Mystery Date (Harlequin Blaze) (6 page)

He didn’t sound like himself, either, and her blood pushed through her veins as she tried to match the voice with her image of him. But even blindfolded, she still saw Riley.

She pointed toward the cuffs on the table. “You’ll want to make sure I can’t take off this blindfold.”

“Why?”

“Because even though you don’t want me to know your identity, I’m dying to see who you are.” Or who he was going to play at being.

She’d meant it teasingly, but was he thinking that she should know who he was by now? It felt as if a piece of her heart had crumbled because she wasn’t sure just how invested he was in all these games she was introducing.

Was she seeing how far he would go before he left her? Would she be getting a divorce from him before they were married thirty-seven years just like her parents had been, saving them the time and heartache?

As she felt Riley reach for the handcuffs, she remembered the first time she had seen him, during a party. He’d been leaning against the outside wall of the fraternity house by the pool with some friends, smiling and drinking a soda, and she had thought what a nice guy he probably was. She’d been a freshman who didn’t know much about boys, and she and Riley had ended up friends. It’d only been after college that she had met up with him again and the fireworks had started.

It had been smooth sailing ever since...until now, when she felt the handcuffs close around her wrists.

She turned her face to him, forgetting for a moment that she couldn’t see him from under the blindfold.

“This is how you want it?” he asked again.

She nodded, and he stood, taking her by the waist at the same time, then putting her on the chair and raising her hands above her head. She rested her palms on her head, feeling vulnerable, her breasts pushing against her sweater.

As her pulse flailed, he pulled up her skirt, and her first instinct was to close her legs. But he guided them back open.

Heat sang through her, but so did a little bit of fear, as her clit throbbed in anticipation.

“Do you like not being able to see me, Dani?” he asked. “Is this dangerous for you?”

“It’s safe enough.” Always safe with Riley.

At least, that was what she thought until he slipped his hand between her legs, touching her at her most sensitive point.

She made a desperate sound, and he tugged her panties away from her body. Air tickled her.

“Who am I tonight?” he asked, and she detected a trace of that sadness in him again. “Who do you want me to be?”

“I...”

She wanted to say “Riley,” but that didn’t go along with the dark-man fantasy.

When he eased his fingers between her legs and strummed her, she breathed in and clamped her arms around her head. He put his mouth close to her ear, and when he spoke, she startled.

“You need to think about who you really want, Dani,” he said softly.

Was he saying that she needed to name an identity for him so that the fantasy would work? Or was there something more important he wanted her to think about?

She bit her lip as he worked her with his fingers, pushing her toward a place where, hopefully, she was going to see the light.

* * *

D
URING THE CAR
ride to the Sea Breeze Suites where Margot and Leigh were staying for a couple of nights, Leigh answered every question Margot had about the date. Even when they’d gotten back to their room, camped out on their beds while hardly able to even think about getting to sleep yet, Margot didn’t stop her inquisition.

“Really?” she asked for about the twentieth time. “You’re going on another date with him?”

The more Margot disbelieved her, the more determined Leigh was to have her next encounter with Callum.

Leigh Vaughn, with her skinny jeans and a whole new attitude. She hadn’t realized how boring her life was until tonight, when she’d experienced a little bit of adventure.

And craved more.

“You bet I’m going back,” she said. “And you know what? If he can play a game with me, I can play just as well. You should’ve seen me at dinner with the honey. You would’ve been proud.”

Seemingly persuaded, Margot leaned back against the pillows she’d propped against the headboard. Then she smiled like a well-fed cat. “Leigh has arrived.”

Was that a blush she felt creeping up her face?

Nah. Women who flirted with unknown men didn’t blush.

After kicking off her hand-tooled red boots and putting her feet on the mattress, she leaned back against the headboard, too.

“I’ve been asking myself one question since I left,” she said. “What kind of man invites over a well-known cook he somehow knew from college and cuts out of the date as if his house is on fire?”

