“Sam, you got a minute?”
Jill Acrebee, the unit director, was the person who had encouraged Sam to stay on after her travel contract was up. The statuesque blonde had played basketball for LSU and was friendly with her staff and many of the doctors who frequented the unit. With a warm smile, sharp wit, and boisterous personality, Jill had always been a mentor for Sam.
“I wanted to ask you how the private duty was going.”
Jill guided Sam away from the nurses’ station. Wearing a pretty pale yellow pantsuit with a flowery blouse and two-inch heels, Sam felt positively minuscule next to her boss.
“What private duty?”
Jill tossed her head to the side. “A few weeks back that gorgeous son of the patient you were caring for came to me asking for your contact information. He wanted to hire you to do private duty for his mother. The stroke patient you took care of … I don’t remember her name.”
Sam’s mind drew a blank. “I’ve taken care of quite a few stroke patients lately.”
“This one was special, a hospital VIP. Her son got permission from Larry Dalgreen, our administrator, to get your number and address. He seemed real interested in getting hold of you.”
“What’s his name?”
“Sebastian Dane. His family owns Dane Shipping. You know, that big glass building on Poydras Avenue with Dane across the top. That’s his.”
Now Sam’s mind was spinning. “I’ve never been contacted by a Sebastian Dane, Jill. Are you sure he wanted me?”
Jill’s raucous laugh made several of the ICU staff turn their way. “Of course it was you.” Jill tucked her hand on her hip. “You don’t remember him, Sam? He was something to look at.”
Sam remembered Piper mentioning the son of a patient and how good-looking he was. She wondered if it could be the same guy. “What did this Sebastian Dane look like?”
Jill shook her head. “Oh my God. Tall, great ass, nice body that I could see beneath his suits. Dark-haired, with these hypnotic blue eyes. You know, the drop dead gorgeous type.”
A funny sense of disaster tweaked Sam’s stomach. “You said his name was Sebastian Dane?”
Jill nodded. “He’s all over the Internet, sweetie. Check him out. Maybe his picture will jog your memory.”
“And he said he was going to contact me?” Sam went on, stunned by the information.
“Yep.” Jill tossed up her large hand. “Maybe he got some agency to pick it up. God knows, he could afford to buy an agency if he wanted to.” She motioned to the unit. “Better get to your rooms. Emily is waiting for you.”
Sam glanced over at her night shift coworker, standing by one of the patient rooms and eyeing the clock above the nurses’ station. Giving her boss a quick nod, Sam set out across the unit. The uncomfortable twinge in her stomach, however, didn’t go away. Sam hoped the worrisome pain wasn’t a sign of things to come.
* * *
It wasn’t until lunch that Sam got the opportunity to pull up Sebastian Dane on her cell phone. In the nurses’ lounge, she waited for the Google page to open. The stitch in her stomach gnawed at her while reading through the numerous links related to the man.
The first article she opened was about Mr. Dane taking part in a local charity event for the New Orleans World War II Museum. The picture of him with other attendees was blurry and hard to see on her phone. She went to his profile page on LinkedIn, scanned through the details about his company—the multi-millions his company generated in shipping every year—and searched the page for his picture. What she found was the logo of the company. Getting frustrated, she scrolled down the Google search engine page to another article about his attending yet another charity event hosted by Nathan Cole.
Sam’s hands paused before she opened the link. So Sebastian Dane knew Nathan Cole? She decided the coincidence meant nothing.
Nevertheless, when the picture on the page opened, Sam almost dropped her phone. Standing next to Nathan Cole was her Doug Morgan.
“What the fuck?”
The caption beneath the picture read, “Local businessman Nathan Cole with Dane Shipping owner Sebastian Dane.”
Sam stared at the picture, fuming.
“Sam, I need you,” a nurse called, popping her head into the lounge.
Tucking her phone back into her tunic pocket, Sam vowed to head to Doug’s after work for some answers.
“Somebody has got a lot of explaining to do,” she muttered under her breath while heading out the lounge door. “And after I get my explanation, I’m gonna kill him.”
