Legal Action - Box Set (39 page)

              She smiled and held a finger to her lips, signaling for him to hush, and she moved one of his hands between her legs and watched as his eyes turn smoky.

              “You really are incorrigible,” he whispered, “isn’t there a saying of some sort? Something like, “a lady in public and unbelievable in the hospital bed!””

              His fingers slipped between her legs and she moaned a silent moan as he found the wet folds and clit that seemed to vibrate under his touch. She pushed his jeans down and freed his pulsing cock and it was so hot and hard in her hand that she drew in her breath, and no sound came from her wounded throat. She moved her free hand to push his shirt up and off of him, and an alarm began to sound on a machine by the bed. Before he could spring away from her, she wrapped her legs tightly around him and pulled his wonderful mouth back down to hers.

              A heavy-set nurse entered the room and stopped dead in her tracks, and Charlotte smiled at her and put her finger to her lips once again.

              “Excuse me,” the nurse said, planting her hands on her ample hips, “the Ambassador asked to be notified as soon as the young lady was awake. I don’t believe he’ll care for this at all,” she said in heavily accented English.

              Charlotte gave Finn a sly look and moved her hand to his bare ass so that the nurse looked horrified.

              “Then you’d better wait a little while before you tell him she’s awake,” Finn said, and his lips moved to Charlotte’s neck as she shook with silent laughter, and the nurse turned off the beeping alarm and stormed out.

              “I love you,” Charlotte’s mouth formed the words as her hand guided him inside her, and they both closed their eyes at the hot, wet, ecstasy of that first moment. Then they moved together, their mouths and hands everywhere, tasting, and touching. Until she shuddered silently, and he cried out loudly, and they were happy and didn’t have a care, because they were alive and together.

*

              After Finn had gone to the bathroom and brought a warm damp cloth and watched her eyes as he moved it over those sensitive parts of her body that he loved so well, there was a knock on the door.

              “I’m not interrupting am I?” Maddie said, poking her head in the room.

Then Amanda and JP practically waltzed through the door, and JP said, “I’m pretty sure they’re finished from the sound of it
all the way down the hall!
”

“Sorry about that, you know my wife, she wants what she wants when she wants it,” Finn said, putting his shirt on as his face turned red.

Charlotte smiled and smoothed her hospital gown contentedly.

“Thought you’d get right back to the baby making, huh?” Amanda asked.

“Bly?’ Charlotte whispered, her eyes suddenly serious.

“He’s good, he’s going to be fine,” Amanda told her, sitting on the edge of the bed and holding her hand. “That witch tried to kill him, and she shot a policeman and left him for dead. She meant to kill you too, Charlotte, do you remember falling in the river?”

Charlotte shook her head and closed her eyes, and JP said, “Let’s not go there right now, you get to leave the hospital tomorrow Char, so we’re told. Most likely to keep from scaring the nurses and setting off all the alarms and shit.”

Charlotte looked past her husband and her friends to her new friend Maddie, and with tears coursing down her face she motioned for her to come closer. She hugged Maddie and her body shook with silent sobs. Maddie cried too, and they held each other for a long while, then Charlotte leaned back a little and mouthed the words very slowly.

“It was you. You figured out about the sequined dress. You saved us!”

Maddie shrugged and blushed and said, “Then we’re friends forever?” and Charlotte nodded and pulled Finn into a group hug and Amanda joined them, and JP rolled his eyes and said he was going to find a pub.

“Where is Atticus?” Charlotte asked Finn, her lips forming the silent words, and he told her the baby was at the Ambassadors hotel suite, safe and sound. So she motioned for him to go with JP, and then she waved her hands wildly for a moment, and reached for a pen and pad of paper and wrote that she wanted to thank Billy Kipling.

“He’s gone, my love,” Finn told her, “he has a little girl in the middle of America somewhere that he’s never seen, he called his ex-girlfriend and told her he wants to get to know his daughter.”

“He’s gone home to Kansas,” Charlotte wanted to say, and Finn handed her a thin envelope from the Grandhotel Pupp.

“He said you were very brave and he was glad it was you that he pulled out of the water,” Finn said, and leaned down to kiss her, then he left to have a beer with JP.

She laid the note aside and then wrote on the pad, “Take me to Bly.”

