“What?” Jules persisted.
“Just leave me the fuck alone.”
“It’s the rest of the time that what?” Jules asked.
Sam tried to eat. Now it tasted like cold crap.
“She likes you when she’s drunk, but it’s the rest of the time that what?” Jules would not let go of it. “The rest of the time, as in when she’s sober?”
Sam set down the fork very carefully, instead of throwing it across the room. Or at Jules, who simply would not let this rest. “Look, she sobers up, and it’s like she . . . she . . . fuck! She instantly forgets who I am. Sobered up, she can’t see past her own fucking expectations, all right? She thinks I’m some rednecked asshole, so, yeah, okay, I play the part. Jesus.” He glared at Jules. “She thinks she knows me, but she doesn’t have a clue. She’s prejudged, prelabeled, and prerejected me. How the fuck do you fight that?”
Jules laughed. “Well, gee, I couldn’t possibly know what that’s like.”
Sam realized what he’d just said and who he’d just said it to.
As a gay man, Jules had spent most of his life prejudged, prelabeled, and prerejected by most of society.
Including Sam.
“Ah, fuck.” He couldn’t hold the other man’s gaze.
“Fuck is kind of like your aloha, right?” Jules said. “It means hello and good-bye and thank you and—in this case—I’m sorry?”
Sam had to laugh at that. “I am sorry,” he managed to say. “You’re . . . okay.”
“Whew,” Jules said. “I was worried about myself for a minute there.”
“Just don’t get too close.”
Jules grinned. “Sweetie, you’re hot, but my heart belongs to Adam.” His smile faded. “And something tells me your heart belongs to Alyssa.”
Sam looked at him. “Does she . . .” God, he couldn’t believe he was actually asking this. “Ever say anything about me?”
Jules looked uncomfortable.
“Forget it,” Sam said. “Don’t answer that. That’s not fair. Whatever she said, she probably said it in confidence.”
“She thinks you’re great in bed.”
Sam laughed. “She told you that?”
“Well, sure. We compare notes. Kidding! No, the past few days, she’s been doing this kind of hold me back, you know, keep me away from him thing.” Jules sighed and shifted in his seat, as if deciding how much to tell him. “Between you and me, Alyssa doesn’t get out much. I’m pretty much a hundred percent certain that she hasn’t been with anyone between you and you. No, I’m a hundred and ten percent certain. She would’ve told me if she had.”
“She talks to you about private stuff, huh?” Sam asked. He shook his head and had to laugh. “You and me, together we’re the perfect man for Alyssa Locke. She tells you her secrets, and you love her unconditionally—and you’ve got no problem telling her that. And me . . .”
Jules nodded. He knew what Sam gave her. There was no need to say it aloud.
Sam made her come.
“I think she’s the one who’s been using me,” he told Jules.
Jules nodded again. “Maybe you should tell her it’s not enough.”
Sam nodded, too. He closed his eyes, remembering the way she’d walked in on him crying. Jesus. It was possible that she already knew.
“Mrs. Shuler, remember me? I’m Senior Chief Stan Wolchonok. Marte Gunvald’s son.”
Helga peered out from behind the chain lock on her hotel room door at the large man standing there. Marte’s son. “Of course,” she said with a smile to hide her lie. Had they met? Yes, obviously they had.
“Desmond Nyland called me, ma’am. He thought you might appreciate some company for lunch.”
“Oh, is it that time already?”
“Yes, ma’am. If you’re not ready, I don’t mind waiting out here.”
Don’t leave without your room key, notepad, and purse. The note was right there, right in front of Helga’s nose. “Let me just get my purse,” she told him. Stanley. Stanley, Stanley, Stanley.
She closed the door and went to the dresser, quickly leafing to a fresh page in her notebook. “Stanley,” she wrote, and stuffed her pad into her purse, along with the room key. On second thought, she took the pen and wrote the name on the palm of her left hand. “Stanley.”
She checked her hair and her lipstick in the mirror and went out the door.
“Got your key?” Stanley asked, holding the door open a crack.
Helga opened her purse. There it was. Good. She held it up for him to see and he closed the door tightly.
“Don’t you have better things to do with your afternoon?” she asked.
“Actually, ma’am, I do have to eat and . . .” He smiled tightly. “Let’s just say I welcome the distraction.”
Hmmm. “Do I know you well enough to comment that that sounds as if you’ve got woman trouble?”
He laughed. “I don’t think anyone knows me well enough to say that to me.”
“Not even your mother?”
“With the sole exception of my mother. You’re right. But she’s been gone a long time.”
“She helped save my life,” Helga told him. “Did I already tell you that? She and Annebet and your grandparents, too. When the Nazis began rounding up the Danish Jews, they took us in. Hid us. For weeks. It was doubly dangerous because Hershel—my brother—and Annebet were working for the resistance.” She pushed the down button for the elevator. “Did your mother ever tell you about that time?”
“Not a lot. And I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “We can’t take the elevator. If the power goes out . . .”
“Of course,” she said. “What was I thinking?” She followed him to the stairs.
He held the door for her. “Did you say your brother’s name was Hershel?”
“Yes.” She held tightly to the bannister as she started down the stairs.
“Hershel Rosen?”
“Yes.”
“My aunt Anna told me about him,” Stanley said.
“Really?” Helga stopped on the landing between flights of stairs, and Stanley courteously let her pretend that it wasn’t because she was out of breath. “Did she tell you they had been married?”
“Well, considering she called herself Anna Rosen, I guess I’d always just known—”
“Anna? Not Annebet?”
“My mother sometimes called her by her full name, you know, when they were arguing, but her prescription pad said Dr. Anna Rosen.”