* * *
Parking her old Honda in the designated lot across the street from her apartment building, Sam dashed to the wide glass doors. Ignoring the guard, Mike, who was seated at his desk just inside the doors, Sam practically jogged across the silver lobby to the elevators.
“You might want to take the stairs, Ms. Woods,” Mike called to her. “The movers are holding up the elevator.”
She spun around and faced the former bouncer with biceps the size of bulldozers. “What movers?”
“The guy on four, next to you. He moved out today.” Mike thumbed the fancy silver parquet ceiling of the lobby. “Movers showed up this morning after eight. Said they were told by the guy to pack up everything.”
The irritation Sam had been holding in all day siphoned out of her like air from a slashed tire. “Doug Morgan is moving out?”
Mike shrugged his behemoth shoulders. “Already moved out. The movers are finishing up with the last of his stuff.”
“Did they say why he was moving out?”
Mike’s heavily ridged brow crinkled. “No. Nobody ever tells me nothin’.”
Possessed by desperation, Sam headed to the stairs on the right of the elevator doors. Bolting up the steps, she kept thinking that it couldn’t be true. Doug couldn’t be leaving her, not after what she had shared with him.
When she came barreling out the fourth-floor exit from the stairwell, she was alarmed by the activity in her hallway. Three beefy men in gray overalls with Al’s Moving stitched in red on their chests were standing by the elevator, loading boxes into it. Without hesitation, she stormed up to the men.
“Are those Doug Morgan’s things?”
A man with deep-set brown eyes and a saggy jowl glanced up at her. “Morgan, yeah. We were just finishing up, miss.”
“Where are you taking his things? What’s his forwarding address?” she questioned, glancing back at his closed apartment door.
The older gentleman eyed his two coworkers. “Ah, company policy. We can’t give out that information.”
Sam was not deterred. “Please. He … never told me he was moving out.” She pointed at her apartment door. “I’m his neighbor.”
The older gentleman gave her an apologetic smile. “I wish I could help, but our boss is kind of a stickler for privacy.” He gave her an encouraging nod of the head. “Perhaps your super might have his address. He could probably give it to you.”
The other two men finished loading the last of the boxes. “We got to go, Mel,” a burly bald man called from inside the elevator.
The kind man turned away and joined his coworkers in the elevator. As the silver doors closed, Sam’s hope for any possible explanation on who Doug was faded away.
Standing in the hallway, her heart sank.
While betrayal, anger, and a whole lot of sadness pervaded every inch of her being, Sam dragged her body to her front door. She struggled to remove her keys from her backpack, and as she tried to fit her key into her lock, a geyser of emotion rose in her chest, taking away her breath and blurring her vision.
Fighting against her tears, she hurried inside her apartment and slammed her door. Sam was about to set the dead bolt when she heard Doug’s repeated warning to lock her door echoing in her mind. With his lush voice still in her head, she sank to her floor.
Letting only a few teardrops fall, she shook off her feelings of hopelessness, stood up, and headed for her computer.
Fl
ipping up the laptop in the second bedroom she used as an office, Sam set her backpack to the side of the old wooden desk and began to do some serious Internet trolling. She wanted to learn all she could about Sebastian Dane. If he was truly her Doug Morgan, she was going to get to the bottom of why the man had played such a cruel hoax on her.
As her fingers typed in his name, a renewed sense of purpose enlivened her. She may have shared some of her secrets with Doug, but there was one thing he hadn’t discovered. If lied to, Sam Woods could turn into one vengeful bitch.
Sebastian Dane stood in his office on the thirtieth floor of the Dane Shipping building and stared out the wide picture window to the Mississippi River below. The current was strong that day and the boats on the river were having a hard time navigating the bend that flowed past the heart of the New Orleans French Quarter.
As the dark muddy water swirled below him, he thought of her. The way she had felt next to him. How she had fallen asleep in his arms. Her smell, like roses and honey, and the way she had tasted … it was killing him.
