by Leah Braemel
“Yeah, I would have, you’re right.” Mark sucked in a breath. “We fucked up, all right? I admit it, everyone admits it. But when Thalia suggested her plan to get you two together, she just thought it was time you settled down. And after what you’d said to me about Jodi, I thought…” He exhaled in a long slow stream. “None of us realized that you were still mourning Jill. I didn’t mean for you to end up hurting again. I was trying to find a way to, I don’t know, thank you for forcing me to see how much I loved Jodi. And it was sort of funny too, to see the tables turned on you for once. I figured you’d end up hitched. None of us intended for it to turn out this way. We’re sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s too late for apologies, you fucking bastard. Rosie’s gone.” His voice caught in his throat.
“No, she’s not.”
“I went straight to her apartment once you let me go. Her neighbor said she’d come home but left ten minutes later with a suitcase. I’ve tried phoning her Berry, but she’s not answering, I’ve texted her. I’ve checked with her friends and either they don’t know or they’re not telling me. I even phoned her parents and they don’t know where she is.”
“I know where she is, Sam.”
Sam pushed his knee harder into Mark’s back, tightened his hold on his arms. “Where? Where is she? You tell me now, damn it!”
“Let me up first.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Sam rolled off of him and leaned against the couch. He scrubbed his face with his hands. “Where is she? And how do you know?”
“Andy drove her to the airport. She’s gone to visit her brother in Puerto Rico.”
“I have to go.” Now he had direction again, he jumped to his feet. “I’ve gotta arrange a flight. I’ve gotta find her, tell her I love her.”
“Sam.”
He picked up the phone. Shit, he didn’t know the number of the travel agent. Damn, it was after midnight, they’d be closed anyway. He’d have to phone the airline directly, book a seat himself. Ignoring Mark, he hurried into his study and grabbed the phone book.
“Sam,” Mark had followed him and now leaned against the doorframe, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, “Rosie was pretty upset. She may not listen to you. She may not even want to see you. Not for a while yet. Maybe you should let her calm down for a couple days.”
He put the book down, willing the threatening panic away. “Don’t you see? I have to go after her, I have to try. I have to tell her I love her and I want to marry her and… I have to make her listen. If I have to get on my knees and beg, I will.”
—
Rosie pulled on her collar as the chilly December wind blew down Zerega Avenue, taking her breath away. When she reached the familiar white wrought-iron fence at the corner, she turned right.
She should have stayed in D.C., or at least used her ticket to Puerto Rico as she’d originally planned instead of running home to New York.
Her parents had sensed something was wrong when she’d arrived out of the blue. Her mother immediately started questioning her, but she wasn’t ready to talk about Sam. Not yet. So she’d come up with an excuse that she had a meeting at the Hauberk offices and booked it out of there first thing that morning.
Instead of going to the office, having to face Rick’s inquisition, of possibly having him phone Sam to find out why she was back in the city, she’d spent the day examining the Christmas displays in the shops. When the cold grew too much, she took refuge in the Guggenheim. But no matter where she went, no matter how hard she tried to pretend Sam didn’t exist, she couldn’t convince herself that the constant ache in her chest was jet lag.
As she reached the warm vestibule of her parents’ building, she heard voices at the top of the stairs.
“You broke my daughter’s heart. You think I don’t know why she came home to her mama?”
“I know I did, Mrs. Ramos. That’s why I’m here.”
Sam. He’d followed her.
She hurried up to her family’s apartment and found Sam standing in the doorway, her mother blocking the door, her arms folded across her chest. Her gaze dipped down to check his right hand to see if he still wore the ring, but he’d stuck his hands in his coat pockets. Surely he wouldn’t be still wearing it if he were here.
“You made my Rosie cry.”
“Mama!”
Sam turned at her call. “Rosie! God, I’ve missed—”
“No, no, no.” Her mother insinuated herself between Sam and the top of the stairs, forcing Rosie to stay on the second step. “You don’t try to sweet talk my Rosie, you big oso.”
