She directed him street by street toward her condo while he concentrated on his driving. Every time a car whizzed by in the opposite lane, he found himself flinching. Didn’t they know they were on the wrong side of the road?
“You really should have let me drive,” she said. “We’d be there by now.”
“I’m enjoying myself,” he lied.
“I’m not,” she said. “Your driving stinks. Pull over and let me get behind the wheel.”
Her request only made him more determined to see it through. He was a proud Scotsman, and that meant seeing a job to completion. Forty minutes later, they pulled up in front of her two-story town house.
She was out of the car in a flash and on her way up the curved walkway by the time he turned off the ignition. He joined her at the front door.
“I have a security system,” she warned him. “Once I put my key in the lock, we have thirty seconds to get inside so I can deactivate the alarm.”
“This is a dangerous place?”
“Every place is dangerous,” she said. “Don’t you know that?”
He hated the thought of her barricaded behind alarms and wires and high fences. There was no need for that where he came from. He told himself that it was not his business, that this was her life and she was free to live it any way she chose. Still, he found himself shielding her body from view as she inserted the key into the lock.
Sam wondered why he was standing so close to her. “Could you move a little?” she asked politely. “You’re blocking out the light.” She also wondered why, all things considered, she wasn’t more annoyed with him.
She turned the key.
Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight…
She stepped inside.
Twenty-seven, twenty-six, twenty-five…
So did Duncan.
Twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two…
He stood so close to her that she was practically in his arms. She’d have to take him to task about that when she had a moment.
Twenty-one, twenty, nineteen…
She had to deactivate the alarm before the entire Houston police department showed up on her doorstep.
Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen…
“There!” She finished pressing in the code and waited for the green light to flash in recognition. “See? It wasn’t so terrible. We weren’t captured by terrorists. You can give me a little breathing room now.”
He didn’t seem inclined to do it, so she stepped around him and dropped her beaded purse on the Parsons table in the foyer.
“The telephone is in the kitchen,” she said. “The directory is on the bookshelf near the desk in the corner. I’ll be right back.”
Duncan watched her disappear up the staircase in a swirl of pink satin and lace. Beautiful and unreachable. He knew the combination well. He also knew to avoid it at all costs. Why was he going along with this charade about the ten thousand dollars? He didn’t want or need her money. If he had the brains he was born with, he would be long gone by the time she came downstairs.
He saw a formal room to the right of the stairs and a dining room to the left. He followed the narrow hallway to the back of the apartment where it opened up into a large, high-ceilinged kitchen with paddle fans and every modern convenience he could imagine and a few he couldn’t. The directory was where she said it would be, and he flipped quickly to the section marked Taxicab Service and chose a number.
“I need a ride to the airport,” he said. “As soon as you can get here.”
“We’ll need your address.”
He swore, then hung up the phone. He didn’t know the address. He wasn’t even sure he was still in Houston proper, for that matter. He was trapped until she returned and gave him the street number.
SAM CONSIDERED the wisdom of locking herself in her bedroom and waiting for him to leave, but decided that was the coward’s way out. Not that she had anything against being a coward. It was just that the man was so stubborn, he might take a week or two before he took the hint.
No, the best way to go about this was to be forthright and honest. And if that failed, lie through her teeth.
She pulled on a pair of jeans and shrugged into a navy blue sweatshirt with frayed sleeves. Quickly she pulled the pins from her elaborate hairdo then dragged her fingers through the mass of waves. Barefoot, she hurried downstairs to see him on his way.
She fished her checkbook out of her desk drawer then marched into the kitchen. “I’ll write you a check and then—” She stopped when she realized she was the only one in the room. Had she been upstairs long enough for him to call a cab and leave? He wouldn’t do that. Still, he had to be somewhere. She stepped into the hallway and noticed light seeping from under the closed door of the powder room. Mystery solved.
She decided to make some coffee to fortify him for his trip. A terrible thought occurred to her as she pulled the pot from the cupboard. What had she done with the pregnancy test she’d bought? The last time she’d noticed it, it was on the vanity in the powder room. The same powder room where Duncan Stewart was right that minute.
A sense of dread filled her but she tried to push it away with a dose of common sense. She wasn’t the kind of woman who left things lying around like that. She was orderly and precise to a fault. No, she must have put it away in the upstairs linen closet, the one with all the other things she’d never use.
No cause for alarm, she told herself as she turned on the cold water to fill the pot. Unless he started rummaging around for extra towels or something, the odds of him stumbling over the home pregnancy kit were about a million to one.
She heard the bathroom door open, then the sound of male footsteps approaching. She had
