bungalow path. They raced down the twisty, Spanish lime-scented stones to the little cigar maker’s cottage that was Roman’s.

  They stumbled into the bungalow. Rain-kissed air blew across the darkened room, tangling the terrace sheers.