The VIP Doubles Down (Wager of Hearts Book 3)

by Nancy Herkness

  “Damn. That’s the problem with good people. They’re always in demand,” Ben said. “I’ll keep her in mind for the next time. Thanks.”

  Gavin rubbed at his chest as guilt tightened around it like an iron band. But at the same time, the shriek of his fear calmed to a mere whimper.

  What kind of man had he become?

  Allie swiveled in her chair to find Gavin scowling as he walked back into the office. “Is there a problem?” she asked. “You look . . . unsettled.” Actually, he looked both annoyed and guilty, but she didn’t want to voice that.

  “Because there’s a very sexy woman sitting in my office, and I’m not allowed to touch her.” He stood behind his chair and gave her a challenging look.

  Although she felt the heat radiating from her cheeks, she refused to engage. “I have another question for you.” She pointed to the computer screen. “I keep seeing references to the title Holiday Best with character names I don’t recognize. Is that an unpublished book?”

  He grimaced. “It was the draft of a novella, set at Christmastime. I don’t know what came over me to thrust Julian into a schmaltzy setting like that.”

  An unread Julian Best story! Excitement fizzed in her chest. “May I read what you wrote?”

  “It’s a rough draft, and it’s unfinished.” But he rolled her chair sideways so he could get to her keyboard. “Here it is. Just don’t ever tell anyone else about it.”

  “Was it Jane’s idea?” It was hard to imagine Gavin’s decision to write about a happy family holiday. But she was beginning to get glimpses of the humanity under the snark. It worried her, because he was already too enthralling.

  “Good God, no. In fact, she was skeptical but willing to give it a look.”

  “It seems . . .”

  When she didn’t finish, he said, “Strange that I would propose a warm, fuzzy story? Believe me, Julian wasn’t baking Christmas cookies.”

  “I’m sure he was on the outside looking in. You would make the reader feel how lonely his spy’s life is, how alienated he has to be from normal people to protect our Christmases.” She looked at his capable hands resting on the keyboard with such familiarity. “Why didn’t you finish it?”

  She waited through a lengthy silence before he said, “I guess I owe you an answer. It might even help with my, er, issue. I started the novella when I got stuck on a scene in the book I’m supposed to be writing. Sometimes a change of direction helps shake loose new ideas.”

  He lifted his hands and leaned back in his chair, making it creak on its wheeled base. “Then my father had a heart attack. I needed to deal with his medical situation because my stepmother isn’t good in a crisis.”

  She couldn’t stop herself from offering the comfort of touch, so she laid a hand on his forearm where it rested on the arm of his chair. “No wonder you didn’t feel Christmassy.”

  He shifted his gaze to the window. “I’d spent all my life trying to prove something to my father, and all of a sudden he’d been struck down. I had no one to brace myself against.”

  “What about your stepmother?”

  He gave a bitter bark of a laugh. “She tried to deny me access to my father in the hospital, but he overruled her. So I could make sure he was getting a high level of care. However, at the funeral service, she barred me from the family pew.”

  Fury made Allie tighten her grasp on his arm. “She really is evil.”

  He brought his other hand to cover hers, reminding her to ease her grip on him. “I never felt like I was part of the family after my father married Odelia anyway. But when she tried to exclude me from the burial ceremony, that . . . was a problem. One I dealt with more forcibly than was perhaps necessary.”

  Allie tried to imagine how it would feel to be kept from saying a final good-bye to her parents.

  “I didn’t do her bodily harm, although it was close,” Gavin said. “However, I expressed my opinion of her at full volume in front of the priest and the entire assembly of mourners.”

  She could picture him marshaling all the linguistic skill at his disposal to give his evil stepmother what she deserved. “I bet you were brilliant.”

  He flinched at her last word as a shadow of guilt crossed his face. “Whether she loved my father or not, she had lost her husband of twenty-odd years. We were two animals in pain, tearing at each other.”