When Sam had told him about her questionable virginity, he had ached to take her right there and then. But his guilty conscience wouldn’t let him. Her first time was meant to be special, meant to be with a man she loved, and love was something Sebastian never gave. Ever.
In his world, there was never supposed to be any mention of love. Sure, Kimberly had professed a deep regard for him during their two years together, but when he had broached the subject of going beyond their contracted agreement to having a relationship, she had shot him down … hard. The entire experience had left him numb, and sent him right into the arms of another woman, another sub with a taste for rough sex.
He shook his head as he thought of sweet Mary Ann and her penchant for violence. He had liked using force on a woman, but only briefly. Once his anger with Kimberly had cooled, Mary Ann’s antics had grown disturbing.
Right when he had about given up on ever finding a match for his tastes, his mother had called him with another one of her dizzy spells, only this time she had lost the ability to speak. Five weeks of speech therapy and physical therapy had followed, but she was finally getting back to her old self. The entire incident had left Sebastian feeling vulnerable, frightened, and obsessed with the adorable little ICU nurse who had cared for his mother.
The blue-eyed brunette with the wonderful smile had made an impression on him, a deep impression. From the moment she had called him by his dead stepfather’s name, he had been intrigued. No matter how many times he corrected her, told her his last name was Dane, and tried to engage her in conversation, the nurse had ignored him. Hell, Sam had done more than ignore him; she had captivated him by not even acknowledging his presence. For the first time in his life, he had been invisible to someone. His looks, his name, and his money had not mattered to her … and that had upended him.
Regrettably, his experiment to get her to notice him had taken a dreadful turn. Instead of teaching her a lesson, she had taught him one. She had touched that untouched part of him, his heart. Resting his head against the window, he thought of her naked body and closed his eyes.
“Fuck.”
“Mr. Dane,” his secretary called over his office intercom. “Your ten o’clock appointment is here.”
Coming back to reality, Sebastian turned to his walnut-inlaid desk. He went to his appointment book and flipped the page. Hitting the intercom button at the bottom of his desk phone, he bellowed, “What appointment, Lacy? It’s not in my book.”
“It’s with that reporter from the Times-Picayune. The one who wanted to do the follow-up on that piece about you. She made the appointment at the last minute yesterday. She practically begged me to let her have ten minutes. That’s all she needs.”
“Not another reporter. Haven’t we had enough of them around lately? If I get one more question about Nathan Cole’s disappearance—”
“This is a follow-up interview to the longshoreman negotiations. You wanted to plead your case to the public before they started asking for a pay raise. Remember?”
He smiled at the way Lacy’s smooth voice filled with irritation. The middle-aged redhead had been with him for ten years, ever since he had taken over the company. She had been outspoken, efficient, and a damned hard worker. Lacy had been hired by his father before his death, and Sebastian had always thanked providence for bringing the mother of two into his life. He doubted Dane Shipping would run half as well without her.
He checked his stainless watch. “She can have ten minutes.” He picked up his gray suit jacket hanging on the back of his desk chair. “What’s this one’s name again.”
“Anderson, Emily Anderson,” Lacy told him.
“Anderson.” He mulled the name. “Is she the tall blonde?”
Lacy chuckled. “Nice try, Mr. Dane. She’s a petite brunette. Pretty little thing.”
Sebastian’s thoughts returned to Sam. He pondered what Lacy would have made of her.
“Put her in the conference room,” he said into the speaker. “Then in ten minutes come and get me. Got it?” He slipped on his jacket.
Lacy’s throaty chuckle made him smile. “Yes, boss.”
Tugging the cuffs of his blue shirt through the sleeves of his jacket, Sebastian headed across the brown and green Oriental rug to his office door. Catching a glimpse of the assorted pictures on the wall of his father standing in front of ships that belonged to their fleet, he smirked, wondering what his old man would have made of his life. As he turned the brass handle on his door, he already knew the answer. He wouldn’t have given a shit.
