“What do you expect when you crawl into a stranger’s bed?” The previous evening must have included events of which he had no memory. Struggling to remember, he dug into the pocket of his suit and fished out several crumpled bills. “This should cover whatever I owe you. Now please leave quietly so a man can get some sleep.”
When he thrust the money toward her, her pupils dilated with flashing anger. She ignored the money and tugged furiously at her skirts, trapped beneath his weight on the bed’s edge.
“Just get off my dress,” she muttered through clenched teeth, “and I’m outta here.”
Before he could brace himself, the woman shoved him, twisting away and wrenching her skirts from beneath him. He toppled off the bed’s edge, rolled across the carpet and landed with a thud against the door to the hallway.
She sidled toward him, then halted when she saw he blocked the door. Scurrying to the desk on the opposite side of the room, she grabbed up a telephone he hadn’t remembered being there the night before and poked the buttons atop it with long, elegant fingers.
“There’s an intruder in my room. Send security!”
The edge of panic clashed with the lyrical sweetness of her voice, and he noted for the first time the rose satin evening gown that molded her trim figure. Scrambling in his memory for details of the previous evening, he could find nothing to connect him with this woman—and he would have remembered her. The honeyed tones of her thick hair, the curve of her delicate cheek and the slim yet enticing body were just to his liking.
“Who are you?” They both spoke at once.
He propped himself into a sitting position and held up his hands to assure her he meant no harm. His forehead throbbed with the worst hangover of his life, and his vision clouded as he studied her, pressed against the desk, eyeing him warily and hefting the telephone receiver as if wanting to strike him with it.
“Ladies first.” He nodded toward her and struggled to keep his expression neutral. If the interest he felt showed on his face, she’d feel threatened, indeed.
“I’m Victoria Caswell and this is my room. How did you get in and what do you want?” Anger and indignation drove the sweetness from her voice.
He attempted to stand, but his knees refused to cooperate. Blasted hangover. Leaning against the door, he patted the pockets of his suit. “I had my key last night but I can’t find it now. I must have left it in the door.”
“You couldn’t have a key. This is my room. Here—” She groped behind her on the desk and held up a key attached to a numbered medallion. “See? Room 131, my room. Now get out, or you can wait for security to arrest you. They’ll be here any minute.”
Confusion joined the pounding in his head. “But 131 is my room number—and I swear, Miss Caswell, you were not in my bed when I fell asleep last night. I’d have remembered.”
He’d sworn off women, but he wasn’t dead yet. And a man would have to be stone-cold dead not to appreciate Victoria Caswell. At his words, a flush of pink only slightly lighter than her gown spread across her high cheekbones. Anger or modesty? He couldn’t tell.
The woman edged to the nearby bureau, jerked open a drawer and reached inside, never taking her eyes off him. “These should convince you this room is mine, unless you have kinky taste in underwear.”
Tory thrust the handful of blush pink lingerie toward the intruder. Where the hell were the security guards? The stranger’s gaze locked speculatively on the silk teddy dangling from her fingers. Stupid move. If the man was a sex maniac, she’d just waved a red flag before a charging bull. She shoved the suggestive garment into the drawer and bumped it closed with her hip, keeping him in clear view. The instant he moved from the door, she’d make a run for it.
“Looks a bit small for me.” His generous mouth split into a broad grin. “And pink’s not my color.”
Her breath caught at the attractiveness of his smile, and she fought the impulse to relax her guard. “And this is not your room.”
She remembered his gray eyes from her dream, but a look of dazed confusion replaced their former piercing stare.
“Then why am I here?” He spoke softly, as if to himself, and she strained to hear him mumble, “Did you invite me in?”
She drew herself up stiffly. “I’m not in the habit of inviting drunken strangers into my bedroom, not even handsome ones.”
She clasped her hand over her mouth. Was she crazy? Why had she blurted out that, even in his disheveled state, she liked the look of him?