“You really want me to answer that?” In the car, Margot had compared Callum to everyone from Count Dracula to the Marquis de Sade. You just never knew, she said. But now she sighed. “I was on the computer while you were gone, conducting another search of Phi Rho Mu. But there’re no millionaires who matched the name Callum.”

“Whoever he is, I think he’s kind of shy.”

“Shy? Some of the things he said to you—especially that opening line about coming—aren’t the stuff shy men say.”

“Playing a game can make a person brassier than they usually are.” Leigh thought about the moment she’d licked the honey off her fingers and when she’d spread it over the bread with suggestive slowness. “I know that having him in the shadows did something to
me.
It gave me some...”

“Power?”

“Yeah.” Leigh turned her head so she could look at Margot. “I’ve never had power before.”

“Yes, you have. You’ve got a TV show. You’re a rising star, Leigh. That’s some power.”

“Business is different.”

They were both quiet for a moment. In fact, Margot seemed too quiet. And she had that expression on her face that she got whenever she and Leigh talked about their jobs.

Enough was enough. “What’s going on with you, Marg?”

It must’ve been the compassionate tone of her voice, because Margot closed her eyes, then put on an embarrassed smile.

“I was going to tell you sometime or another. Might as well be now.”

“Is everything okay?”

“More than okay. In most ways.” She tucked a dark strand of hair behind her ear. “Do you know why I’m not writing the ‘single woman on the go’ books anymore?”

Something was already sinking inside Leigh’s chest. “No.”

Margot shrugged. “My publisher canceled my last contract. Sales were declining, they said.”

“Oh, Margot.” Leigh sat away from the headboard.

She held up a hand. “No pity, please. Don’t they say that when a door closes on you, a window opens? Well, that’s what happened with this new blog and the ‘city girl goes country’ book I’m working on. You know the blog’s getting a lot of hits, and maybe that could lead to another publisher buying a book or two. And then there’s Clint.” Margot got a dreamy look in her eyes. “He’s the best opened window of all.”

“So life is good?”

“How can it not be with him around? Everything’s great, including the fact that his brothers, who were about to sue the pants off of him because he didn’t want to sell the cutting-horse ranch, have backed down now that we’ve got a bulldog lawyer on our side.”

Leigh leaned against the headboard again, smiling at her friend.

Margot returned the gesture. “Know what the worst part of all this was, though?”

“What?”

“Telling you that I’d failed.”

Leigh knit her brows, about to argue, but Margot went on.

“We’ve had this competitive thing going on since college. Last month you even told me that you’ve always wanted to be just like me, and that everything came so easily to me.”

Leigh remembered. They’d been in a bridal shop, perusing gowns for Dani. She had gotten a pang that day—the sense that she would probably never get married because her inner chubby girl kept telling her no man would want her in the long run, after she inevitably gained all her weight back. She’d told Margot that she more or less envied her because Margot had always been the perfect one, but then her friend had gotten that expression on her face....

Now Leigh understood the reason.

“In my eyes,” she said to Margot, “you’re always going to be a winner. Look at how you’ve bounced back already.”

Margot smiled, and she was just about to say something when Leigh’s cell phone rang.

They looked at each other, gazes wide.

“Well?” Margot said, nearly bursting. “Are you going to get that or what?”

Leigh promised to talk to Margot later as she grabbed the phone and peered at the ID screen.

“It’s Beth Dahrling,” she said, her pulse whipping into a frenzy again, just before she pushed the answer button.

* * *

W
HEN
A
DAM RECEIVED
Beth’s Skype call on his computer that night, he was in his bedroom near the attic of the mansion, a room that hadn’t been included in Leigh’s tour.

He pushed aside the quarterly projections for one of the biofuel companies he’d invested in and focused on Beth instead.

She was wearing a silk dressing gown, her hair in a bun at her nape, as she sat at a desk in the guest cottage on the mansion’s property. “I just thought you might want to know that Leigh officially said yes to tomorrow.”

Adam sat back in his chair, smiling. He’d been trying to steady his heartbeat for the past couple of hours while wondering if Leigh would sincerely want to have a second encounter with “Callum.” He’d ended the date so abruptly that he thought he might’ve made a mistake in trying to leave her with her curiosity about him intact.

