The Gift of Love

by Lori Foster

“Because I’m standing in front of your building, watching you walk this way looking confused. Hurry up, babe, you’ve kept me waiting out here long enough.”

  Her head shot up, her gaze rushing past the few strangers littering the tree-lined street until it landed on his towering form. She didn’t know if it was Mac himself or her desperate need to be near him that drew her attention so unerringly, but she locked on his short, near-white hair, the leather jacket over a plain black T-shirt, his usual worn jeans and work boots … and her heart lurched. Her lungs stopped working and tears pricked behind her eyes.

  And then she was moving again, walking, then jogging, then running the last few feet to reach him. She threw her arms around his neck, and he caught her, lifting her in his embrace for a tight hug, her legs swinging off the ground.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked when she pulled back to look at his face.

  He opened his mouth to answer, but she covered it with two fingers. “And don’t say you’re standing here waiting for me to get home. I mean what are you doing here in Manhattan after your insistence that”—she lowered her voice and wrinkled her brow, mimicking his low, masculine tone—“‘I can’t go back there, I can never go back’?”

  He grinned at her lousy impression and smacked a quick kiss on her lips. “A funny thing happened after you left. I started getting phone calls from old friends and contacts. Folks asking where I’d been, why my photos were suddenly showing up in your new portfolio, and when I was planning to pick up again where I’d left off.”

  Her eyes widened, surprised at the response his work had gotten from just the few places she’d circulated her portfolio. Granted, his photos were fabulous and deserved all that attention and more. But usually when a model went looking for work, she was the one to hold center stage, not the photographer who had shot the images.

  “I ignored them at first, but the calls kept coming,” he continued, his cheeks coloring slightly in embarrassment. “Phil Jackson … you remember him, right? … invited me to stay with him for a few days if I wanted to come into the city and feel things out.”

  “You’ve been here for a few days? Without letting me know?” she demanded, a scowl turning her mouth down at the corners.

  He at least had the grace to look chagrined about that, too. “Yeah, but I have a good reason. I wanted to be sure.”

  “Sure about what?”

  “That I could do this. That I could be back in New York without wanting to hit all my old haunts or having the urge to go back to all my old habits.”

  Her fingers, which were wrapped around his firm upper arms, squeezed gently and moved up and down in a comforting, supporting motion. “And?”

  “I hung out with old friends, talked about the business, even went to a couple parties just like I used to.”

  Sophie’s stomach tumbled. He sounded so serious, she feared things hadn’t gone well. That the demons from his past had caught up with him and gotten him to do something he didn’t want to do.

  “And …” He drew the word out, building the tension, making her every muscle and tendon draw tight with worry. “Nothing. I enjoyed myself, and started to recall why I loved the business so much and got into it in the first place. But even though the booze was flowing freely—along with several less legal substances, I’m sure—I didn’t need it. Didn’t have so much as a twinge as trays of champagne floated past or when someone offered me a drink directly.”

  Letting loose a tiny squeal, she jumped up and wrapped her arms around his neck once again, hugging him close. “I’m so proud of you,” she told him. “I always knew you were stronger than that garbage.”

  “Yeah, well …” He cleared his throat, which had gone thick with emotion. Nuzzling his nose against the curve of her neck, he said, “I realized something else these past few days, too.”

  “What’s that?” she asked without moving away from his snug embrace.

  “I’m thinking that if I had someone here to keep me on the straight and narrow, to go along with me to those parties and give me something to think about other than drugs or booze …” He shrugged a shoulder, hugging her even closer. “Well, that could be a pretty strong incentive for me to move back and start shooting the good stuff again.”

  Heart beating double-time behind her rib cage, Sophie pulled back until she could see his face and meet his dark brown gaze. She licked her lips nervously. “Got anyone particular in mind?” she asked with much more bravado than she felt.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Phil would probably be an okay choice. Or maybe Bruce Trevoti.”