He didn’t appear to notice her compliment but slumped against the door. “My head is swimming. Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”
She would have opened the door and escaped into the hallway, but he sat between her and freedom. She noted the ashen hue of his complexion. The man appeared genuinely ill. It couldn’t hurt to humor him. Anything to stall him until security arrived.
She backed into the bathroom, taking her eyes off him only long enough to fill a glass, but he remained slouched against the door as if he’d fall over if he tried to sit up straight. When she handed him the glass, his tanned fingers closed around hers, sending a strange tingle of warmth up her arm. Alarmed, she jerked away.
“Thank you.” He raised the glass to his mouth with a trembling hand, then lowered the glass slowly to the floor by the door.
She breathed deeply to calm her own trembling. “Now will you please leave?”
“Not until you promise to have dinner with me this evening to make up for my—my mistake.”
Her head filled with images of his handsome face across the table on the hotel terrace before her common sense kicked in once more. “You don’t owe me anything, except my privacy.”
He drew his hand to his mouth, sucking where her teeth had drawn blood. “You’re right. I’d better go before I bleed to death.”
Ignoring her twinge of sympathy, she punched the number for the front desk once more, but the line rang busy in her ear.
“There’s obviously been some kind of error,” he said. “Maybe we were booked into the same room by mistake.” He climbed unsteadily to his feet and pushed away from the door, moving toward her.
“Stay back. I’m warning you.” In a panic, she grabbed the nearest object, a leather-bound phone directory.
The man either hadn’t heard or paid no attention to her words. He stumbled relentlessly toward her. When he came within arm’s length, she raised the phone book and brought it down across his broad brow.
He shook his head like a dazed animal, turned toward the door and traveled only as far as the middle of the room before his knees buckled beneath him. He pitched facedown on the plush carpet and lay still.
Tory froze. She hadn’t hit him that hard, and the padded leather had softened the blow. His collapse could be a ploy to draw her within his reach. The busy signal continued to ring at the front desk, and she had dialed an outside line to call emergency services when someone rapped on her door.
Relief flooded her. Security had arrived, and she could leave the handsome stranger to them.
“Come in,” she called.
The door opened several inches and Emma’s cheery face peeked through. “The front desk sent me, m’dear. Security’s tied up with a brawl in the spa and a theft on the third floor.”
Tory bit back a bitter reply. What good would a hundred-pound old lady be against her intruder? She nodded toward the unconscious form, spread-eagled on the floor. “He broke into my room during the night. I found him in my bed when I woke up this morning.”
Emma scurried to the man’s side. “Oh, dear, you haven’t hurt him, have you?”
“He broke into my room. God knows what he intended.” The maid had to be simpleminded. “I want him out of here—fast.”
“I’ll send security as soon as they’re free and see if I can locate a doctor.”
“Wait—”
The door closed behind Emma and Tory was alone with the stranger once more. She sidled past his prostrate form toward the door, inten
ding to vacate the room until security had removed the intruder. As she backed toward the doorway, reaching behind her for the doorknob, the man moaned, a heart-wrenching sound that stopped her in her tracks.
He was obviously ill. What if her blow to his head had scrambled his senses? What if he suffered from a life-threatening illness? What if she abandoned him and he died? Besides, security would be along any minute, and in his condition what harm could he do her?
The stranger lay prone with his face turned toward her and one arm flung above his head. She knelt beside him and raked her fingers through his thick, fine hair, feeling for lumps or other signs of injury. Long lashes curled darkly against a cheek that seemed pale beneath his tan. She cupped his square jaw in her palm, then lay the inside of her wrist against his broad forehead. Cool and dry with no signs of fever.
Then she noticed his clothes—the strange cut of his gray suit, the width of his shirt collar, the odd knot in his tie and his gleaming black boots. Probably European. The majority of the hotel’s guests were tourists from outside the United States. She attempted to roll him over to search his coat pockets for identification, but she couldn’t budge his dead weight.
