by Megan Crane
Meeting the real Tommy Seer had sent her into turmoil. She could admit it. First, he wasn’t that fantasy in her mind that she’d used as a security blanket all these years. He was real. He wasn’t anything close to perfect. In fact, he was mean sometimes. Cruel. Funny, too, and surprisingly witty. She’d never thought about him being witty. Because he’d basically been nothing more than her own voice in her own head, for all those years. She had thrown herself at a man, expecting the fantasy, and she was lucky it hadn’t gone farther than it had that first night, because then she’d really hate herself.
But now … She wasn’t sure what game he was playing, with his behaviour lately and that scene in the hotel suite that still made her pulse pound when she thought about it. And it wasn’t as if she could think of anything else. She felt marked by him, and the craziest part was that something in her thrilled at the idea. She didn’t know what he was doing, or why, but what she did know was that she was falling in love with him, and this time it was for the person he actually was. The cranky, pissy, brooding, possibly insane person it turned out Tommy Seer was. She didn’t understand where the chemistry had come from, but it had nearly overwhelmed her in the hotel. She’d thought she’d felt the heat of him before, but that had been a pale imitation.
Suddenly, he wanted her back.
And it scared the hell out of her.
Which forced her to face another unpleasant truth – and why not, what better place for unpleasant truths than a park bench in the middle of a stalking expedition – and that was that she was as skittish about the real Tommy Seer as she’d been about the other real men she’d dated. As she’d been about Adam. Which meant, she was pretty sure, that she had severe commitment issues. Emotional problems, as Adam himself had often accused her in their drawn-out fights. Because the fact that she was currently sitting in 1987, having met and touched the real Tommy Seer, was, to put it mildly, an anomaly. The reality was, she’d been using the fantasy Tommy as a shield. It was sad that she was only able to realize it now, while she was trying not to use fantasy Tommy as a shield against real Tommy.
Jenna knew with some deep, internal wisdom that if she had sex with this man, this real live living person, with all of his complications and needs and flaws, it would change her on some fundamental level. There would be no waking up the next morning and feeling normal. There would be no dismissing it, or minimizing it. She understood that Tommy was different – more, somehow. More demanding. More powerful. It had something to do with that raging chemistry that had sprung up between them, that she’d felt flood every cell of her body with the same glorious, terrifying heat.
He had marked her with no more than a few kisses. What would sex do? Could she survive it? Did she want to?
She was positive that she was much too afraid to find out.
And equally, recklessly certain that she wanted to do it anyway.
Hours later, Jenna was stiff and cranky and happy she had no access to a cellphone, because the situation begged for some ill-advised texting. WHERE R U, JACKASS? for example.
It was well after eleven when she saw the flashy sports car, black and sinister-looking, pull up to the kerb in front of Tommy’s building. Early, really, considering the fact that Tommy was a superstar and not a worker bee. Jenna sat up straight on her bench, ignoring the numbness in her butt and the stiffness of her limbs.
One of the doormen raced to the driver’s side, and Tommy climbed out of the low-slung car, unfolding himself with his customary grace, so unexpected and mouth-watering in such a tall man. Jenna knew she should have been able to recognize the brand of car at a glance – it was that kind of car, the sort that screamed its pedigree with every gorgeous line – but all she really saw was Tommy. As usual. He exchanged a few words with the doorman, and smiled. Then, instead of turning towards his building and heading inside, he stopped. His head swivelled around, and he scanned the darkness. Jenna caught her breath, in the shadows. It was almost as if—
He frowned.
Directly at her.
Jenna didn’t understand how he’d known, but he was clearly looking right at her, standing with his hands on his narrow hips. He looked annoyed. But not surprised.
Cars rushed past him on Central Park West, shooting uptown and downtown in speeding packs, but he was looking across them as if he barely noticed them. And he pinned her into her seat with the force of his glare.
