by Cindy Gerard
Yes, yes, yes.
She pulled back from that idea with a steadying breath. “No, oh no. I couldn’t ask you to do that. You’ve done enough. And you don’t even know me. For that matter, I don’t know you.”
“That is an issue,” he agreed with another one of those knee-melting smiles that didn’t make fun but teased just the same. “Here’s a thought. You could tell me your name, and I could tell you mine.” He paused, his grin playful and expectant. “You see where this is leading, right?”
Infectious. His smile was positively infectious.
“And then we can say we know each other,” he finished, looking very pleased with himself and his silliness. “Works out pretty well to my way of thinking.”
She liked his way of thinking. She was baffled that a man who looked like him would even bother with a woman who looked like her, but she liked it. In fact, she was quickly discovering that she liked everything about him.
Like his lips. Supple, sensual.
“So, what do you say?” he prompted. “How about you go first?”
“Phoebe,” she murmured, dragging her gaze away from his mouth. “Phoebe Richards.”
“Phoebe,” he repeated, mulling it over then looking immeasurably pleased. “I like it. It suits you much better than Mouse.” His expression was as sober as it was sincere.
She blinked, speechless again.
“I’m Daniel.” He extended his hand. “Daniel Barone.”
This time when he smiled it was full out, no-holes-barred and devastating.
She drew a deep breath and tried to shore herself up as every bone in her body sort of liquefied to the consistency of pudding.
And then she smiled like a goon again because he just made it so darn easy.
Slowly, she took the hand he offered. It was a strong hand. Her own hand felt small and protected tucked inside his. Before she could stop the image from forming, she imagined the coarse, warm strength of it caressing…well, something much more intimate than her hand.
She was thankful it was shadowy and dark on the street. Maybe he couldn’t see the flush spreading across her cheeks. With luck, he wouldn’t notice the slight tremble of her hand either when she finally managed to extricate it from his and lift it to her nape to tug self-consciously at her hair again.
“Let me take you home, Phoebe Richards,” he said, his voice and his eyes gentle. “Now just wait a sec before you say no. Think of how bad I’d feel if after all this you ended up getting mugged or something. I’d have put my life on the line for nothing.”
His easy self-assurance only reminded her of all the confidence she lacked. It reaffirmed that she had no business accepting his offer because in the overall scheme of things, it meant very little to him if he took her home and way too much to her.
Daniel Barone, she’d decided, couldn’t help but play the hero. She, conversely, never had and never would fit the role of a heroine. Especially not his heroine, although she couldn’t help herself from wanting to cast herself in the part.
That was when it hit her.
She knew who he was.
Her eyes widened.
How could she not have recognized him?
Maybe she was wrong, she thought, stalling panic as her gaze raced across his face. Maybe she hadn’t just made a fool of herself in front of a man who, a few months ago, the Boston Globe Magazine had billed as “Boston’s Own Sexy-as-Sin Daredevil Millionaire.”
Yeah, and maybe the light sheen of perspiration that had broken out on her forehead made her look delicate instead of desperate.
“Daniel Barone?” she squeaked, like the mouse she truly was. “The Daniel Barone?”
When he merely crossed his arms over his chest and grinned, she pressed the flat of her palm to her forehead.
“The Boston Globe’s Daniel Barone? The Baronessa Gelati Barone?”
Unless you lived under a rock, you knew about the Boston Barones. The colorful Italian family’s ice cream dynasty was legend, not just on the East Coast but worldwide. The original gelateria still flourished in the North End of Boston, and the delicious gelato had made Baronessa a household word and made multimillionaires out of anyone bearing the Barone name.
He shrugged, looking a little sheepish, which only added to his appeal. “I’m getting the impression that you may not consider this a good thing.”
“Oh, no. No, it’s just—”
“It’s just a name,” he preempted to make his point. “And I’m just a guy who wants to make sure you get home okay. Okay?”