  “She was supposed to stand in as your mother. To protect you.”

  “That ship sailed almost the moment my father announced they were getting married.”

  “Why would he marry a woman who couldn’t love you?”

  Gavin interlaced his fingers with hers. “The housekeeper retired. He hired her after my mother . . . left. Mrs. Knox and I got along fine for three years while my father spent all his waking hours at the family store. But her husband wanted to move to Florida.” He shrugged. “My father couldn’t find another housekeeper, so he found a wife instead. Odelia was a widow with three young daughters, so I suppose Dad thought she would be maternal.” His tone turned bitter. “There weren’t a lot of prospects in Bluffwoods, Illinois, and my father wouldn’t leave his precious store long enough to search farther afield.”

  Allie heard the reverberations of the aching loneliness that had enveloped a small boy. A mother who deserted him. A distant father. Even the housekeeper had abandoned him. She wanted to gather the grown man into her arms and rock him like that lost child. “Your mother just . . . left?”

  He blew out a long breath and looked down at their entwined fingers. “I think that’s a story for another day.” He lifted their hands to kiss the back of hers. “You should have been a psychotherapist, not a physical therapist.”

  But he’d written some of it into Julian Best’s past. “Now I know why you became a writer.”

  “To punish my father?”

  “I imagine that was a bonus. No, to make things come out right in the end.”

  “You are far too clever, my dear.” He disentangled their fingers. “Now I have papers to critique.”

  “You teach?” She couldn’t imagine the impatient, snarky Gavin guiding a classroom of students.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Well, you’re not the most tolerant of people.”

  He laughed. “I lead a creative-writing class in genre fiction at NYU. The students expect me to be bad tempered. Remarkably, I rarely am with them.”

  “I’d love to see you teach.”

  “Because you can’t picture me doing it.” He chucked her under the chin with a sly smile. “Just to surprise you further, it was my idea to offer the class. When I took creative-writing courses, I suffered from the intense snobbery of my fellow students who wrote only literary fiction. I offer validation to my fellow commercial hacks.”

  “Still making things come out right.” Her heart went soft at the knowledge that this was a man who worked to prevent others from suffering as he had. She reached out to curve her hand along his cheek and jaw, and he turned his head to brush her palm with his tongue.

  “Hey!” She pulled her hand away and gave him a light smack on his biceps.

  “You can’t stop yourself from touching me, so why not just give in?” His voice was honeyed with seduction.

  “You have papers to grade.” She put her foot on the base of his chair and gave it a shove so it rolled a few inches away.

  Gavin smiled and rolled himself backward, using his long legs to propel the chair across the carpet until he reached his desk. The bout of playfulness lightened Allie’s heart after the shattering revelations about his childhood.

  How did a man who had grown up in such a loveless home understand how to be a mentor to students and debut authors, an adviser to struggling lovers, and a valued friend to billionaires and superstars? She sank deeper under the spell he had wrapped her in, but with the fear that his magic was affecting her heart.

  Gavin scrawled a final note on the last page of the short story. It was by one of the students he believed had the potential to mak
e a living as a writer. She struggled with structure, but her writing voice was quirky and distinctive, a gift of pure talent.

  An odd choking sound came from Allie’s desk, and he pivoted in his chair to see her rummage in her purse. She pulled out a tissue and blew her nose. Producing a second one, she seemed to be dabbing at her face with it.

  “What are you working on?” he asked.

  She kept her back to him. “I’m reading your novella.” Her tone was clipped and abrupt.

  “It must be worse than I thought.” Strange that he had to remind himself to breathe as he waited for her answer.

  Slowly, she spun her chair around to face him. Her eyes were red rimmed, and she hadn’t quite wiped all the tears from her cheeks. “It’s heartbreaking. You have to finish it.”

  Chapter 16

  Allie felt like an idiot, weeping over Gavin’s book. But now that she knew its author, she suffered along with his character even more intensely. “This story reveals Julian’s emotions in a way you’ve never done before.”