It was like the city faded. The lights changed, and it was as if the street lamps were only there to shine on his dark head. The horns and the music and the hum of traffic disappeared, and there was only Tommy. Jenna drifted up and on to her feet, then over to the kerb without meaning to move, as if he’d called her somehow.
His frown deepened. He looked as if he intended to take a step, which would have put him directly in the path of oncoming cars.
And then she remembered: he was in danger.
Was this her fault? Would he have walked inside if she wasn’t there? Would he have been safe?
But she didn’t have time to think about the ramifications of that. She put her hands up in the international sign for STOP, and, when there was a break in the flow of traffic, ran across to him.
‘You have to get out of the street,’ she said, her heart thudding hard in her chest. ‘You have to watch out—’
‘What are you doing here? Why were you sitting on that bench?’ He shook his head, as if shaking off the strange spell they’d been under. He was muttering, and he sounded pissed off about it.
Jenna didn’t think there was time for his muttering. She took his arm and tugged. His attention was riveted on her hands, where they touched the bare skin of his wrist. She wished he didn’t generate so much heat – it was distracting.
‘I’m serious, Tommy.’ She was proud of herself for sounding it. She was hardly breathless at all. ‘You can interrogate me on the sidewalk.’
‘You don’t really think you can move me if I don’t want to move.’ His eyebrows arched up. Heat and annoyance and humour simmered in his gaze. ‘You do, don’t you?’
‘Tommy, please,’ Jenna begged, her nerves screaming at her and making the back of her neck tingle.
Tommy laughed, throwing his head back so the strong column of his throat shone in the street lights, and for a moment everything slowed down. But Jenna was looking behind him at the headlights which were accelerating through the stoplight on the corner, and she knew this was it, that the car would hit him and it was her fault after all because if she hadn’t been there, would he still be in the street? Would he have paid attention to his surroundings rather than to her?
But then she thought, who cares why, and she threw herself against him with everything she had, knocking him backwards and off his feet – knocking them both over and down towards the concrete sidewalk, down as the car roared past her, so close she could feel it just beyond her skin – so close that if she had waited even one second more, it would have smashed into the both of them.
Safe! she thought triumphantly, but that was in the split second before they smacked into the ground with all of the force she’d put into tackling him.
There was a single, silent beat as they hit the ground, tangled in each other. Her knees made contact, scraped. She felt more than heard him grunt as he crashed against the concrete. She thought maybe their heads cracked together, and she landed in an undignified heap on top of him with their torsos on the sidewalk and their legs poking out into the street.
But they were alive.
Which was when the pain started, bursting into flames along her knees and the place on her forehead where she must have cracked into his jaw.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Tommy said thickly. ‘What the hell was that?’
And then the yelling started, and things got really crazy.
17
Of course, Tommy insisted on taking her home.
He worried that maybe the bump to his head had been harder than he’d thought, because the moment he’d informed her – not asked
her, informed her – that he would be taking her home, he knew it was a bad idea.
The night was already absurd. The press taking pictures, the cops summoned to listen gravely to the story of a near hit-and-run no one would ever be able to solve, an unnecessary trip to the hospital for exactly two stitches on the back of his head and bandages for Jenna’s scraped knees and bumped forehead, and there he was at two in the morning announcing he would escort her home like they’d been on a date.
And he really wished they had been on a date. That was the worst part. Everything involving Jenna was the worst part. And here he was, begging for more. He disgusted himself.
‘I don’t need an escort,’ was what she told him. Scowling.
They were in a curtained-off section of the emergency room at St Luke’s Roosevelt, and he was awash in irritating protective instincts. His mood had not been improved by Duncan’s inevitable arrival – he didn’t know who had even called him, he suspected the doormen in his building were on the payroll – or the subsequent medical attention. It worsened as he took in Jenna’s body language – arms crossed over her chest, hair scraped into a knot on the back of her head, shoulders hunched over like she was trying to ward him off.
She was trying to keep him at a distance.
It made him crazy. It made him want to leap across the small space and show her exactly what he thought of distance, and what the hell was his problem that all he could think about was leaping over furniture? What was he, an animal?