In spite of it all, she was helpless not to return his smile. She’d given up resisting it. Just as she’d given up on the idea of doing the smart thing and begging off on his offer of a ride.
When he extended his hand, she hesitated for only a moment before taking it.
Just a name. Just a hand. And he’s just being polite, she told herself. Yet she felt as if she was walking in a dream as she let him lead her to his car.
Wasn’t she entitled, just this once, to have a fantasy fulfilled? One real-life fantasy involving one of the richest, sexiest men alive?
When he opened the door for her she went with it. She sank into the plush, supple leather of the bucket seat and pretended that she belonged there. She let the classical music flowing from the stereo system wrap around her, and entered another world. His world.
Phoebe Richards, welcome to the world of the rich and famous. All she needed to complete the scene was Robin Leach with his phony accent prattling away in the background.
She sighed and regained enough of her wits to remind herself that she really didn’t belong in that world. Just like she didn’t belong with a man like him.
Yet here she was.
She was in a car, in the dark of night, with the man of her dreams—hers and any other woman with a beating heart.
Daniel Barone was a true-life knight in shining armor who had literally saved her. Surely the shiny silver Porsche qualified as armor. Surely he was as much of a knight as Guinevere’s Lancelot.
And in the name of fair play, surely, just once in her life, Phoebe Richards was entitled to a fairy-tale ending, even if, like Cinderella’s coach, she’d turn into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight.
Okay. So she was mixing her fairy tales and her metaphors. She didn’t care. For this brief moment in time she indulged. She let herself forget about pumpkins and different worlds when he turned to her.
His blue eyes were thoughtful and interested as they met hers over the tanned arm that gripped the gearshift. The streetlight cast stunning shadows and shading across his incredible face. He smiled that devastating smile. “All set?”
“To the castle,” she murmured and settled back as his soft, warm chuckle enveloped her.
Three
Phoebe’s euphoria didn’t last past the first intersection. The adrenaline rush that had kicked into full stride during the ugly scene with Jason wore off quickly. Plus, she was far too grounded to let herself drift on this little dream cloud for long. Grounded or not, though, without the adrenaline to shore her up she was a wreck by the time Daniel had deftly followed her directions and pulled onto her street.
Daniel Barone. She still couldn’t quite grasp it. And he, well, if he found her neighborhood lacking compared to the pricey Beacon Hill residence where he’d grown up and the circle of wealth in which he ran, he was too polite or too polished to let it show.
He was also the picture of the perfect gentleman. Except that he drove too fast. She hadn’t needed to read the Boston Globe article about him to know that it was part of his MO. The speed. The thrills. The daring to do what most mortals feared. His exploits were legend. She supposed it should be exciting, racing through the night in this shining bullet of a car, but her slight case of the shakes was prompted more by apprehension than any spirit of adventure.
She was hopeless. And he was so wrong about her name. Mouse suited her perfectly. She had the backbone of a snail. In fact, she was pretty sure she’d been
the victim of one of those hit and run urban legends—like the one where some unsuspecting soul fell asleep in a motel room and woke up in a bathtub full of ice and missing their kidneys. Only in her case, it was her spine that had been surgically removed.
She sighed heavily. She didn’t belong in this silver Porsche. She didn’t belong in either dream or reality with this man, no matter how hard he tried to put her at ease. And bless him he did try. To her utter mortification, however, their conversation on the half-hour drive to her house consisted mostly of her stuttering apologies for putting him out and his teasing her about her white-knuckled grip on the console.
Out of her league.
She should have felt relief when he finally swung the car into her driveway and cut the engine. Instead, an unsettling mix of remorse and regret swamped her.
She smoothed her hand lovingly along the melting soft leather seat, heaved another resigned sigh and reached for the door handle.
And so ended her romance with romance.
“Wait,” he said. “I’ll get that.”
Because she wasn’t as resigned to the end as she’d thought, she waited while he got out of the car, walked around the hood and opened the door for her with all the gallantry of a medieval knight.