“You’ll make arrangements for a limousine to pick her up at her hotel tomorrow?” he asked.

“Yes, and I told her where to wait on the beach below the mansion after she’s dropped off. After your date, it’ll be taking her back to her hotel, too.”

“She’ll be here just in time to enjoy the sunset.”

He had a little something planned—slow seduction, heated suggestion, sweet words on a phone as she strolled down the shoreline much as she’d strolled through his rented mansion tonight, flirting with him.... He wasn’t sure what would come after that, though.

All he knew was that he had to see her again. Hear her voice, her laugh.

Beth reached for the keyboard as if to terminate the connection.

“Wait,” he said. “You’re not still angry with me.”

“
Angry
isn’t the word.” She looked away from the computer, offscreen.

“Then what’s going on with you?”

Her jaw tightened, and he could tell he was in for it.

“We’ve known each other a fairly long time, Adam,” she said, still unwilling to meet his computer gaze. “I didn’t know you in college—you weren’t there long enough for that—but you were still young when you and Carla hired me to manage your business affairs.”

“My late twenties wasn’t that young. Especially after what I’d gone through when Dad died.” And a few years later, he’d felt even older after watching how much Carla had suffered with the damned cancer.

“Believe it or not,” Beth said, finally looking into the computer’s eye, “you were different back then. You were...normal.”

The word struck him. “Normal?”

“You actually had the capacity to feel. You wouldn’t have shut yourself away and screwed with a woman’s head like you did tonight...and like you’re probably going to do tomorrow. Unless I’m wrong and you’re going to be Adam Morgan with her.”

A short laugh escaped him. “What’s normal anyway?”

Was it setting yourself up like a target and waiting for life to shoot bullets at you? Was it taking those bullets and pretending that they hadn’t ripped you apart? Or was “normal” the opposite—putting on layers and layers of protection just so you could make sure you never got hit again?

Beth was shaking her head. “Don’t ever ask me what normal is, Adam. I might not have the definition, but I know it’s not this. And I don’t think for a minute that this Callum act is going to make you happy in the end. As I told you earlier, someone’s going to get burned in your little game, and I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be you.”

He bristled. “Overly concerned for Leigh, are we?”

“She was one of my sorority sisters and in general she’s a nice person. I don’t like to see people hurt.” She tilted her head. “I don’t like to see you hurting, either.”

At that moment, he wished he could be different, if only for Beth’s sake. But he liked being this way, didn’t he? Or maybe he just had to be this way to tolerate what life dealt out.

“Truthfully,” Beth said, drawing her robe around her tighter, “I’m surprised Leigh is going for this.”

He was, too, but he didn’t say so.

Beth lifted up her hands in a “who can figure it out?” gesture. “I guess you must have caught her at the right time. She lost all that weight, and I can tell you that as a woman, even taking off five pounds makes you feel like a goddess. She’s feeling that with Callum, I suppose.”

“Leigh’s a big girl, and she knows what she wants,” he said. “Tonight she flirted with Callum. It was good for both of us. Why ruin it when there’s only going to be one more date?”

Beth merely nodded, looking so tired. He sensed a surrender, as if she had no idea what to say to him anymore.

But she might as well have been telling him that Carla wouldn’t have known who he was. His wife wouldn’t have recognized Adam in the guise of Callum at all.

As he and Beth said good-night and ended their connection, Adam tried to get his mind back on work, but it never quite got there. He couldn’t stop thinking about tomorrow night, when Leigh would come again.

And when he would go back to being the man he wasn’t.

4

T
HE LIMOUSINE DROPPED
Leigh off near a gate at the foot of the driveway that led to Callum’s rented seaside mansion, and she donned her white sweater just before she got out of the backseat.

The uniformed driver beat her to the door. She was an older woman in a suit, her hair pulled back in a gray bun and light pink lipstick her only note of color. As Leigh got out, the driver handed her a phone.