“Mama,” Rosie whispered. “It’s all right, you don’t need to protect me. And for heaven’s sake, I wasn’t crying.”
When her mother switched to Spanish, Rosie didn’t bother to tell her that Sam would understand every word. “You think you can fool your mama? You think I couldn’t tell from your eyes this morning that you weren’t crying half the night? Or that I wouldn’t hear it in your voice, or see it as you drag yourself around like a puppy that had been kicked?”
Sheesh, did her mother have some hidden camera in her room? And what was wrong with her eyes—she’d looked in the mirror this morning just in case and they’d looked fine. Maybe Rick should think about hiring her mom to do interrogations. Heck, Homeland Security should hire her.
She chanced a glance at Sam and instead of the amused grin she’d expected him to be wearing, he looked mortified.
“Senora Ramos,” not taking his eyes from Rosie, Sam addressed her mother in their own language though he used a European Spanish rather than their Puerto Rican, “I never meant to hurt Rosie, and I certainly never—”
“Sa-a-m.” Rosie clenched her teeth together. He was going about this all wrong if he wanted to win over her mother. He needed to smooth talk her, compliment her, not admit he was wrong. Once he’d shown a weakness, her mother would never let him forget it. But depending on what he was here to say, maybe she didn’t want him to charm her mother.
“Let the man speak, cariño.” Her mother lowered her voice and spoke out one side of her mouth, still not getting that Sam could understand every word. Or maybe she did, but just didn’t care. “It doesn’t hurt for a man to grovel once in a while. Especially when he’s hurt someone he loves.”
“Mama, Mr. Watson’s my boss.” God help her if her mother discovered she’d been sleeping with him without benefit of a wedding ring.
“Pssht.” Her mother batted her hand in Rosie’s direction. “You’re in love with him, Rosie, don’t argue with your mama. If Mr. Watson’s here looking for you—at your home—that means he loves you too.”
Rosie stifled the urge to roll her eyes. Sam however hadn’t taken his eyes off her, the heat from them as intense as a laser beam.
“You come in, Mr. Watson, you talk with my daughter. Tell her how sorry you are that you made her need to run home to her mama and papa.”
“Mama!”
Her mother grabbed her arm and hauled her into their apartment only half-whispering, but loud enough that Sam, who was following, could hear. “He’s not married, is he? If he is, I’ll get rid of him, don’t you worry.”
“No, Mrs. Ramos, I’m not married. And Rosie came home because she knew it was the only way I’d listen to her.”
“Ay, my Rosie tries to teach you a lesson, no? And what did you not want to listen to that was so important?”
“That the past is the past, and she’s my future.” His voice grew soft, soothing.
Rosie forced her legs to keep walking away from him instead of turning around. She knew if she looked at him, she’d melt and accept everything he said.
“Ah.” Her mother stopped in the middle of the room and pushed Rosie toward the couch. “Sit. Both of you. I’ll get coffee and some nice cake I baked this morning.”
When she started to shrug off her jacket, Sam’s hands brushed hers. The electricity between them still crackling, she dropped her hands. He folded her jacket and laid it neatly over the arm
of her father’s chair, and stroked it once before turning back to her.
Feeling dwarfed by him, feeling the walls closing in about her, she took a step away from his towering presence but couldn’t go any farther because of the Christmas tree jammed into the corner of the tiny room.
Once, twice, she opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t find the words.
“I would have gotten here sooner, but I’d been told you’d gone to Puerto Rico so I flew there first.” He stayed where he was, as if he sensed her reluctance to be near him.
Her gaze darted up to his then fluttered away again. He’d flown first to Puerto Rico and then all the way to New York? Surely that meant he wanted her back. Didn’t it?
