All in all she thought it didn’t bode well for her date with Harris later that evening. She’d wanted to have a pedicure and maybe buy something new to wear but there didn’t seem to be time or money. The lights of the city flashed past the windows of the limo as Ray drove her to the Dolphin hotel on Disney property. She’d been there one time to a karaoke bar with some friends.
There was a single red rose on the seat left for her and a note in his own handwriting that said.
The evening awaits.
Her first impulse had been to order Ray to turn the car around and take her home. She had no idea what he expected from her. Well, okay she had a small inkling but she’d realized last night sleeping in the same bed she’d slept in since she was a child that she wasn’t ready for Harris. Harris represented change to her and she’d just gotten comfortable with herself.
She hated riding in the back of the car by herself. It left too much time to think and her thoughts weren’t as pleasant as usual. She lowered the partition between the front and back.
“Yes, ma’am?” Ray asked. His voice was gravelly and low and she wondered what he’d done before he’d driven a limo because there was something in his face that hinted at more.
“How’s it going tonight, Ray?”
He bit on the cigar stump in his mouth, talking around it. “Not bad.”
“How’d you get into the limo service?” she asked.
“Just kind of fell into it.”
“What did you do before?” she asked.
“This and that.”
“Don’t want to talk about it?” she asked. Ray had the look of a man who’d lived a rough and lonely life. She worried that years from now Harris might have that some look about him.
“How’d you guess?”
“I’m not as ditzy as I might appear at times.”
He chuckled. The sound made Sarah smile. One of her gifts was making people feel good.
“What do you know about Harris? Have you driven him for long?”
“This is the first time.”
“Oh. So you wouldn’t know if this is his M.O.”
He coasted to a stop in I-4 traffic and met her gaze in the mirror. “What’s that mean?”
“Nothing. I’m just doubting myself,” she said, more to herself than to Ray.
“Why?” he asked.
She didn’t want to vocalize her insecurity. “Why not? I mean I’m not sophisticated or successful and Harris reeks of those things.”
“Maybe that’s part of your appeal.”
“You think so?”
“I’m sure it is. Don’t sell yourself short, Sarah. You’re a very attractive woman.” Ray turned his attention to the road and a short while later they arrived at the hotel. Ray winked at her as he opened the door and Sarah felt…still unsure.
She wasn’t the kind of woman who met men for dinner in their hotel rooms. No matter how attractive they might be. She hesitated in the lobby. Maybe she’d have Ray take her home. She’d call Harris from the car.
She pivoted.
“Sarah?”
“Hello, Harris.”
“Damn, I wanted to be here when you arrived but the elevator was slow.”
He appeared nervous. Not at all the calm self-assured man she’d come to know. That made her feel better in a hundred ways.
“Ready for dinner?” he asked.
She stared at him not really sure. He looked different tonight. No five-hundred-dollar-suit to make him stand apart from the others milling around the lobby. Yet he did stand apart. Something in his icy-gray eyes told her that getting close to this man would be nearly impossible.
His deceptively casual clothes and intense gaze. The keen intelligence and the weariness that she was coming to understand were part of who he was. His shirt was a cream silk one open at the neck and tucked into a pair of jeans that were so old and faded they clung to his skin like a lover. She drew in a deep a breath as awareness rolled over her.
There was no kidding herself that she had an altruistic goal here. No pretending that teaching Harris to love was her only motivator. She wanted him.
And she knew her heart. Knew it well. There was a reason why she kept going to church each week and lighting candles in the hopes of finding a man. She wanted to believe the things that life had shown her didn’t exist. She wanted to find the happiness in life. The type of happiness she experienced every time a couple fell in love in a movie. She wanted to believe in the illusion that Harris so effortlessly wove around her.
He took her arm and led her to the bank of elevators. His touch swept through her body like fire over dry land. She trembled under the impact and acknowledged that maybe she was here for a very physical reason. It had been a long time since she’d had a lover.