The castle, Daniel noted, turned out to be a modest ranch, white trimmed in black, circa 1960. It was set in the middle of the block in a quiet and fairly well-kept neighborhood of Boston proper. Lamplight glowed from inside the house where a huge, fat tabby lounged in the bay window and regarded them through the glass with golden eyes and a superior attitude as they approached.
He was a detail man and noticed that the parched grass was mowed and twin rows of sunburned flowers struggled to brighten the sidewalk leading to the front porch. The porch was actually little more than a concrete stoop covered by a shingled overhang that boasted a hanging basket of deep-purple petunias and peeling posts.
He wasn’t sure what affected him more: the fact that she was a woman who planted flowers, that she probably mowed her own lawn, or the peeling paint that said she was either pressed for money or time.
In the end it was none of those things. It was the sight of an ugly, fist-size plaster frog squatting on the stoop. He didn’t have a clue why it got to him.
“Well,” she said as he watched her avoid his eyes by tucking her chin and staring at the center of his chest. She tugged on her hair, something she seemed to do a lot when she was nervous—which she obviously was around him. “Thank you. Again. Really. And you didn’t have to walk me to the door.”
As she’d been doing since about midway through the drive across town, he could see her gearing up for another apology for putting him out.
“Don’t you dare say it,” he warned her before she wound up for a good start. “We reached an agreement, remember? You aren’t going to apologize anymore.”
“You’re right. I’m s—” she caught herself and smiled sheepishly. “I’m so not going to apologize again.”
Looking pink and flustered and adorable, she bent to pick up the ugly frog.
Daniel stood there in suspended silence…absorbing the pleasant scent of vanilla ice cream and summer that surrounded her…studying the endearing little cowlick that parted her hair with a swirl at her crown…considering touching the silky soft strands that looked baby fine and so touchable he had to shove his hands in his pockets to keep from reaching out and sifting it through his fingers.
He didn’t get it. He didn’t get why he was so fascinated by her. She was as far from a siren as Dame Edith and yet she called to him. He should feel relief now that he’d done his duty. He’d delivered her safely to her door. He was free to go. So he sure as hell didn’t know why, when she turned that stupid frog upside down and slipped a key out of the compartment hidden in its belly, he felt a surge of tenderness that sent warning bells ringing in every rational part of his brain.
Aside from general concern, it shouldn’t matter so much that the woman was being hounded by an ex-boyfriend with a whole lot of mean on his mind. It shouldn’t matter so much that she hid her house key in a frog and probably regarded it as a security measure.
It shouldn’t matter so much that at first glance, he’d thought of her as ordinary.
And yet it did.
She was as far from ordinary as a dive along the outer reefs of a Micronesian atoll. As far from ordinary as the rare Lapp Orchid he’d had the pleasure of seeing in the wild in the mountains of Abisko in northern Lapland.
Far from ordinary.
Also, far from sophisticated. She wasn’t glamorous, wasn’t worldly. In fact, she quite possibly needed a keeper.
He should leave before he did something really stupid and volunteered for the job.
Instead of a quick goodbye, though, he shook his head and heaved out a sigh. Then he pried the key from her rigid fingers, inserted it into the lock and swung open her front door. Cool air gushed out of the house and into the heated night in welcome waves.
She was in the process of stammering out an, “Oh, um, well, thank you again,” when he propped his hand above her head on the doorjamb and looked down into a face that made him think of a very cute, very sweet, very vulnerable baby owl about two wing-fluffs away from taking flight.
“Exactly how nervous do I make you, Phoebe?” he asked with a twitch of his lips that was fast threatening to turn into another grin.
The breath that escaped her was less sigh than surrender. “On a scale of one to ten?” She glanced up at him, then away, then back again before admitting, “About a fifty-five.”
A dark thought had him narrowing his eyes in concern. “Because of that Jason guy? Because you think I might turn out to be like him?”