  Pulling her arm back, she punched him none too gently in the stomach. “You big jerk!” she charged. “You’d better be talking about me or you can haul your butt right back to that dump you call a studio and take pictures of drooling babies for the rest of your life.”

  He threw back his head and laughed, a deep, rich sound that rolled through her veins like honey.

  “Yeah, I’m talking about you. Thought maybe you’d let me crash with you for a while till I can find my own place and get back on my feet.”

  Her heart continued to race, but for a whole different reason this time. “That would probably be all right,” she replied carefully, not sure how excited she should get when everything was still so uncertain.

  “If things work out,” he went on, “we can talk about finding another, bigger place together. Maybe do the whole Manhattan version of the white picket fence, two-point-five kids, a dog in the yard.”

  His fingers were in her hair now, stroking it away from her face while he cupped her jaw and kept his eyes locked with hers. “I love you, Sophie. And I want the next drooling baby I capture with my camera lens to be ours.”

  Everything past I love you flew at her in a rush and made her feel as though she’d slipped into an alternate reality. But she was game. She was very, very game.

  “I love you, too,” she told him, running her fingers over his rough cheeks and pressing a soft kiss to his lips as she struggled to hold back tears of joy. “But let’s take things slow, okay? Give me a couple years to enjoy being back on the runway and in swimsuit editions before you knock me up and turn me from a model into a mom.”

  One corner of Mac’s sexy mouth lifted and a wicked glint sparkled in his eyes. “Fast or slow, baby. You know I like it both ways.”

  She chuckled, ready to explode from the complete and utter happiness pinballing its way through every cell of her being. Reaching into her handbag, she came up with a set of keys, dangling them in front of him.

  “I’m in 4B. Care to go upstairs and prove it?”

  The glint in his eyes grew even brighter, edged now with the short fuse of unleashed desire. He pulled open the glass front door of her building, bracing it with his body before scooping her into his arms.

  “Quicker than you can say ‘cheese,’” he told her, carrying her upstairs, where he proceeded to demonstrate the very best of everything.

  atticus gets a mommy

  ANN CHRISTOPHER

  To Richard

  Special thanks to Lester S. Duplechan, MD,

  who answered my endless questions with patience and enthusiasm.

  Any mistakes are, of course, mine.

  one

  “Who’s the guy?”

  Whoa. Was that his voice? Growling like that?

  Yeah. Unfortunately.

  He, Keenan Evans, a successful architect and generally cool guy despite being a wheelchair-bound quad with limited use of his arms and hands and zero use of his legs, was about to lose his freaking mind.

  Right here, at the elegant reception following his sister Lisa’s wedding to his best friend, Cruz Shaw. Right now.

  Why?

  Because Diana Barker, another architect at his office and the most beautiful woman in the world, had shown up tonight with … Keenan had to swallow back the rising bile even to think the horrible four-letter word … a date.

  A date.

  Wasn’t that just a kick in the teet
h?

  Apparently he wasn’t the only one who thought so. Atticus, the capuchin therapy monkey that handled all his fine-motor tasks and was his constant sidekick, cocked his fuzzy little head as though he knew things were about to get bad. Settling into Keenan’s lap, blue leash jangling, he looked into Keenan’s face with concerned brown eyes. “Oooooh,” he murmured.

  Meanwhile, Diana, the object of Keenan’s increasingly tortured obsession, looked around, delicate brows raised and a crystal champagne flute poised near her perfect lips.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  She looked pissed, which was just fine with him, because God knew he was pissed.

  Pissed because, in a roomful of two hundred or more people, he was the one stuck, undancing, in a wheelchair, even though the music’s beat pulsed through his blood just like it did everyone else’s. Pissed because he would never dance again, never walk, and never be free of this godforsaken wheelchair. Even after years of getting used to it, he was still pissed.

  Most of all, he was pissed because Diana was here with some other guy who had four working limbs. She’d found the kind of guy she deserved, damn her.