His hand slid down her arm and he slid his fingers between hers. He squeezed gently and she glanced up at him and smiled. There was something so different about Harris tonight.
“Ready?”
“Yes,” she said, realizing she was starting an adventure.
Harris’s room overlooked Epcot center. He’d never been to the theme park despite numerous visits to central Florida. He didn’t believe in deception and fantasy and saw no point in wasting his money. He liked the Dolphin hotel because it was set up along the lines of many of the Japanese places he stayed while traveling in Asia.
But seeing Sarah against the backdrop of make believe made him realize how different they both were. His father had chased an illusion and ended up locked alone in his apartment. It was a warning Harris couldn’t ignore.
His suite was comprised of a sitting area with a sofa and love seat. A desk where he worked and then a bedroom with a large king-size bed.
“This doesn’t look like a hotel room,” she said.
“I travel so often that I take the luxuries I’m used to with me.”
“You bring furniture?”
“Just bookcases.”
“You like to read?”
Like was too soft a word to describe his love of books. But he refused to sound like a geek in front of her. Why what she thought of him was so important, he didn’t know, he only knew that it was. “Yes.”
“Me, too.”
She skimmed her finger along the edges of the hardcover books. New releases sat next to hundred-year-old classics. His tastes were eclectic when it came to reading.
“I love this one,” she said, pausing next to a new title by Nick Hornby, the British author.
“I haven’t read it yet.” Sometimes Harris felt himself living vicariously through novels. For the most part he read family dramas and relationship books. And he was too honest with himself not to admit that those stories were as close as he wanted to come to experiencing those bonds.
“If you like his other titles you’ll enjoy this one,” she said. She watched him closely and his neatly laid plans started to shatter. There was something in her eyes that told him she wasn’t buying his casual pose. She wasn’t going to settle for the surface Harris that the women he’d had affairs with in the past had.
Harris didn’t want to talk about books or likes. He wanted to keep Sarah in a neat little compartment. Not allow himself to know her too well. Just tease himself a little with the intense sexuality she brought to the surface. Tease himself with her warm smile and imagine for these few brief weeks that he was a man worthy of that smile.
“Let’s sit down and eat. I hope you like Japanese food. I ordered box dinners for us. Nothing too sophisticated.”
“Love them. You should try Ichiban downtown,” she said with a smile.
He led her to the table set up in front of the bank of windows. Fiddling with the Bose CD player on the coffee table Harris filled the room with Mozart. There was something soothing about the classical composer. He joined Sarah at the table.
He poured them both a glass of sake and then lifted his glass toward her.
“To serendipity,” she said.
He clinked his glass to hers. He didn’t believe in things like that but he took a sip anyway.
“Why serendipity?” he asked as she toyed with her chopsticks.
She set them down and bit her lower lip. She’s nervous, he thought.
“It brought us together,” she said at last.
“How can you be sure?” he asked, brushing his finger down the side of her face. He thought maybe some sort of karma from a past life was dogging him. Putting him in the path of this woman who tempted him to forget the truths he knew about himself and about life.
“What else would you call it?” she asked, tilting her head to the side. The cool strands of her thick hair brushed the back of his hand. He wanted to twist his wrist and wrap his hand in the silky stuff. Use that grip to bring her head closer to his and plunder her mouth. To make her forget about why they met and to stop talking about things that couldn’t be proven.
“Bad luck,” he said at last.
“Bad?” She shifted to the side breaking the contact with his hand.
“Your car was broken down,” he reminded her, rubbing his fingers together and picking up his chopsticks. They felt hard and coarse after the smoothness of her skin.
“But something good came of it.”
“Our meeting,” he said, sensing she was going to say it.
She nodded. He wasn’t sure what else to say to her. Didn’t she understand that chance meetings weren’t ordained by fate but by routine.
“I’m not sure it’s a good thing,” he said at last.
“Why not?”