When her hand brushed a damp spot beside him, she drew back in disgust. Where his right hand touched the carpet, blood dripped from the neat half-moon of her teethmarks.
She scurried to the pristine white-tiled bathroom, squeezed cold water from two fresh facecloths, then returned to the immobile form on her bedroom floor. Tying one cloth around his bleeding hand, she wiped his face with the other in an attempt to rouse him.
While the stranger lay unmoving, as still as death, Tory dialed the front desk again. The line rang continually, but no one answered.
“Come on, come on!” she muttered through clenched teeth.
“What is that?”
She jumped at his question. The stranger had regained consciousness and raised himself up onto one elbow. He was staring at the television set a few feet away.
Her heart hammered against the ecru lace of her Victorian bodice. His disorientation was even worse than she’d feared. What was keeping security? “The television? What did you think it was?”
“Didn’t know. What’s a television?” he groaned, as he struggled to pull himself upright and got only as far as his knees.
When he threatened to pitch forward on his face once more, she bent down, pulled his arm around her shoulders and dragged him to his feet. Staggering under his weight, she maneuvered him to her bed, where he slumped against the pillows.
His eyes, gray as a winter day, held her as his good hand grasped her wrist. “Thank you. I’m so tired....”
His eyes closed and he released his grip. She leaned forward, listened for the even sound of his breathing, then pulled a blanket from the foot of the bed across the broad expanse of his chest. With the strong contours of his face relaxed in sleep, the man appeared far less threatening than when she’d first discovered him in her bed.
Thick, fine hair of sun-burnished mahogany fell over his high forehead to his eyebrows, giving him the appealing appearance of a sleeping child, but there was nothing childlike about the hard muscles of his chest and thighs that even a thick blanket couldn’t hide. Through slightly parted lips, strong white teeth gleamed and fine lines etched the corners of his mouth. A shadow of stubble darkened his firm, unyielding jaw. A man to be reckoned with.
She tore away from her study of the enigma before her. No use fantasizing over the handsome hunk fate had thrown her way. Even if his brains weren’t scrambled, she had no use for him—for any man.
When her mother had died—of grief, Tory believed—shortly after her father’s fatal heart attack just a year before, Tory had vowed never to become so dependent on a man’s love that she couldn’t live without him. Her mother had given up on life, but Tory would never let love destroy her, even if it meant remaining single the rest of her days. She had her work. What more could she want?
She gathered fresh clothes and carried them into the spacious bathroom where she locked the door behind her. As she removed her bridesmaid’s gown and hung it on the back of the door, sorrow pierced her. Her sister was now halfway around the world. Jill had Rod, and his large, boisterous family would be waiting for them at the airport in Sydney. But no one would be spending the fourteen-day vacation with Tory, and no one waited in the big, two-story house in Atlanta for her return.
She glared at herself in the mirror above the sink, abhorring her self-pity. She’d done fine on her own this far, building a successful business, and she wasn’t even thirty yet. She’d manage. She tried not to think of dinners with no one across the table, breakfasts with only the Atlanta Constitution for company and future business triumphs celebrated alone.
Alone. She wasn’t alone now. She had a stranger in her room—in her bed. She eyed the shower longingly but resorted to a quick sponge bath before slipping into burgundy slacks and a shell pink blouse and tying her hair back with a plum-colored scarf. When she eased open the bathroom door, the man still lay as she’d left him, sleeping soundly in the big double bed.
But where was security? And the doctor Emma had said she’d summon? For a five-star resort, the hotel’s staff had lousy response time. She punched the numbers for the front desk, only to hear the irritating buzz of the busy signal once again.
Slamming the receiver into its cradle with disgust, she looked up to find the stranger’s startling gray eyes fixed on her.
“What are you doing in my room—and dressed like that?” His voice wobbled with weakness.
“Like what?”
“Like a—a man.” He pulled himself into a sitting position and rubbed his temples gingerly.