“I had my ticket in my hand and was ready to go through security and then…” She didn’t think she could have survived making small talk while watching Jose and Elba coo over their new son, painfully aware that she wouldn’t be a mother any time soon. Besides her eldest brother would have asked why she’d decided to visit them on such a whim, and asked questions she didn’t want to answer. Not that her mother had been any better. “I just changed my mind, that’s all.”
“It’s a woman’s prerogative.”
She toyed with an angel her mother had hung on the tree, still not willing to look at him. “I wasn’t sure whether you’d want to see me again.”
He chuckled, but it held no humor in it. “I was thinking the same thing in the taxi coming over here. About whether you’d want to see me.”
“I wasn’t in on their plan, you know. Not until that day.” When I realized you were in love with a ghost.
“I know. I don’t blame you for anything that happened, if you’re worried about that.”
“I’m not.” She was.
Her mother bustled back in, carrying a tray loaded with two coffee cups from her grandmother’s special collection, and her grandmother’s sugar and cream set. “There, I’ll leave you two alone for a while. Call me if you need anything.”
Rosie perched on the couch and added two teaspoons of sugar to one cup. “You should be honored, Mama only uses this china for special occasions.”
“Rosie…”
She hurried to speak before he could say anything more. “My grandfather worked for a week building shelves for a jeweler when they’d first come to New York. He’d wanted to buy my grandmother a birthday present, but they didn’t have any money, so he negotiated with the jeweler that if he built the shelves, he could…” Why was she babbling? “…he could choose something of equal value in trade. It’s pretty, isn’t it?”
Sam knelt in front of her, placed one hand on her knee. His right hand. He wasn’t wearing the ring anymore. “If you don’t want me here, if I make you uncomfortable, or unhappy. I’ll leave. Just say the word.”
“Would you really leave if I asked you to?”
The expression on his face changed so she couldn’t read what he felt. “Do you want me to leave, Rosebud?”
His nickname sliced through her objections. “No. I don’t want you to leave.” She carefully placed the coffee cup back on the tray, grateful her hand didn’t shake betraying how everything inside her quaked and roiled. “But why are you here, Sam?”
“To tell you I love you.” He lifted his hand and stroked her cheek with the back of his knuckles. “To tell you you’d never come second to anyone in our relationship.”
“I love you too. But I also know you were right that day. About love not being like a light switch you flip on or off. You can’t tell me that in the two days since I last saw you, you’ve been able to forget about Jill.”
“Jill will always be a part of me, Rosie.” He touched a finger to her grandmother’s coffee service, ringing the top of the empty cup. “Same as your grandparents will always be part of you. Same as your mother and father, and your brothers and sister, will always be in your heart.”
“It’s not the same.”
“No, it’s not. But it doesn’t mean I don’t have room for you too. I promise Jill’s memory won’t ever come between us. When I’m with you, I don’t think of her. But I don’t know how to convince you of that. I can’t hand you something concrete to prove it, I wish I could.”
So did she. Still he’d removed the ring, that was a start. But had he hung onto it? Was it still tucked away somewhere safe for him to look at now and then? Or had he gotten rid of it?
“If you’re wondering what I did with the ring, I asked Mark to send it to Jill’s parents.”
Feeling guilty over the relief flooding through her, Rosie turned her hand over and twined her fingers with his. “Jill was only part of why I left, Sam.”
“Oh?” His voice was a study in casualness but from the way his fingers dug into hers for a moment before gentling his grip, she knew he was forcing himself not to react.
“There’s the question of how you didn’t respect me as an operative. How you wouldn’t let me do my job.”
A moment passed before he said, “I told you at the start not to try to get between me and a bullet.”
Especially you, she heard him not say.
“I thought Robert was a sniper. You were my principal. That’s what Hauberk hired me to do. To protect our clients.”
“So you threw yourself on top of me prepared to take the bullet in my place. That wasn’t a tactically sound move, Rosebud. You should have just taken me down out of the line of fire, and sought backup. If you’d been shot, I’d have been just as vulnerable as if you hadn’t been there at all.”
