by Danielle Monsch, Cate Rowan, Jennifer Lewis, Jeannie Lin, Nadia Lee, Dee Carney
God, not drug dealers again. The car still had hubcaps, which was a bad sign. If it wasn’t dealers it probably would have been stripped by now. Or stolen.
She turned to head up the stoop outside her building, and a hand grabbed her ankle.
“Don’t even think of running.”
Instinctively she flinched away, a scream dying in her throat, as she looked right into the face of the one man she wanted to see less—and more—than any other.
Marco Danieli.
He’d been sitting on the stoop and he rose up, grasping her arm with his other hand as his eyes seared into her, taking in what he saw. Not the elegant figure in a dress and heels, but an ordinary girl with unruly hair in dull work attire.
He stared intently into her eyes. She realized with a jolt that they were no longer blue, and her breath lodged at the bottom of her lungs.
“Alexandra.” His fingers dug into her upper arm, hurting her.
“It’s Sandy.” She didn’t know what else to say.
Marco let out a snort of laughter. His smoky eyes, nearly black beneath lowered lids, looked into hers. “I know. After I recognized your shoes in the hallway, I went to the sales floor and asked them who’d just left. Then I looked up your information in the personnel files. Blue contacts?”
She nodded.
Her arm ached where he held it and she couldn’t help but twist it a little. Marco looked down at his hand and no doubt realized he must be hurting her. He loosened his grip.
“Why?” A contemptuous sneer tugged at his lip.
Sandy cast her eyes down at the sidewalk, then up at Marco. “You never noticed me looking the way I usually do.” She stopped and swallowed hard as the memories of preparing for that night flooded her brain. “I should never have gone on a date with you. The raffle was closed to employees but I entered anyway.” She’d never lay the blame on Conchita, who would wonder where she was tonight. She’d have to find a way to contact her.
“Can we go inside?” Marco had apparently noticed the small crowd of spectators that was not exactly gathering so much as hovering, on stoops, in open windows.
Sandy shook her head. She was afraid of him, afraid of herself.
“Why?” Confusion clouded his gaze.
She knew what he meant. Why did you lead me on, trick me, torment me, make love to me in my bed and then leave me?
“I don’t know.”
Because I worshipped you from afar. Wanted you. Knew I could never have you.
Not as myself.
“So are you saying we’d met before and I didn’t look at you?” Marco shook his head, peering at her, obviously trying to puzzle it out.
Sandy gulped and nodded.
“Where?”
“In the Chelsea building. The elevator.” She could still remember each and every time they’d ridden together. The times he’d looked right at her and seemed to see right through her.
“I was probably thinking about work.”
“Yes.”
Why should he look at her? What was so darn special about her? Nothing. That was the point. Her heart sank a little further.
“You’re beautiful, you know.” His voice was soft, his eyes wary.
Sandy looked down at the stoop.
“You don’t need fake blue eyes and a ton of makeup.” He lifted up her chin. “I like your real eye color better. It’s warmer.” He looked right into her eyes, claiming them with the smoky warmth of his own. “And your hair is so pretty.”
Sandy shivered with a little frisson—fear and desire—the cocktail that Marco brewed in her.
He gently pushed a lock behind her ear. “If I didn’t notice you before, it wasn’t because you weren’t beautiful, but because I wasn’t looking.”
His gaze drifted over her cheekbones and came to rest on her mouth. Her lips trembled, wanting… She bit her lip again.
His eyes dropped lower, to her conservative gray suit.
“You quit your job.”
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“I had to.”
“Why?” Confusion scored his brow, twisted his mouth.
Because I’m nothing but a lousy con artist and no good can come of me lingering in any part of your life.
He didn’t say anything, probably so disgusted by her flaunting the rules of the contest that he couldn’t even think of words.
She recoiled in shame, wanting to hide. “I have to go now.” She pushed past him and shoved her key into the lock.
He grabbed her arm, and for a second she thought he was going to shove his way in with her. She prepared to try and wrestle herself away, but he dropped it.
She slipped into the hallway and closed the door quietly behind her. His eyes seared through the thickness of the door as it shut in his face. She staggered toward the stairs, boneless with despair.
Marco sat in the toll lines at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, fingers drumming impatiently on the wheel to the full-volume cacophony of Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew.”
Pounding on the window drew him from his brooding contemplation and he looked up to see Dave looming over the low-slung car.
“Turn the freakin’ music down!” he said, as Marco lowered the window. Marco reduced the volume. “I never should have agreed to meet you in the city at this time of day. Now we’re both stuck in traffic. What the heck are you doing in Jersey anyway? You look blacker than the tunnel.”
“Yeah? I feel it.”
A loud chorus of honks caused them both to turn their head to where Dave’s driverless red Mercedes held up traffic.
“Freddie’s?”
“Yeah. I need to get drunk.”
“See you in a few.” Dave flipped a finger at the impatient honkers as he climbed back into his car and continued on toward the line of toll booths.
Marco arrived at Frederico’s on Prince Street first and was well into his second gin and tonic by the time Dave arrived.