  The gnawing jealousy had already hollowed out his insides with its sharp little teeth. At this rate, he’d be certifiably insane before the newlyweds left for their Caribbean honeymoon in a couple of hours.

  Diana. Even her name was an ache in his heart, and had been since the day she showed up in his office and his life, and looked into his eyes. Diana.

  After dancing to the Black-Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started,” “Electric Slide,” and several other fast songs, during which she’d tempted him like Salome with her scarves, all swaying hips and lush curves in a filmy black dress that was classy and yet left plenty to his overactive imagination, she’d slow-danced. With him. Her—Keenan repressed a shudder—date.

  The punk who’d had his clingy arms all around her like poison ivy strangling an oak.

  Stuck in this lousy chair, Keenan had watched from the sidelines and seethed.

  Now both he and Diana were spoiling for a fight. It was the perfect time because her date had hightailed it off to the cake line or some such, and they were as alone as it was possible to be in a packed ballroom.

  “Your date,” Keenan reminded her, with just as much aggression in his voice as before. So much for not snarling this time. At best, he’d managed to sound as though he merely wanted to maim the punk rather than kill him outright. “The guy who was all over you a minute ago. Remember him? Where’d he come from?”

  “Evan?”

  He’d preferred to think of him as Punk, SOB, or Loser, but whatever. Evan. If he had to have a name.

  She shrugged and sipped her champagne. “We met at the gym—”

  Of course. Because the gym was where you hung out when you had a whole body.

  True, Keenan hung out at a gym, too, but it was a special one for people like him, where he could work on keeping his upper body strong even if his lower body was a useless combination of loose skin, atrophied muscles, and the sharp right angles of his bent legs.

  “And he asked me out a few times. I finally said yes.” She paused to stare him right in the face, the challenge bright in her eyes. “Why do you ask?”

  They were gliding into treacherous waters here, but then everything about Diana felt dangerous to him and always had. Dangerous and endlessly fascinating.

  Time to back off a little lest she realize exactly how much she meant to him.

  Trying to match her nonchalance, he shrugged and navigated the wheelchair until it was next to her chair at the table and they were shoulder to shoulder.

  Too close and yet way too far away.

  Atticus, who was always on the lookout for a forbidden treat, took advantage of Keenan’s momentary distraction and sniffed at the remnants of Diana’s wedding cake. With sugar in the offering, he chittered with rapture and dug in with his tiny fingers, shoveling icing into his mouth. The dumb thing would make himself sick in a minute, but Keenan could deal with only one crisis at a time, and Diana was it.

  “He doesn’t seem like your type,” Keenan told her.

  “How’s that?”

  “You have an IQ. From what I’ve seen tonight, he doesn’t.”

  There was something dark in her half smile, amusement that wasn’t amusement at all, but something harder, almost bitter. “Just because he hadn’t heard about the tornadoes in Topeka yesterday?”

  Keenan snorted. “Honey, I’m thinking that unless they show it on Sports Center, there’s going to be a lot he doesn’t know. Have you checked to make sure he knows who the current president is?”

  To his consternation, she laughed. Laughed. And then she did something far worse: looked off across the room to where Evan was now shaking hands with some guy over by the bar, and sighed, giving him a look of such frank sexual appreciation that it was practically a leer.

  Keenan almost choked on his jealousy.

  “Well,” she said in a husky-sexy voice that was exactly what he’d imagined in all his overheated dreams of her, “Evan’s got other things going for him. A lot of other things. So it’s all good.”

  Following her gaze, he forced himself to look at Evan and take inventory. Again.

