The Name of the Game

by Nora Roberts

  and neck. The studio audience was loud and raucous, the contestants wired. Johanna’s stomach was in knots. When Sam turned and winked at her during the commercial break she nearly bared her teeth.

  Positions jockeyed back and forth. Professionally Johanna knew that when the show aired it would pull the television audience in. That was, after all, the name of the game. Personally, she’d hoped for a landslide, however boring.

  When the final question came up, she held her breath. Sam was quick to push the button, but his partner was quicker. He nearly swore. The expectant mother from Orange County had more than her own fate in her hands.

  “Surrender, Dorothy!” she shouted. When the lights went on, Sam took her face in his hands and kissed her. Hard. Audrey would be able to dine out on the moment for months. Sam kept his arm around her as they walked toward the winner’s circle. Once she was settled, he strolled casually over to Johanna and bent closer to her ear.

  “Saturday night, seven. I’ll pick you up.”

  She only nodded. It was hard to speak when your teeth were clenched.

  ***

  Johanna found several vital tasks to perform after the taping was completed. She did not, as was her habit, say a personal thank-you to both guest stars. That job was handed over to Bethany. She made herself scarce for thirty minutes so that she could be sure Sam Weaver was off and out of her hair. Until Saturday.

  She couldn’t quite drum up the job-well-done mood the end of the day usually brought her. Instead she made a list of details to see to the following day that would keep her occupied from the time she got up until she crawled back home again. Business as usual, she told herself, and broke the tip off her pencil.

  “Everybody’s happy,” Beth told her. “The questions we didn’t use in the speed round are locked back in the safe. The contestants we didn’t get to are ready and willing to come back next week. Your dupes.” She handed Johanna the tapes. “We’ve got some great shows. Especially the last one. Even the techs were getting into it. They loved Sam.” Bethany pushed back a lock of hair. “And you know how jaded techs can be. Anyway, it’s nice to know that besides being gorgeous and sexy he’s got some smarts.”

  Johanna grunted and dropped the tapes in her carryall.

  Bethany tilted her head. “I was going to ask you if you wanted to take some of the leftover fruit home, but it looks more like you’d prefer raw meat.”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “Uh-huh.” Beth knew her boss better. Johanna had pulled a roll of antacids out of her bag and had popped two of them. A sure sign of trouble. “Want to have a drink and talk about it?”

  Johanna had never made it a habit to confide in anyone. There simply hadn’t been enough people in her life she could trust. Johanna knew Beth. Her assistant was young and energetic, but she was also trustworthy. She was also the closest thing Johanna had ever had to a foul-weather friend.

  “I’ll pass on the drink, but how about walking me out to my car?”

  “Sure.”

  The sun hadn’t set. Johanna found something reassuring about that after having been inside all day. She’d put the top down, she thought, and take the drive home through the Hills fast. Maybe a bit recklessly. She had a taste for the reckless, a taste she usually controlled. It came from her father. But tonight it might do her good to give in to it for a little while.

  “What did you think of Sam Weaver?”

  Bethany cocked a brow. “Before or after I stopped drooling?”

  “After.”

  “I liked him,” she said simply. “He didn’t expect the red carpet, he wasn’t condescending and he wasn’t snickering behind his hand at the contestants.”

  “Those are all negative virtues,” Johanna pointed out.

  “Okay, I liked the way he joked around with the crew. And the way he signed autographs as though he wanted to instead of acting as though he were granting a favor.” She didn’t add that she’d asked for one herself. “He acted like somebody without making sure everybody remembered that somebody was in all capital letters.”

  “Interestingly said,” Johanna murmured. “Are you still keeping that little book with the list of celebrity panelists?”

  Beth colored a bit. She was in the business, but that didn’t stop her from being a fan. “Yeah. Sam gets five stars.”

  Johanna’s lips twitched a bit at her assistant’s top rating. “I guess I should be relieved to hear it. I’m having dinner with him on Saturday.”

  Bethany’s mouth went into the O position. There were stars in her eyes. She simply couldn’t help it. “Wow.”

  “It’s confidential.”

  “Okay,” Bethany said, and Johanna knew she was as good as her word. “Johanna, I know you were raised in the business and Cary Grant probably bounced you on his knee, but doesn’t it give you a tingle?”

  “It gives me a pain,” Johanna stated bluntly as she pulled open her car door. “Actors aren’t my type.”

  “Too general.”

  “Okay, blue-eyed lanky actors with a drawl aren’t my type.”

  “You’re sick, Johanna. Very, very sick. You want me to go as proxy?”

  She chuckled as she lowered herself into the car. “No. I can handle Sam Weaver.”

  “Lucky you. Listen, not to pry or anything . . .”

  “But?”

  “You will remember the details? I might want to write a book or something.”