  The relief that had softened Gavin’s posture was replaced by a frown. “That might not go over well with my hard-core male readers.”

  “You’ve still got plenty of twisty plot and action scenes. It’s the contrast with the cheery Christmas atmosphere that makes Julian’s isolation so vivid. Those hard-core readers might not even notice the emotional content because it’s implied, not stated.”

  “Because I’m a damned good writer.” He ran one hand through his hair, giving it that storm-tossed look she’d come to love. “I’ll take a look at the novella later. Maybe it’s salvageable.”

  Allie decided to go for broke. “Why not make it a whole novel? There’s so much depth in it, I feel like it should be expanded to give it more scope.”

  “A . . . whole . . . novel.” He gave his hair another rumple, but his posture had pulled taut, like a racehorse at the starting gate. “An entire book set at Christmastime.”

  She kept silent as he tilted back his chair to stare at the ceiling.

  “It’s risky,” he said, but she could hear a vibration of interest in his voice. When he brought his chair back to level again, his gaze was inward, as though he was already playing with the possibilities. “Let’s run the idea by Hugh at dinner.”

  “I’m going home for dinner,” Allie said. “I have a cat.”

  Gavin’s brows drew down. “Feed it after work and come back.”

  “She needs company.” Allie had no desire to spend time with Hugh Baker after he’d practically accused her of being some sort of con woman. She’d had her fill of actors anyway.

  “I need your company. Bring the damned cat here.”

  “What?”

  “The cat can have all the company it wants here.”

  “Pie is a she, not an it.” He was getting a little high-handed. “Trust me, you don’t want Pie in any of your fancy cars. She gets motion sick.”

  “That’s what plastic was invented for. Jaros will take care of cat proofing.”

  Boundaries. She needed to set boundaries. It was one lesson she’d learned the hard way with Troy. “I am going home after work and staying there until tomorrow morning.”

  He got up and stalked over to where she sat, looming over her with a hot gleam in his eye. “Then I’ll join you there after dinner.”

  “Not again. You have a houseguest, and it’s rude to leave him alone.”

  He took a step back, his expression baffled and frustrated. “What the hell is this about? Hugh couldn’t care less where I spend the night.”

  It was about setting limits before she let him roll right over her. “But I care.”

  “I’ll tell Hugh to find a hotel room.”

  “It’s one night.” Thank goodness he was being an arrogant jerk, or she might have a hard time holding on to her resolve. “Give it a rest.”

  He rubbed at the back of his neck as he tilted his head from side to side. She couldn’t decide if it was an unconscious gesture or if he was doing it deliberately to make her feel guilty.

  “Fine,” he said. “But tomorrow . . .” His smile sent a promise and a warning, and she felt an unwilling fizz of response in her breasts and her belly.

  Allie was reading in bed with Pie curled up beside her when the apartment intercom buzzed. She glanced at the clock on her bedside table—10:34. It must be a resident who’d forgotten a key and was randomly trying neighbors’ intercoms. She decided someone else could help the person out. It buzzed again, but she ignored it.

  Her cell phone began to dance on the bedside table. “He wouldn’t,” she muttered, scooping it up to find out that, indeed, he would. “Gavin, did you just buzz my intercom?”

  “I came to apologize.” He sounded tightly wound.

  “For coming here when I told you not to?”

  “For being an ass.”

  “If you were sorry, you wouldn’t have come here, because that makes you, well, an ass all over again.” It sounded ridiculously circular.

  “You mean I’m digging myself an even deeper hole.” He gave a ragged laugh. “Please, let me explain. In person.”

  She heard something in his voice that concerned her, so she sighed. “You see that coffee shop about halfway down the block? I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Why should we meet in a coffee shop when I’m standing in front of your apartment building?”

  She knew what would happen no matter how good her intentions were. “Because if you come up here, it will just muddy the waters.”

  A pause and then he said, “I see,” with a mixture of satisfaction and annoyance. “The coffee shop it is.” He disconnected.