  Evan was tall. Keenan used to be tall. Evan was the kind of dark and handsome guy that women universally went nuts for, the kind of guy Keenan was once. Hell. Keenan supposed he still was good-looking, from the waist up anyway, not that women ever bothered to look down at him these days. Being ignored by the fairer sex, when they’d once fallen all over him, wasn’t good for his morale. To say the least. Evan, on the other hand, had all the confidence in the world, and why shouldn’t he? He could have any woman he wanted, make love to any woman he wanted, and Keenan—

  “What’s wrong?” Diana asked softly, and the challenge in her expression had grown and intensified into open defiance. If he didn’t know her better, his sweet Diana, he’d almost think she wanted to stick it to him and rub his face in Evan’s perfection. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”

  The growing sickness inside him had a choke hold on his struggling lungs, and it took him forever to speak. When he did, it was in a weak voice that would have unmanned him if the car accident hadn’t already done that so effectively.

  “Happy for you?”he echoed.

  Diana hitched up her chin, and Jesus, it felt like she was cocking her fist, getting ready for the right hook that would knock him out of the wheelchair and leave him flattened, facedown, on the ballroom’s parquet floor.

  “Didn’t you tell me to find someone who could give me everything I need?” She smiled then, his Diana, a smile that was all flushed cheeks and sensual knowledge, as though she’d already enjoyed all the pleasures a man like Evan could give her and intended to enjoy them again as soon as possible.

  That smile killed him.

  “Now I have everything I need,” she said. “Evan’s giving it to me. ”

  They stared at each other for several silent seconds, each more painful than the last, and he wondered how he could hurt so bad without a fresh physical injury.

  Just when he’d come to the conclusion that they’d hit bottom and this night had gotten as bad as it could possibly get, a new thought blindsided him, one that made the thought of Diana having sex with some other guy—a whole, healthy guy—seem like a mere walk in the park on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

  Oh, shit. Oh, Jesus. Oh, no.

  And he shouldn’t ask. They’d covered this ground already, and he’d made his position on any sort of a relationship with Diana perfectly clear: wouldn’t happen. It was better for her, obviously, because she didn’t need to be saddled with a cripple, and better for him because why get his hopes up that life might hold some happiness for him after all?

  So, yeah, what she did with her personal life was no concern of his, and there was a speeding lightning bolt with his name on it, and then, once it struck him dead, a special place waiting for him in the hottest f
ires of hell for being a big enough bastard to even wonder, but …

  God. He hadn’t known it would feel like this to see her with someone else.

  “Are you in love with him?”

  That was it for Diana; he knew it even before her lips twisted with derision and her entire body stiffened to granite. Clunking her champagne flute on the table, she stood and stared down at him with icy brown eyes that glittered with the unforgiving hardness of diamonds. Working hard not to blink, he met her gaze and considered it a modern miracle that his testicles didn’t wither and fall off before her quiet fury.

  “That’s none of your business, is it?”

  No. It was none of his business at all, and they both knew it.

  And that didn’t lessen the pain one damn iota.

  Lobbing a final glare at him, she spun on her sky-high heels and walked off toward her date, the man who deserved her.

  “Shit.” Keenan was left alone feeling doubly paralyzed—physically, as always, and emotionally, because he just didn’t know what the hell he should do now. “Shit. ”

  Atticus, who’d devoured all the cake remnants and had the telltale white icing ring around his mouth to prove it, now had a moment to commiserate. Facing Keenan, he stretched up on his hind legs and stared into his face, his expression grave. Keenan stared back, not bothering to hide his desolation.

  And Atticus, bless his little furry heart, patted his cheeks with both messy hands, offering what comfort he could.

  two

  Pull it together, girl, Diana told herself, and managed something like a smile just as Evan, her date, held out a hand to reel her in. Sidestepping the last couple of people at the crowded edge of the dance floor, she slipped into his welcoming arms, which were strong and muscular, and she felt … nothing.

  Well, not quite nothing. She felt all the heightened awareness a woman automatically feels when she’s near a handsome man, and there was no question about it—Evan was handsome. It was all going on right here, no doubt. He had the height and the shoulders, the sparkling eyes and the dimples. He smelled good, too, with a hint of cologne that was sophisticated and musky and should have been devastating rather than just pleasant.