Making his way down the burgundy carpet that decorated his office hallway, Sebastian spied his office staff and thought ahead to the interview. He toyed with the idea of taking an abrupt approach with the reporter. He would be polite, keep his answers short, and hope Lacy showed up early. But if the dogged Ms. Anderson was attractive … well, that was a whole different kind of interview.
Shaking his head, he stopped before the oak double doors of his conference room.
“Let’s just hope this one is pretty.” Putting on his fake smile, he turned the doorknob and stepped inside.
She was standing at the window with her back to him, admiring the same view he had from his office. But when she turned to greet him, Sebastian’s stomach clenched.
“Hello, Mr. Sebastian Dane,” Sam said with all the venom of a cobra set to strike.
Sebastian shut the door. “Sam? What in the hell are you doing here?”
In a fitted black skirt and cream-colored blouse, she looked better than his memories of her. She came up to him, wobbling on her heels, and when she finally stood in front of him, she slapped him across the face.
“You bastard!”
He kept his head turned away from her as his mind scrambled to absorb what had just occurred. “You’re Emily Anderson?”
“I figured if you could use a fake name with me, Doug, I could turn the tables on you … asshole.”
Squaring his shoulders, he faced her. “Why? Why did you lie?”
“Would you have seen me otherwise, you lying sack of shit?”
She had a point. He would never have allowed her in the building. “Why are you here, Sam?”
“Why am I here?” she shouted. “Why do you think?” She waved her hand at him. “I wanted to find out if I was crazy for believing you actually gave a fuck about me.”
“Don’t curse,” he admonished.
“Fuck you!”
He grabbed her arms. “How did you find me?”
“The Internet, dumb ass. How else?”
Sebastian struggled to hold her. “You need to calm down, Sam.”
“Calm down?” She was fighting to get free. “You owe me an explanation, Doug, or Sebastian … or whoever you are. Maybe we should stick with asshole.”
“Enough.” He took her to one of the red leather chairs from the conference table and shoved her into it. “You’re going to sit down and listen to me.”
She stayed in the chair and defiantly folded her arms. “Asshole.”
He pulled out the chair next to her and had a seat, trying to formulate what he would say. He had hoped by the time Sam learned the truth about him, she would have moved on. He had never counted on her tracking him down. “My real name is Sebastian Dane. I told you my name was Doug Morgan because I wanted to get to know you, without who I am and what I do, getting in the way.”
“Why?” she demanded. “Why me?”
“You took care of my mother in your ICU for a few days. I went to see her every afternoon and you were there. You always got my name wrong, you completely ignored me, and you didn’t give a damn who I was.” He ran his hand through his hair. “You captivated me, something a lot of women never do. I wanted you … as my sub, but I knew I couldn’t be Sebastian Dane when we met. I had to be a regular guy.”
“I don’t get it. Why couldn’t you just be you? I wouldn’t have cared about who you are.”
“I didn’t know that at the time. A lot of women want to get to know me because of who I am. It’s made being what I am difficult, to say the least. I’ve had to join exclusive clubs to meet women.”
“Like the club you told me about? The one you and Nathan Cole belonged to.”
He rubbed his hand across his chin, apprehensive about telling her too much, but then again … what choice did he have. “This club is different. It has strict rules for members. Women outside of the club aren’t allowed because they’re considered a liability. In this club there are no rules, no contracts, no limits on our play. As a Dom, I could do anything I wanted to a woman without having to worry about … repercussions.”
Raising her eyebrows, Sam sat back in her chair. “Is that why you wanted me? To make me a part of this club?”
He nodded his head, inwardly berating his actions. “When I met you in the ICU … all I knew was that I had to have you, but I also had to find a way to ease you into my world. So, I got in touch with your supervisor and pulled some strings with your hospital administrator to get some particulars on you. When I found out you lived in Nathan’s building, I asked him about you.” Sebastian sat back in his chair. “The way he spoke about you was reason enough for me to step in. I didn’t want to leave you to a man like Nathan Cole.”
Dark Attraction: The Corde Noire Series Page 11