“Let’s eat dinner first. We can talk later.”
She looked like she was going to argue but she acquiesced.
“This is your routine?” she asked after they’d finished the main course.
“Pretty much that is my life,” he said, gesturing to his computer.
“I knew you were a workaholic.”
“So are you,” he reminded her.
She glanced around the room. “Where are the pictures of your family?”
“I don’t have a family.”
“No family? Test-tube baby?”
“Nothing so sci-fi. I had a mother and my father is still alive.”
“Then you have a family.”
Family was that image you conjured in your head of a mom and dad and couple of kids. Harris had never had anything close to that. “Not that counts.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked tilting her head to the side. He knew she wanted to offer him comfort but he didn’t want her pity. He wanted her passion.
“Would that make you more comfortable?”
“I don’t know. You know a lot about me. I don’t even know what you do for a living.”
He made money for people with lots of money but that never sounded nice. “I’m a financial consultant.”
“With a Harvard M.B.A.”
“See you know more than you think you do.” This was better. He slid his foot between hers under the table and she arched her eyebrows at him but didn’t move away.
“Why don’t you consider your father family?”
Harris pulled his foot back. Seduction was one thing but baring his soul to Sarah wasn’t something he was prepared to do. His father—damn he should never have brought the man up. “He’s…different.”
“How?” she asked.
He wasn’t saying any more on the topic. He didn’t want her to really understand how messed up he was when it came to relationships. But Sarah reached out and clasped his clenched fist in one of her small hands. She rubbed her finger across the back of his knuckles and he had a glimpse of what might be. That glimpse was enough for him to unclench his hand and look into Sarah’s eyes.
Why should this one woman make him react so strongly when no other one ever had?
“He can’t cope with life. He never leaves his apartment.” Harris felt foolish saying the words out loud but because he wanted Sarah in his bed he owed her a little truth. Seduction was never about truth. Only about wants and needs.
“Oh, Harris.”
“I told you my past is all about the darker side of love.”
“What about the present?”
“What about it?”
“Am I only an obsession?” she asked.
“I can’t decide,” he said, standing and pulling her in his arms. He lowered his head to hers and took the kiss that he’d been waiting a lifetime to taste.
Five
S
arah knew she should get out of that hotel suite as fast as her legs could carry her but she wasn’t going anywhere. Harris’s arms around her felt right in a way that nothing had since her parents’ death twelve long years ago. Too right. And she knew her vulnerabilities better than most women did. She faced them every night when she closed down the restaurant that she fought to save even though working there was a life sentence.
She knew that she was waiting for a man like Harris. That she’d been praying for a guy like him since before she was old enough to realize that real-life seldom resembled fiction. And her one true weakness was that she longed for someone to watch over her. Someone big and strong who’d be willing to help shoulder her burdens—not all the time just once in a while.
She slid away from Harris even though all she wanted to do was rip off her dress and say take me, big boy. Emotionally she stepped back as well. Reaching up she smoothed her hair and tried to make some appearance of normalcy even though her pulse was racing to beat the band.
She and Harris had some unfinished business before things went too much further. Because when he’d held her just a moment earlier she’d realized she already cared about this man with the dark stormy eyes. She already cared about this man who made her forget that happy endings didn’t seem in the cards for her. She already cared for this man who was watching her as if she’d turned into a deadly enemy.
Nerves assailed her and for once she couldn’t talk. He kept watching her, making her more nervous with each passing second. She shrugged and tried to say something but all that emerged was a squeak.
Harris cursed under his breath. “I need a drink.”
He paced to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a whiskey. She watched him unsure what to do next. Watching Harris drink wasn’t it.
She walked around him to the love seat facing the windows. Patting the cushion next to her, she said, “Come join me.”
“I think I’d rather take this news standing up,” he said, tossing back his drink.
“I’m not going to be delivering a proclamation.”
“Then what?”
“I want to finish our conversation from earlier.”