*

“Alexander Bly wake up,” she whispered with her mouth as close to his ear as possible.

His eyes blinked open and it took a minute for him to focus on the three women standing beside his bed. They were very beautiful, he thought, one tall with darker than dark hair, one small with auburn hair, and one just the right height, with blonde hair that fell softly around her face and the most
alive
look in her enormous brown eyes.

Charlotte sat on the edge of his bed and scribbled on her pad of paper while Bly watched. Then she reached for Maddie’s hand and pulled her close and handed the note to her. Maddie read it to herself and shook her head and tried to step away, but Charlotte held her hand and gave Bly a look, so that he said, “Read the note, please.”

Maddie cleared her throat and had to start over again several times. “Hi Alex, I’m Madison Newland, but you can call me Maddie. I saved your life and Charlotte’s, and I don’t want to be reading this right now but Charlotte is such a bossy-flossy.” She turned red, and Bly smiled for the first time, “Charlotte wants you to be as happy as she is, and she loves you as her dearest friend, and she wants you to take me out on a date.” Maddie’s eyes shot up to Bly, who was smiling, then to Charlotte, who was resting her chin in her hand smiling, then to Amanda who was examining her fingernails and thinking about JP.

“Charlotte gets what she wants, its one date, what can it hurt?” Amanda said, and looking up from her nails for a minute, she tilted her head and smiled too.

*

              “I want you to come home with me to Paris, Alexander, where I can take care of you,” Evangeline said, as she stared into the mirror over the sink next to her son’s hospital bed. She lifted the sides of her mouth and then felt the skin under her chin, testing for signs of sagging, or the dreaded skin droop that happened as a woman aged. She didn’t have those problems thanks to Dr. Henri Battelle, she trusted him with more than her life, she trusted him with her face and body. He nipped, he tucked, he injected, and although she was fifty six, she was eternally young.

“Mother, what happened to the gigolo you were on the cruise with, won’t he be waiting for you to return? Anyway, Isadora takes care of
you
when you’re home, if I went with you the poor old thing would have twice the work to do. Not to mention she’d be cooking for West all the time,” Bly said, as he refused the wheelchair the nurse rolled into the room. “No,” he said, shooing her away, they might enforce that rule in the states, but in Prague it wasn’t how he intended to leave the hospital.

West took the wheelchair and parked it down the hall with the nurse giving him hell about it in rapid-fire Czech. He didn’t want to stay in the room and hear Evangeline bitch at Alex or go on and on about how she was losing her looks. She had to be fifty-something, he guessed, and she still had that glamorous super-model look about her. She was fucking hot and she made his dick hard with her ‘oh so entitled’ Marie Antoinette attitude.

When she swept into the hospital room the night before and stood next to Charlotte, he almost laughed. Their personalities were completely opposite (Evangeline was a total bitch, and he hated to admit it, but Charlotte was kind and thoughtful) yet they looked enough alike to be mother and daughter. It wasn’t really a likeness of features, but of body type and stance. Both were tall and thin, but with dangerously sexy curves, they had black hair and startling blue eyes in smooth alabaster faces. The quality they shared was an unbridled allure and seductiveness. He wondered if Alex could see how alike they were physically, and he also wondered if it was part of Alex’s unshakeable obsession with Charlotte. Evangeline was probably as warm as an ice cube to Alex all his life, maybe unknowingly he was substituting Charlotte’s love for Evangeline’s.

West leaned against the wall outside the hospital room and waited, he still couldn’t believe what had happened in the last few days. Bly International had assembled a team to investigate the details of “Natasha’s” deadly scheme. At Alex’s discretion they would bring criminal charges against anyone who had aided in his abduction with intent to cause harm. The girl West had been seeing admitted that she’d been hired by Natalie to “distract” West, and that she’d supplied some of the drugs used on Bly. It made him sick that she was a cold-hearted gold-digger, but she was, so he turned her over to the authorities to be taken to jail in California.

“Fine, be like that, and he wasn’t a gigolo, really Alexander, do you have to be vulgar?” Evangeline said, as she draped her arm through his and they walked down the hall. “You were always a petulant child and Isadora will probably breathe a sigh of relief when I tell her she won’t have to wait on you hand and foot. Now let’s get going, my darling, I can’t miss my flight, I have the spring couture previews and of course my touch-up appointment with Henri,” she said, and West stared after her, all five feet eleven inches of statuesque beauty.