“A tactically sound move?” She narrowed her eyes. “What about you racing into the club when you thought I was being held hostage, huh? You charged in, expecting to have to fight for me even though they’d taken your weapons at the gate.”
He opened his mouth to speak but she barreled over him. “Yet still you came. Unarmed. Unprepared. Alone. Did you even think of calling the police? The SWAT team or hostage negotiation? Nope. Big old Sam Watson walked straight into a trap. You deliberately put yourself in harms’ way. Now tell me that was a tactically sound move.”
“That was different.”
“No, it wasn’t. In fact it was worse than what I did on the terrace.” She poked her finger into his sternum, pushing until he lost his balance and fell back with an oomph. “What you’re saying is that you’re allowed to sacrifice yourself, but I’m not allowed to. So what does that mean, Sam? That I’m not allowed to love you as much as you love me?”
He clambered to his feet. “It’s not a matter of allowed or not allowed, or who loves who more. It’s about how I don’t want to lose you, and I hope you don’t want to lose me either.” He held up his hand stopping her from speaking. “It’s got nothing to do with Jill or anything Thalia or Chad said at the club. I love you, Rosie. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to get you pregnant and have children that I can teach to ride a bike and throw a football.”
“You want children?” she spluttered, unable to form a coherent thought. The course of this conversation had taken a turn she hadn’t expected. The hope she’d squelched when she thought about Jose and Elba cooing over their new baby boy flared up, sensing a fresh source of oxygen.
Great, if he was this protective of her when she wasn’t pregnant, think what Sam would be like when she was. She’d barely be able to make a move without him coddling her.
Is that so bad? Yes! She might as well be living at home, dependent upon Mama and Papa. She’d spent too long gaining her independence to give it up now. But somehow she also knew Sam’s type of coddling would be different than Mama’s. It probably meant spending long hours in bed with him.
Sam sat on the couch and pulled her onto his lap, resting his forehead against hers. “Come back to D.C. with me, Rosie. Give me a fresh start. Let me take you out on a date, go with me to a restaurant, maybe a movie. Just Sam and Rosie, not Samuel Watson and his bodyguard for once.”
“We skipped that part, didn’t we? Dating, I mean.”
“Yeah, we did. So w
hat do you say?”
“All right. But I have some conditions.”
“Ah, a negotiation.” His grin returned. “Name your terms, sugar.”
When she slid off his lap and began pacing, he spread his arms out along the back of the couch, and straightened his legs, forcing her to divert her path around him.
“First off, you’ve got to stop treating me like I’m some china doll. I’m a Close Protective Officer with Hauberk Protection. And we’re the best on the whole eastern seaboard. Got that?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Shut up and listen, you big jerk.” She stopped in front of him. “I can drop a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound man and have him crying for his mommy in two seconds. I carry two Glocks and I know how to use them.”
“Right. You’re tough. Keep going.” His grin widened.
“Damned right I’m tough. And like it or not, if someone threatens you, I’m going after them.” She climbed back on his lap, straddling him. “They want to get to you—” she jabbed his sternum with her thumb, then pointed her herself, “—they have to go through me. You got that?”
She narrowed her eyes, growling, “I said—got. that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her gaze dropped from his face to his bulging erection. “Are you getting off on this, Watson? Because I know that’s not where you keep your Glock.”
A grin flashed on his face before he wrestled control back and replaced it with a bland expression. “No, ma’am. I mean, no, that’s not my Glock. And yes, ma’am, you sure make me hot when you get all riled up.”
A choked sound echoed down the hallway. Damn, how had she forgotten her mother would have been eavesdropping?
“Do you agree to my terms? That you don’t try to wrap me in cotton wool and protect me like some china doll?”
“Agreed. Reluctantly. But agreed. Now you mention it, I have a couple conditions too.”
“Which are?”
His grin faded. “You don’t run out on me again, Rosebud. You stick around and hear me out if we ever get into an argument.”
“Right back at you.”