“Thanks a lot,” she sputtered with annoyance. “Remind me not to waste my charms on you.” Her appearance had been described in various ways by a number of attentive men, but masculine hadn’t been one of them. “Don’t you remember? We’ve already established that this is my room.”
He shook his head as if trying to clear his confusion. “I feel as if my head’s been trampled by wild horses. I’m sorry—”
He paused at the sound of a key in the lock. The door to the hallway pushed open and a cart draped in a white linen cloth appeared, propelled into the room by a smiling Emma.
“What’s going on here?” Tory demanded. “Where’s security?”
“No need for them, m’dear. Everything’s under control.” Emma whipped the cloth from the cart, revealing enough breakfast for two.
“There’s a stranger in my bed, no one answers at the front desk and you bring a breakfast I didn’t order. That’s not control, it’s chaos.” Tory reached for the door handle, ready to order Emma and her hearty breakfast out.
Emma thrust a glass of orange juice into Tory’s outstretched hand. “I’m sure you’ll feel differently once you’ve had your breakfast. And from the looks of him, Mr. Trent could stand a hot meal.”
Tory turned from the little maid to the man who sat propped against the pillows. The color was returning to his face as he observed the two women with interest.
Then the import of the maid’s words hit her. “Mr. Trent? You know him?”
“Now that I’ve seen his face clearly, I’d know him anywhere. Randolph Trent. I’ve seen his picture a thousand times in the exhibit in the west hallway.” Emma bustled from the cart to the table, carrying the covered breakfast plates. “You can go check for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“But those pictures were taken a hundred years ago,” Tory said. “Randolph Trent is—”
“Dead—” Emma’s amethyst eyes sparkled “—as a doornail.”
Chapter Three
“You’re out of your mind.” Rand, feeling his strength surge back, swung his legs off the bed and approached the maid. “I am Randolph Trent, and although I’m a bit hung over, I’m as alive as you are.”
Even as he spoke, doubts crept into his mind. Something very strange was happening to him, from the beautiful w
oman he’d found in his bed to the odd telephone with buttons and the curious piece of furniture she’d called a television, all in a room that had been exclusively his when he sprawled into bed the night before.
The elderly maid whipped the covers off the plates. “Of course you’re alive. That’s why you’re hungry. But if you’re not dead, there must be another explanation for your being here.”
“Yes, what are you doing here?” the attractive young woman asked.
“Bon appetit.” The maid backed hurriedly out the door and closed it behind her.
“Well?” Jade eyes flashed at him, demanding an answer.
The delectable aroma of scrambled eggs and sausage assaulted his nostrils, and his stomach grumbled. He eyed the steaming breakfast longingly. How had the maid known how starved he was?
“Miss Caswell—that’s right, isn’t it? I feel as if I haven’t eaten for days, and I don’t wish to pass out on you again. Do you mind if we discuss this over breakfast in a civilized manner?”
She opened her mouth as if to protest, then seemed to think better of it and sat at the table across from him in the bay window that overlooked the rose garden. She poured coffee, while her lips clamped in a severe line, as if to staunch the flow of questions she would ask him.
He took a deep draft of coffee, hoping the stimulant would clear the cobwebs from his brains and enable him to make sense of the bizarre situation in which he found himself. His well-ordered life didn’t allow for such interruptions. The sooner he could resolve the confusion over his room and return to business, the better. Distractions cost money, even so pleasing a distraction as the one across the table from him.
Tory watched him with a wary eye, still unconvinced Randolph Trent wasn’t a ghost like Angelina, as he dug into the platter of sausage and eggs with all the gusto good manners allowed. Sunlight gleamed behind him through the bay window, outlining his solid silhouette. The pale Angelina had possessed a luminescent, ethereal quality. The man before her radiated robust health and the high color of dynamic flesh and blood. His eyes, unlike Angelina’s pale, unhappy ones, shone with warmth and good humor.
It's About Time Page 2