“That grim look got anything to do with the pretty girl you brought to the party?”
Marco snorted with disgust and took another gulp of his drink.
Dave eased himself into the booth and signaled the waiter to bring him his usual. “What’s she been doing?”
“Jerking me around. You know how women are.”
“Guess I don’t. Married ten glorious years and all that.”
“Lucky bastard.”
“You could get lucky, too.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Maybe you’re looking for love in all the wrong places, my friend. Those glamour girls I see you with look good on your arm, but they’re not ideal wife material. Could be you need to find someone a bit more down-to-earth.”
Another raucous snort of disgust escaped Marco. He drained his drink, slammed the glass down and signaled for more. Numbness was the sensation he was going for. Oblivion.
“She’s married.” His voice emerged as a growl. She had to be. It was the only explanation for her cagey behavior. He’d tracked her to her home, told her he thought she was lovely just as she was—and she told him to leave, in no uncertain terms.
Dave winced.
“You tangle with her husband or something?”
“No way! You think I’d even touch a woman that I knew was married? No. I couldn’t figure out why she wouldn’t tell me where she lived. Wouldn’t give me her number. She’d call me but I couldn’t call her, you know?”
He glanced down at the wooden table. Someone had carved a heart into the wood, and the scar had blackened with time and wear. “Then I put two and two together.”
“Wait a second here.” Dave paused to take his drink and thank the waiter. “You’re assuming she’s married, but you don’t know for sure, right?”
“I don’t need it spelled out for me. I tracked her down, went to where she lives. She has brown eyes, not blue.” He looked up at Dave’s puzzled face. “She was all glammed up, in a kind of disguise when she came to meet me.”
<
br /> “Why?”
“Who knows? So her old man wouldn’t catch her, I guess.” Marco took another deep draught of his drink.
He was starting to feel its medicinal effects.
“Where’d you two disappear to that night, anyway? I looked for you to see if you wanted to come back to our place for drinks after the party, but you were gone.”
“She ran off.” Marco shook his head. “Slipped out through an emergency exit. And that wasn’t the first time. Ran out on me on our first date, too.”
Dave chuckled. “She sounds like trouble.”
“You’re telling me.”
“So why were you messing around with her?”
“Witchcraft, man. She had me wound up like a fly in a spider web.” He took another deep gulp. The icy liquid soothed the rawness of his pain.
“And from the looks of you she still does.”
Marco sighed. He hadn’t eaten all day and he was getting drunk fast. Suddenly Alexandra’s—Sandy’s—big brown eyes danced in front of his vision. Soft and sad. Haunting. He rubbed a hand over his face.
“There’s something about her.” He shook his head again, trying to banish the images and thoughts of her that came crowding in on him. “She’d call me at night. Wake me up.”
“Seduce you?”
“Yeah.” Marco couldn’t help his lips curling into a smile, but he cut it short with another quick gulp of liquor.
“You’ve got it bad.”
Marco looked down at the black heart-shaped scar crudely scratched into the table. It seemed a fitting symbol for his experience with love.
Love?
Hell, no. Couldn’t be. He barely knew the woman.
Scratch that. He didn’t know her at all.
“So why do you think she was after you?”
Marco shrugged. “Gold digger? Looking to dump hubby for someone with deeper pockets?”
“Then why would she run off?”
“Damned if I know.” His thoughts were becoming a little fuzzy around the edges. “Wouldn’t let me into her apartment when I showed up there, either. Made a lousy excuse about how she hadn’t won her date with me fair and square. As if I’d care.”
“Maybe she’s afraid of you.”
“She should be.”
“I don’t know, Marco, it doesn’t add up. She’s leading you on and slipping away, then coming back again….”
“Jerking me around like a puppet on a string.”
“But why? That’s not the way gold diggers work. They want to be your all and everything. Won’t let you out of their sight until they get that rock on their finger. You know how that goes.”
Marco nodded in assent, but his mind was elsewhere. He remembered how it felt to hold Sandy tight in his arms and wrap himself around her. The way their bodies had cupped together, a perfect fit. How good it was to have her in his bed. His woman.
Ouch, he was getting wasted.
He blew out a blast of air and shook his head, trying to clear the fog of lust that had descended over him. “Maybe she just wants to have a little fun on her terms.”
“Marco, Marco, Marco. You just don’t have good luck with the ladies, do you? It doesn’t seem right that someone with your looks and cash is crying into his drink over a girl.”
“Do you see any tears?”
“And a fat bastard like me has a lovely woman at home waiting for me. Speaking of which…”
“Go home.”
“There’s someone out there for you, Marco. Don’t sweat it.”
Marco sneered. “Someone out there for me? Yeah, right. Been there, done that. ’Til death do us part.” He took another gulp of his drink. “I really loved Deanna, you know? I thought we’d be together forever.”
“You were young. She was young. It was a mess. It’s over.”
“I thought I was cured of all that love stuff.”
“And now you’ve fallen hard for this new girl.”
“Yeah.”