“No. Oh no. You could never be anything like Jason Collins,” she said so adamantly that he smiled. “It’s not that at all.”
“Because you don’t know me, then?”
She tried to stall a small sound that could have been a groan or a squeak. “Just the opposite. Because I do know you. At least I know who you are.” Slender fingers rose toward her hair again.
He snagged her hand midair, held it captive in his. Her hand was soft, graceful and trembling ever so slightly. He felt that tug again and, taking pity, let go with much more reluctance than was warranted.
“I realize it’s not very sophisticated to admit it,” she said, clearly flustered by the contact, “but I don’t know quite how to act around a man like you. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do…with my eyes…with my hands.” She stopped and lifted a hand in entreaty, her gaze landing everywhere but on him.
Most women knew how to act, he thought cynically. At least most of the women who approached him did. Maybe that was why he found this woman so intriguing. She was a refreshing change from the women he generally tried to avoid when he returned to Boston. The Beacon Hill Beemer set generally wanted him because he had money or because they had money and he filled the bill as their equal. Some wanted to “snag” him. Some wanted to “tame” him. He recalled the ridiculous statements in the Boston Globe article with a grimace. Some, he knew for a fact, simply wanted to be seen with him. And others, for some sick reason, wanted to be used by him. He, evidently, represented their personal brush with adventure.
It was all the more unsettling to realize that he appeared to be Phoebe’s personal brush with intimidation—unintentional on his part, but there anyway. The longer he stood here the less he liked knowing how he affected her. He could think of other ways—many other ways—he’d like to affect her. All of them involved something much more up close and personal than holding her hand.
“When I was a little kid,” he said, “I got my foot caught in the toilet bowl.”
Behind her glasses, her eyes, the color of apple cider, blinked, then opened wide and disbelieving. “Get out,” she said.
He grinned at her reaction. “It’s true. I’d been running from my brother, teasing him with the last cookie, I think. I ran into the bathroom and jump
ed up on the stool to hold it out of his reach. Because he wanted it, that automatically meant I wasn’t going to let him have it. Long story short, he reached, I dodged. I slipped and fell in.”
She lifted her hand to cover her mouth but not before he caught the grin twitching at its corners.
“It was very serious. And I had some anxious moments, I’ve got to tell you.”
“Oh, I would think so, yes,” she said, her tongue planted deeply in her cheek.
“Yep. It was quite the ordeal. They had to dismantle the whole shebang, but once they got the toilet free from the floor, I was still stuck tighter than a wet suit on a diver.
“So there I stood,” he went on, warmed by the sparkle of mirth in her eyes, “three paramedics, four firemen and a plumber all scratching their heads and trying to figure out how to get me out of the bowl. My dad was so angry at me that he threatened to make a harness and just let me carry the damn thing around on my foot for the rest of my life.”
“You’re making this up,” she accused as she leaned back against the door frame, her hands behind her back now, cushioning her hips from the molding as she visibly dropped her guard and grinned up at him.
“Scout’s honor.” He made an X over his heart with his finger. “I was ten years old and until they finally got me loose, I’d pretty much decided I’d be pitching Little League with fifty pounds of porcelain on my foot. The part I couldn’t figure out was how I was going to run the bases.”
Her lips twitched again and her shoulders relaxed even more.
“I’ll tell you another secret.” He leaned in, lowering his voice as if concerned someone else might hear his whispered confession. “I used to sleep with a night-light.”
That earned him a full-fledged and gorgeous grin along with a skeptical, “Is that a fact?”
“Yeah, but it’s been, oh, I don’t know, weeks now since I’ve felt the need to turn it on.”
She laughed finally, all gentle, bubbling pleasure and silky sounds that warmed him in places a Bora-Bora sun never had. The smile that lingered was relaxed. And amused. And quite wonderful. So was the sparkle in her eyes. Suddenly the words turned on took a leap to another forum entirely.