‘I didn’t ask if you needed an escort, I told you I’m doing it,’ he snapped at her, unreasonably enraged. At his own response to her, mostly, but he decided that was her fault too. Might as well snap at her.
‘Not really interested in the alpha-male thing, thanks,’ she threw back at him with extreme snottiness, but she didn’t storm off and leave him sitting there on his gurney, she just planted her hands on her hips and glared.
Tommy interpreted this as a victory.
‘Why were you sitting in front of my building?’ he asked, watching her closely.
She shrugged, and then, suddenly, she looked shifty. Uncomfortable. Had she been waiting for him? If that car hadn’t come at them – and Tommy blamed too much alcohol and a bad driver no matter how many times Jenna claimed it had been headed right for them – what would have happened? Would she have come upstairs with him? Was that what she’d been waiting for? An invitation?
Somehow, he didn’t think so, despite his body’s enthusiastic response to that idea. Which made him that much more surly.
‘Are you going to answer the question?’ he asked when she didn’t speak. He swung his legs slightly as he sat on the high bed, bracing himself with his hands against the edge.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, still not looking at him. The bustle and noise of the hospital swam around them, beeping machines and moans of pain, quiet conversations and occasional announcements, and then the two of them alone in the midst of it.
‘You don’t know if you’re going to answer the question or you don’t know why you were there?’ he asked, his voice still light. ‘Because I’m happy to come up with my own explanations.’
‘Really.’ She looked at him then. Her dark eyes measured him.
‘Of course.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m Tommy Seer. You certainly aren’t the first groupie to sit for hours outside my house, desperate for a glimpse of me. Some girls wait for days.’
A smile tugged at her lips. He wanted her to laugh more than he could remember wanting anything else.
‘I’m sure that’s true,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think I count as a groupie any more. Do I?’
‘I’m not in charge of groupie classifications,’ he said, trying not to smile himself. ‘I just know them when I see them.’ She laughed then, and it made Tommy’s chest swell. It was ridiculous, and it wasn’t even a big laugh. More of a rueful sort of laugh.
Was he categorizing her laughter? What was wrong with him?
‘Zombie eyes,’ she said. Her brows arched. ‘Isn’t that what you told me? Isn’t that the usual way to tell?’
‘There are zombie eyes, sure, and then there’s sitting outside my house in the dark all night,’ Tommy replied. ‘It’s hard to argue with a good stalking. It pretty much speaks for itself.’
‘For all you know I was there for exactly thirty seconds,’ Jenna pointed out. ‘Hardly stalking.’
‘Were you?’ He dared her. Because somehow, he knew she’d been there longer. He just knew.
She grinned. ‘You’ll never know, will you?’
‘Why were you there?’ He laughed when she sighed. ‘Why can’t you tell me?’
‘I already did.’ She shook her head. ‘I had some thinking to do, and a park bench seemed like a great place for it. I don’t know.’
‘I think you do,’ he suggested, his voice going lower. ‘It’s a big city, Jenna. There are thousands of benches. What made you pick that one?’
She met his gaze then, with a challenging sort of expression in her eyes. Her chin tilted up.
‘You seem to think you know.’ She crossed her arms over her front again. In defence. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
And he would have – in graphic detail – but the curtain was tossed back without ceremony and the doctor hurried in, with Duncan and a tight-mouthed Eugenia in tow.
‘Darling!’ Eugenia cried in carrying tones, the better to alert the waiting journalists, no doubt. ‘I was so worried! I only just heard the news!’
She rushed to his side without sparing a glance for Jenna, who, Tommy thought, looked entirely too relieved. Just wait, he promised her silently, suffering through one of Eugenia’s overwrought embraces because the doctor was watching. I’m not done with you yet.
‘Practise your smile,’ Duncan told him, in a pleasant tone that Tommy assumed was for the doctor’s benefit. ‘There’s a crowd out there.’