“Are you over her at last?” she asked her son as they rode down in the elevator.

“Of course I am Mother, although I don’t know why it concerns you.”

“Well, it’s probably best that you aren’t her child’s father, I’m not at all ready to be a grandmother. Not that your sister seems to understand that, she’s already a bit overweight, and the way she carries on with that… muscle-bound barbarian, is disturbing. I fear she’ll be… expecting before she ever makes it to the altar. It is rather a shame about your Charlotte in a way, who knew her father was that tall, gorgeous, blue-eyed ambassador,” Evangeline rambled on.

“She isn’t
my
Charlotte any longer, and please don’t disgrace yourself with the ambassador, he’s a married man,” Bly said, kissing her cheek lightly as West held the door of the Mercedes for her and told the driver to take her to the airport.

“You’re not coming with me to the airport, Alexander? Well, I’m sure West will take care of you. By the way, you’re very handsome West, have I ever told you that? Oh darling, here’s a little something for your birthday,” she handed Bly a small Cartier box from the depths of her purse, then examined her face in a gold compact mirror without ever looking up, as the car drove away.

“Heartwarming, isn’t she?” Bly smiled at West and handed him the Cartier box, “I’m sure it’s a watch,” he said, and they got into another Mercedes that was waiting to take them to the Four Seasons.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Mr. Bly, I completely understand if you’re not feeling up to having dinner so soon after being released from the hospital,” Maddie was saying, she’d answered the phone and Alexander Bly’s voice sent her into an instant fit of panic.

“I feel just fine, Miss Newland, and really I’d like to call you Maddie, but if you insist on calling me Mr. Bly…”

“No! Of course not, yes, call me Maddie, oh shit! Oh, ignore that… what should I call you? Please tell me, and I’m insanely nervous and I’m shutting-up right now!”

He laughed and it was a genuine, feel good laugh, the kind of laugh he needed after the nightmare with Natasha or Natalie or whoever she was. Natalie was her real name, and she had been drugging his drinks from the first night they met, West had learned from the teenage girl. Drugs that rendered him senseless, but let him appear fairly normal to the untrained eye. Prescription meds that allowed her to take control of him from the moment he drank that first tainted drink, and she began to convince him she was the perfect replacement for Charlotte. The hospital found traces of the potent muscle relaxer Soma in his bloodstream, as well as Vicodin, and Oxycodone. It was truly fortunate that he had been found so quickly, the doctors said, or as the dosage of the drugs was increased, the combination would have been lethal.

“Call me Alex, and I’d like to send a car for you. If you don’t mind we’ll have dinner in the hotel restaurant, that way I’ll be close to my room and a bed just in case. Wait, fuck, that didn’t sound right!” he said, and then they both laughed and decided to start again from the beginning.

He called and said his car was in front of her hotel, then he stepped out and smiled at the surprised look on her face when she saw him holding the car door open for her.

Her hand flew up to cover her delighted smile, and her eyes sparkled as she passed in front of him and scooted onto the leather seat.

“You shouldn’t have come out in this cold weather, I didn’t expect it… but you look so much better than you did in the hospital. Healthy… I mean… you looked fine then too, handsome, seriously handsome! Never mind,” she said, and he took her hand and kissed it.

“Thank you for saving my life,” he said, “you look beautiful tonight, but you looked beautiful the night I saw you in the hospital, as well.”

“You’re my boss Mr. Bly… Alex. I work for your company and this is weird, let’s just admit it. I feel so out of place being on a date with you, but I know you’d do anything for Charlotte and she wants so much for you to be happy. I have no idea what went on between you two, and I don’t want to know. I do know this, you have a true friend in her,” she said. Then she wondered why she couldn’t shut her mouth and just enjoy the fact, that for whatever reason, she was going to dinner with Alexander Bly.

“I have an idea,” he said, as the car drove through the snowy streets of Prague, and along the lamp-lit banks of the Vltava River. “We’ll pretend we’re not on a date, we’re just two new friends having dinner, and let’s not talk about Charlotte anymore. Because the truth is, Maddie, when I opened my eyes and saw you standing in the hospital room, before you read the note, I already hoped I would get to see you again.”