  “Go home, Beth.” The engine sprang to life as she twisted the key. Yes, she definitely wanted power and speed tonight.

  “Okay, just let me know if he always smells so good. I can live on that.”

  Shaking her head, Johanna roared out of the lot. She hadn’t been interested enough to notice what Sam Weaver had smelled like.

  Like a man, her memory informed her. He’d smelled very much like a man.

  3

  It was only dinner. Nothing to worry about. Certainly nothing, after several days to put it in perspective, to be annoyed about. They would no doubt go to one of L.A.’s flashier restaurants, where Sam could see and be seen. Between the pâté and the double chocolate mousse he would greet and chat with the other glamorous types who patronized that kind of eatery.

  Meat houses, her second stepmother had called such places. Not because of the menu but because of the flesh exposed. Darlene had been one of the most honest and least affected of her father’s attachments.

  If she wanted to stretch a point, Johanna could consider it a business dinner. She found she wanted to stretch a point. She could tolerate this, as she had tolerated many other meals, as a part of the game everyone who wanted to remain part of the business learned to play. Since it was business, she would be charming and chatty, even gracious, until it was over and she could close the door on the entire episode.

  She didn’t like persistent men.

  She didn’t like men with reputations.

  She didn’t like Sam Weaver.

  That was before the flowers arrived.

  Johanna had spent Saturday morning gardening and half-hoping Sam Weaver wouldn’t find her address. He hadn’t called to ask her for it or to confirm plans. Waiting for him to do just that had left her jumpy and out of sorts all week. That was just one more sin to lay at his door.

  It was her habit whenever she worked outside to take her cordless phone with her. Business could crop up even on weekends. Today, however, she pretended to have forgotten it and spent a warm and pleasant morning tending a plot of columbine.

  This was her respite, even her vice, in a way. The flowers she planted were nurtured and cared for. They rewarded her by renewing themselves year after year. Their continuity soothed her. This, as was the case in other areas of her life, was something she’d done with her own hands. Whatever rewards she reaped, whatever failures she suffered, were her own.

  The flowers lasted. The people in her life rarely did.

  Her jeans were scruffy at the knees and her hands stained with mulch when the delivery
man pulled up. Johanna shaded her eyes as she rose.

  “Miz Patterson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sign here, please.” The deliveryman met her halfway across her lawn, handing her first his clipboard and then a long white box embossed with a florist’s name and tied with a red satin ribbon. “Nice garden you got there,” he said with a tip of his hat as he climbed back into the truck.

  She was a sucker for flowers. Without waiting to go in and wash up, Johanna opened the box. They were roses. Not a dozen red or two dozen pink, but one long-stemmed sample of every color she’d ever seen, from the purest white to the deepest red, and all the pinks and golds between. Charmed, she lowered her face to the box to draw in their scent.

  Heady. Roses were always heady, lush and unashamedly sensual.

  It wasn’t her birthday. In any case, her father—or rather her father’s secretary—wasn’t imaginative enough to have thought of such a sweet and charming gift. Though her fingertips were soiled, she pulled open the card that had come with the box.

  I don’t know your favorite color. Yet. Sam.

  She wanted to shrug it off. Pretty gestures came so easily to some. It would have taken only a casual order to an assistant to have them delivered. How well she knew it. So he’d found her, she thought with a shrug as she started back across the lawn. The deal was still on, and she’d live up to her end of it.

  She tried, really tried, to set them aside and go back to work on the buds she’d planted herself. But she couldn’t dismiss the roses, didn’t have the heart to dampen her own pleasure. She was smiling when she sniffed the flowers again. Smiling still when she went into the house to arrange them.

  ***

  He hadn’t looked forward to an evening quite so much in a long time. It was easy to compare it to a winning poker hand or a successful day at the track. He’d never cared half as much for the purse as for the winning. He’d have preferred to think of it in those terms, but the truth was that he was looking forward to spending a few hours in Johanna Patterson’s company.

  Maybe he was intrigued because she was so disinterested. Sam took a turn sharp and fast while the radio blared through the open windows. What man didn’t appreciate a challenge? If she’d taken him at his word on their first meeting, they might have enjoyed a pleasant lunch and an easy hour. He’d never know if that would have been the end of it. The fact that she’d refused, and had continued to refuse, only made him more determined to wear her down.

  Women came easily to him. Too easily. Sam wouldn’t deny he’d gone through a stage when he’d taken advantage of that. But his background, and what many might have considered the rather quaint and traditional values that had gone into it, had surfaced again.

  The press could beat the drum of his romantic adventures all they liked. The truth was, he was a romantic. Rolling from one bed to the next had never been his style.

  There were two Sam Weavers. One was intensely private, guarded about matters like family and relationships, the things that really mattered. The other was an actor, a realist who accepted that the price of fame was public consumption. He gave interviews, didn’t bother to dodge the paparazzi and was always willing to sign an autograph. He’d learned to shrug off whatever reports were exaggerations or outright lies. They were the public Sam’s problem. The private one couldn’t have cared less.