He must be drunk if he was willing to admit it out loud. Dave chuckled. Apparently he thought so, too.
“You’re in no state to drive. Come with me.”
“I’ll walk home.”
“Give me your keys.”
Marco fished his keys out of his pocket and tossed them at Dave.
Dave winked at him. “You’ll be okay.”
“I know.”
But he’d never been less sure of anything in his life.
He had her number. Literally and figuratively. He already knew she was Sandy Riley of 31 Elm Avenue, Apartment 4, Jersey City, New Jersey, telephone number…
He’d probably call and get her husband on the line. Then the husband would put it all together and Sandy would get it hard on the ass.
He didn’t want that to happen to her.
Why the hell not?
Marco sighed. It was 2:00 a.m., right around the time his mystery caller had awakened him with sweet fantasies that stirred his blood.
Played him for a sucker.
But he couldn’t get that lovely face out of his mind. Blue eyes or brown. The mouth that smiled so sweetly. The shapely body that moved like a dancer through his imagination.
The soft chuckle that tickled something deep down inside him.
The way she danced. And the way they’d made love together.
Heck, if a man picked up he’d hang up.
It wasn’t in him to leave a stone unturned. He’d never move on until he got this resolved for good and all.
Just one question. All she had to say was yes or no.
He dialed the number and listened to it ring. Someone picked up.
“Hello?” Her voice, groggy with sleep.
“Are you married?”
She hesitated for a moment. Marco held his breath. His stomach muscles clenched, ready for a punch to the gut.
“No.”
“Seeing someone?”
“No.”
Her response, soft, quiet but unhesitating and resolute, swept through him on a tide of relief. He believed her.
“Then what are you playing at?”
“Marco, I’m not who you think I am….”
“No kidding.”
“I’m no good. No good for you. You need to forget about me.” He thought he heard a catch in her voice, right before he heard the ugly drone of the dial tone. She’d hung up on him.
But this time he wasn’t left with a warm feeling of sensual arousal and the anticipation of more to come. He was left with an intense longing to corner her, take her in his arms, and kiss her until she told him what the heck was going on.
“I’m no good for you.” What was this—a forties movie? He’d decide what was good for him, thanks.
Marco twisted on the bed. He was naked.
And now he was hard.
Apparently just the sound of her voice was enough to get him howling with lust. He rolled over onto his stomach and willed his erection to go down. He wasn’t going to storm over there in the middle of the night and frighten the life out of her.
But he wasn’t going to let her walk away.
He had an important meeting tomorrow with the president’s top security adviser about voice-print security systems for the White House and the Pentagon. And the LAPD was interested in the sound activated radios they’d seen. He had to nail that deal tomorrow before the competition moved in.
But after that….
Chapter Seven
‡
She had a job! It wasn’t the best, but it would pay the bills. She’d be filing and pulling records in a medical office—during the day so she’d have to start taking night classes. No problem, though. Plenty of people took night classes.
Her new job didn’t pay enough to cover tuition, but she’d called about working in university maintenance doing late-night cleaning. That would get her a few dollars and a tuition reduction if she did at least thirty hours a week. She wouldn’t have any time left for herself, but what did she need that for?
It wasn’t like she had any social life. It wasn’t like she had a—
No. Don’t even think about him.
As Sandy turned onto her street, she scanned for any sign of a flashy sports car. She’d probably be doing that for the rest of her life.
Nothing.
Good. No, really, it was good.
Then why did she have this unpleasant sinking feeling?
Get over it, Sandy!
Why did he have to call her? She’d hated herself for hanging up on him, but she hadn’t known what else to do. Getting involved with her would be bad for his reputation. His company had highly sensitive government contracts. Employees at the top levels went through stringent security screening. She’d committed at least one sin of omission on her application form and even though juvenile records were sealed, if her name—and her father’s—were linked with his…. Well, that would be bad for all concerned.
She’d lain awake all night cursing herself for letting herself get talked into this whole mess in the first place. She’d let Conchita seduce her into breaking the rules—by using a ticket she should never have won. Had she still not learned to say no? She still hadn’t figured out how to explain her sudden departure to Conchita, who’d be devastated if she felt responsible for Sandy leaving her job.
She’d only hoped for one enjoyable evening to cherish as a memory. Her plan had gone awry when one date wasn’t enough—for either of them. Each time she’d hurt Marco had been a stab to her own heart. He didn’t deserve to be treated like that. He was a good man, kind, caring, an attentive lover…
Stop it, Sandy!
Her shoulders slumped as she saw the empty stoop. Had she truly expected him to come track her down?
She slid her key into the lock, then hesitated when she heard raised voices on the other side of the door. A man and a woman. She recognized her landlady’s high-pitched voice.
“I’ll have you arrested!” Mrs. Patel squawked. “You have no right!” Frightened for the frail older woman, Sandy turned the key and shoved the door open. She crashed into the hallway, prepared to defend her with force if need be.
“Sandy.” Marco. He towered over both of them.
“Do you know this man?” The tiny woman stood with her hands on her hips.
“Yes,” whispered Sandy.