  Allie sat staring at the phone in her hand. A strange exhilaration vibrated through her, half excitement, half trepidation. To have Gavin Miller trek down to her dingy neighborhood late at night because he felt the need to apologize in person was heady stuff.

  Yet she knew she was playing with fire. He was dark, complicated, and powerful, in ways that were far out of her limited experience. She had the feeling that Gavin had depths in his soul that her ex-husband couldn’t even comprehend, much less descend into.

  Refusing to dress up for his intrusion, she threw on jeans, a T-shirt, and a hoodie, and left her hair in its neat nighttime braid. Grabbing her jacket and purse, she jogged down the stairs and out the front door, half expecting him to be right outside. But for once, he’d listened, which suggested he was truly repentant.

  She hunched her shoulders against the cold February night and walked the half block to the Achilles Coffee Shop, a clean but no-frills place where you got coffee in small, medium, or large with milk, cream, or sugar.

  The shop held five round tables on the vinyl tile floor. Gavin sat at the one in the window with three paper hot cups in front of him. He wore black from head to toe, and his dark hair was rumpled. While she watched, he rolled his head in a circle and winced, reminding her that she needed to find him another PT.

  As she walked through the door into the overheated shop, Gavin stood, the grim expression on his face lifting.

  “I thought I might be sitting here alone for the rest of the night,” he said, holding the chair for her.

  His uncertainty pulled at her heart, so she stood on tiptoe to give him a peck on the cheek. His eyes lost some of their wildness at her gesture. “Is that why you bought three cups of coffee?” she asked as she seated herself.

  When he sat, the vinyl-and-aluminum chair creaked. “I bought you a coffee and a tea. I wasn’t sure which you’d want at this hour.”

  “Tea’s good, thanks.” So he did know how to let her make her own choices.

  He picked up one of the cups and set it closer to her. As he brought his arm back to his side, she caught a tiny flinch of pain. Guilt jabbed at her again.

  Gavin rotated his cup with one hand. “I’m a desperate man,” he said, “but that’s no excuse. I overstepped when I pushed you about tonight.”

  “Desperate?” Allie wasn’t
sure what he meant.

  He concentrated on the revolving cup. “The Christmas novella. You got me thinking about it. I had some ideas. Even thoughts about how to resolve the last movie’s cliff-hanger. Then I got pulled away for those goddamned meetings, and when I came back, you were gone.” He brought his gaze to meet hers, letting her see the bleakness in them. “I tried talking to Hugh about the story.” He shook his head and winced again, making her want to massage away the pain. Leaning forward, he turned his hand palm up on the tabletop. “I need you.”

  The baldness of the statement socked her in the chest. The uncomfortable angle of his shoulders tugged at her desire to heal.

  But she’d nearly lost herself the last time she put her own needs aside because someone else’s seemed greater. She had to remember the lessons it had cost her a marriage to learn.

  She forced a calm, rational tone. “We can work on the story all day tomorrow.”

  He curled his open fingers into a fist. “My class meets tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Gavin, I can’t just move in with you.”

  “Why not? I’ve got room for a small army in my house. Pie can have the run of the place. A kitty-litter box in every room, if it . . . she wants.”

  He made it sound so reasonable. “I just got through a difficult divorce.”

  “Please, tell me all about it. I want to understand you.” But what glittered in his eyes seemed as much curiosity as sympathy.

  “I’m not a character in one of your books.”

  “I know. You’d be so much easier to deal with if you were.” His lips curled in a rueful, lopsided smile.

  She couldn’t help it. She laughed. “I can just imagine you writing me into your bed, then into your shower, then back into your bed.”

  “I’d find much more creative locations than those.” But the light in his eyes went dark. “I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I was a desperate man. The writer’s block . . . it’s not just about missing the deadline or holding up the movie production. Everyone thinks those external pressures are what’s giving me neck spasms.” He went silent.