Helga wasn’t sure whether she wanted to laugh or cry. Anna had been Hershel’s sweet name for her. She started down the stairs again. “No wonder I could never find her. I searched for a Dr. Annebet Gunvald.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I should have known,” Helga said. “Anna Rosen. What did she tell you? About Hershel.”
“That she’d married him when they were both pretty young,” Stanley told her. “That they didn’t have your parents’approval. That he was Jewish. When I was a kid I used to go with her to synagogue. She claimed she was an atheist, but . . . She liked to go. She told me she and Hershel worked for the resistance, that it was pretty unorganized, even after the Germans came looking for the Jews, but that everyone in town stepped forward to hide their neighbors.”
“Seventy-eight hundred Jews in Denmark,” Helga told him, “and all but four hundred seventy-four escaped to Sweden, thanks to people like your mother and her family.” She smiled. “Do you know when your father—no, your grandfather—came to warn us that the order had come to remove the Jews from Denmark, my father and mother didn’t believe him. They argued for so long that your grandfather was still there when the Germans came pounding on the door. We hid in the basement, and Herr Gunvald went out the back. He came around the front of the house and told the Germans that we weren’t home, that we were vacationing up north. He told them to go away, that he’d been asked to keep the property safe, and he was determined to do so. He threatened to call the police. And do you know, they actually left?”
“I can’t imagine what that must’ve been like to live through,” he told her as he ushered her into the dank restaurant in the basement. She snuck a look at her left palm. Stanley.
“We stayed with Marte’s family for weeks while Annebet and Hershel used their contacts to try to arrange passage to Sweden,” she told him, thanking him as he held out a chair for her at a nearby table.
He glanced around the room as if he were looking for someone before he sat down, too. He was trying not to let it show, but she could read frustration in his body language.
“She’s not here, is she?” Helga said.
He looked startled for a moment, but then he laughed. “No, she’s not.”
“You want to talk about it?”
His smile was beautiful. “The situation is a little, um . . . Well, let’s just say it’s not something I’d share even with my mother.”
“Ah,” Helga said. “You slept with her. That pretty pilot, right? What happened? Didn’t you tell her you’re in love with her? Of course not. Men always leave out the most important details.”
Stanley didn’t blink. “Might I recommend the curried vegetables over noodles? There’s a buffet line, I can get us both plates. It’s quicker than ordering.”
“Don’t worry,” Helga said. “I won’t tell.”
She probably wouldn’t even remember by the time he came back with their lunch.
By 1220, Alyssa was feeling solid enough to give lunch a try.
But the sight of Sam Starrett and Jules Cassidy sitting together in the hotel restaurant, deep in discussion, made her blood run cold.
What was Starrett up to? God, he was probably setting Jules up for something. This had to be some kind of cruel con, some kind of payback or revenge trick—all because she’d seen him cry.
Didn’t it?
Except she was watching Starrett’s eyes as she walked toward him. She saw when he first noticed her. He looked up and a myriad of emotions crossed his face. Apprehension and embarrassment, anger and even fear—she saw it all before he quickly looked away.
He actually thought she was going to walk up to him and rub in his face the fact that she’d seen him crying.
She knew better than to do something like that.
Didn’t she?
Confused, she made a sharp detour and went to the table where piles of wrapped sandwiches were on ice.
She couldn’t deal with this. She couldn’t deal with Starrett looking that nervous at the sight of her, couldn’t deal with not knowing for certain if she had been about to fling his tears right back in his face.
Dear God, she could actually imagine herself doing it. All Starrett would have had to do was greet her with some stupid-ass comment about the clothes she was wearing, and she would’ve lashed out without thinking. “Poor baby, are you going to cry over that now, too?”
When had she become such an insensitive monster?
Whatever had made Sam cry, that was none of her business. It was off-limits. Using it to try to hurt him was going too far. He didn’t seem to know where to draw the line in the war they had going between them, but damn it, that didn’t mean she had to sink to new depths.
Yes, his tears were none of her business.
Unless, of course, he’d been crying over her.
Kind of the way she’d cried over him just this morning.
“You, um, getting that to go?”
He was standing right behind her.
Alyssa braced herself before she turned to face him.
“I, uh, wanted to apologize for, um, shouting at you that way in my room,” he said, not quite able to meet her eyes. “You caught me at, um, you know, a disadvantage there, and I, uh, I kind of freaked out.” He cleared his throat. “I know you thought I was going to hit you, but, Jesus, I would never do that, Lys.” He looked directly into her eyes. “I would never hit you. Never.”
“Oh,” she said, surprised. “No, I didn’t think that. Not at all. I didn’t . . .”
He nodded. Forced a smile. “Well, good.”
“Why were you sitting with Jules?” She wanted to know, and she figured what the hell, she might as well ask. Especially when he was standing right in front of her, completely stripped of his arrogance and his cock-of-the-walk attitude.
Well, maybe not completely stripped. He had enough in him to bristle slightly. “Don’t get any ideas. I’m not crossing over to the other side or anything.”
She tried to swallow a laugh and failed. “Sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s just, out of all the men I’ve met in my life, you’re about the most unflinchingly heterosexual.”
He laughed softly. “Thank you. I know you don’t mean that as a compliment, but thank you anyway.” He looked down at the sandwich she was holding, gestured toward it with his chin. “Are you taking that with you? Do you mind if I, uh, walk with you?”
Alyssa nodded, unable to trust her voice.
“You want a soda to go with that?”
“Water,” she said, and he grabbed two bottles from a bin of ice as they headed out of the restaurant.