‘They think it’s a publicity stunt,’ Eugenia said crisply, the doctor clearly beneath her notice. ‘Lead singer in peril, and so on.’ She looked from Duncan to Tommy. ‘You don’t really think that car was trying to hit you, do you?’
‘Yes,’ Jenna said firmly from her corner, even as Tommy shook his head.
‘No,’ he said, with a quelling look her way. ‘I think it was an accident.’
‘Doesn’t make any difference,’ Duncan said, dismissing the entire incident with a wave of his hand. ‘You get to look cute, wounded, and brave. The fans will eat it up.’
Tommy forced a smile. That made him sound like a Cabbage Patch Kid, or something else equally toothless and inane. Duncan did wonders for his self-esteem.
‘Great,’ he said, and managed to keep himself from slapping Eugenia’s talons off his shoulders.
‘And you,’ Duncan said, his tone changing as he turned towards Jenna. ‘I don’t know what you were doing there, but this needs to spin as Tommy saved by his staff, not Tommy with random girl. Do you get me?’
‘Absolutely,’ Jenna said, much too quickly for Tommy’s taste. ‘In fact, I think I’ll slip out the back while Tommy faces the press, so there’s no confusion.’
‘And then it looks like I have something to hide,’ Tommy argued smoothly, without meaning to speak. ‘They all know I came in with a woman. Why would you slip away if you were only my assistant? It looks as if you’re avoiding my fiancée.’
‘Touché,’ Jenna said grimly. He could feel her glare, but he didn’t look at her. He was too busy trying to keep his smirk at bay.
‘Good thinking,’ Duncan said, rubbing his chin. ‘We’ll all leave together.’
‘Everyone wants to make sure you’re alive and in one piece,’ Eugenia crooned, still touching him, the very model of the supportive fiancée.
‘You’re ready to go,’ the doctor said then, in a diffident voice, evidently intimidated by Duncan. Or maybe by all of them. Tommy forgot in moments like this that he was supposed to be impressive himself. It was one more benefit of self-loathing, his constant companion.
Tommy stared back at him blandly and buttoned up his shirt.
Jenna, naturally, was staring at the floor, her expression shuttered.
‘Try to look pathetic and heroic, Tommy,’ Duncan snarled as the doctor threw the curtain back once again. ‘Instead of pissed off, if you think you can manage it.’
He not only managed it, he rocked it. Anything to make it end, so he could escape his supposed fiancée and her cloying, faked attentions. And then he’d literally manhandled Jenna into the back of a taxi, jumped in after her, and fled.
‘That did not hurt,’ he said, again, as she rubbed at her arm and glared daggers at him.
‘It’s my arm. I get to decide if it hurts or not.’ She sniffed in disgust. ‘And by the way, I know you’re famous and all, but you can’t go around physically forcing someone—’
‘I helped you into the cab,’ he interrupted, in a bored tone. When really, he was enjoying himself. ‘It’s called chivalry. I did not physically force anything.’
‘You grabbed my arm. It was not chivalrous at all. I think I might have bruises. And then you shoved me into the back of a taxi.’ She glared. ‘Completely unacceptable.’
‘If you were hurt,’ he said in a reasonable voice, ‘you wouldn’t be giving me such a hard time, would you?’
‘And now I understand the rise of political correctness,’ she snapped. She shook her head. ‘What are you, a Neanderthal?’
‘I feel like a Neanderthal when I’m around you,’ he muttered. He frowned. ‘What did you say? Political what?’
‘Never mind.’ She turned away and faced the front of the cab. ‘I could have taken a cab by myself.’
‘Jenna.’ He waited until she looked at him, reluctantly. ‘I think you saved my life. The least I can do is make sure you get home all right.’
That shut her up. Although he was pretty sure he could hear her mind racing as they sat there in tense silence. The cab shot across town in the usual fits and starts, even so late at night. Tommy didn’t know why he was so insistent that he see her home. The more she made it clear she didn’t want him to do it, the more he took perverse pleasure in doing it anyway.