  He wondered, given what he now knew about Johanna Patterson’s background, which Sam Weaver she would understand.

  She was the only child of the respected producer Carl Patterson, the product of his first, and reportedly most tempestuous marriage. Her mother had disappeared or, as some reports put it, “gone into seclusion,” after the marriage had failed. Johanna had grown up in the luxury of Beverly Hills, had attended the best schools. Some rumors stated that she adored her father, others that there was no love lost between them. In either case, she was the only offspring Patterson had after four marriages and numerous affairs.

  He was surprised that she lived back in the Hills. He’d expected some slick condo in the city or a wing in her father’s Beverly Hills estate. The sharp professional woman he’d met seemed out of place so far from the action. He was more surprised when he found the house.

  It was tiny. Like a dollhouse, but without the gingerbread. Hardly more than a cabin, it was rustic and sturdy, with the wood unpainted and the panes of glass sparkling in the evening sun. There wasn’t much land before the trees and the hills took it over. What was there was uneven and rocky. To compensate—more, to enhance it—flowers and budding vines were everywhere. The dashing little Mercedes parked in the driveway looked as though it had been left there by mistake.

  Hands in pockets, he stood beside his own car and looked again. She didn’t have any close neighbors, and the view was nothing to write home about, but it seemed as though she’d carved out her own corner of the mountainside. He knew about that. Appreciated it.

  When he reached the door, he caught the scent of sweet peas. His mother planted them each spring, outside the kitchen windows. Johanna opened the door and found him smiling.

  “Brigadoon,” he said, and watched her polite smile turn to an expression of puzzlement. “I was trying to think what your place reminded me of. Brigadoon. Like it’s only here once every hundred years.”

  Damn him, she thought, feeling almost resigned. She’d barely managed to put the roses in perspective and here he was, charming her again. “I wasn’t sure you’d find it.”

  “I have a good sense of direction. Most of the time.” He glanced toward the flowers that flanked both sides of her house. “From the looks of things, the roses were overkill.”

  “No.” It would have been petty not to let him know they’d pleased her. “It was sweet of you to send them.” He wasn’t wearing a dinner suit, but a breezy linen shirt and pleated slacks. Johanna was glad she’d guessed right when she’d bypassed glitz for the subtler lines of a slim-skirted white dress. “If you’d like to come in a minute, I’ll get my jacket.”

  He did, though he thought it would be a shame to cover up her arms and shoulders. The living room was small enough to be cozy. She’d arranged deep chairs by a white bricked fireplace and had added dozens of pillows. It made Sam think that when Johanna was finished with work she liked to take off her shoes and snuggle in.

  “This isn’t what I expected.”

  “No?” She pulled on a sizzling tomato-red jacket. “I like it.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it, I said it wasn’t what I expected.” He noted his roses had been given a place of honor on the mantel, tucked prettily in a clear, widemouthed vase that glinted at the bottom with colored pebbles. “Do you have a favorite?”

  She glanced at the roses. “No. I just like flowers.” The clusters of rubies at her ears glinted as she adjusted them. “Shall we go?”

  “In a minute.” He crossed to her, noticing with some interest the way she stiffened up. Despite it, he took her hand. “Are you going to be a good sport about this?”

  She let out a little sigh. “I’ve thought about it.”

  “And?” It was the easy curving of his lips that made her relax.

  “I decided I might as well.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Some.”

  “Mind a bit of a ride?”

  Curious, she tilted her head. “No, I suppose not.”

  “Good.” He kept her hand in his as they walked outside.

  ***

  She should have known he was up to something. They didn’t drive into the city as she’d expected. Rather than comment, Johanna let the conversation flow as she wondered how to handle him. Actors were a tricky bunch. They knew how to set the stage, how to read their lines, how to put on whatever face was most appropriate to the situation. At the moment, it seemed Sam had chosen to be the casually friendly companion a woman could relax with. Johanna wasn’t ready to give him an inch.

  He drove fast, just faster than the law allowed and just under the edge of safety.
Even when they left the freeway for a road that was rough and sparsely populated, he continued at the same steady clip.

  “Mind if I ask where we’re going?”

  Sam negotiated a lazy turn. He’d wondered how long it would take before she asked. “To dinner.”

  Johanna turned to study the landscape. The land rolled by, wide and dusty. “Something over an open fire?”

  He smiled. She’d used her haughty tone again, and damned if he didn’t enjoy hearing it. “No, I thought we’d eat at my place.”

  His place. The thought of dining privately with him didn’t alarm her. She was too confident of her ability to handle whatever situation cropped up. She was more curious about the fact that he would have a place this far from the glitz. “You have a cave?”