all. And there were only so many Sam-fueled fantasy sessions a girl could host in the privacy of her lonely bedroom. She’d had lovers, off and on, over the years. None of them had so much as put a dent in her love for Sam, of course. And she’d hurt some of them, she knew, with her emotional unavailability. But she hadn’t been celibate, pining in a tower somewhere over her unrequited love.
In all honesty, she’d thought she had it worked out. Sex when she needed it, and Sam in her life forever. Perfect. Right?
Except now it was time to grow up and face the facts: if she wanted children and a husband, she had to get Sam out of her head and heart.
She knew herself well enough to know that that meant excising Sam from her life. Just the thought of it made tears well up in her eyes as she stared bleakly out her windshield. She couldn’t imagine her life without Sam in it. He was her best friend. Her business partner. The one who finished her sentences. He could always make her smile, and he could infuriate her like no one else on the planet. It would be like losing an arm or a leg.
Or a heart.
But there were no half measures with this thing, she could see that. She’d be cheating her future husband if she remained friends with Sam. She had to at least be open to the possibility of loving someone else.
She felt sick to her stomach. Their lives were impossibly intertwined. She lived beneath him, for Pete’s sake. She worked with him. No, not just worked—she owned half the business, he owned the other half. It really would be like lopping off a limb.
But she didn’t see that she had much choice. It wasn’t as though her love for Sam would just curl up and die of its own accord one day. It had been nearly sixteen years and it showed no signs of waning. So, she was faced with a choice—Sam, or a family of her own.
Sitting in her car, Delaney felt the panic rising again. She forced herself to think practically and push the panic away. It was nearly a quarter past ten. She needed to get in to work. At the very least, there would be a big pile of paperwork in her in-tray that needed to be dealt with.
Starting her car, she drove the remaining short distance to the office and parked in her spot. Taking a deep breath, she exited the car and beeped it shut. For the first time ever, the sight of her red-and-white MINI Cooper didn’t bring a smile to her face.
“That bad, huh?” she asked herself wryly as she turned toward the entrance to the building.
She blinked as a startling vision almost plowed in to her.
“Careful!” the woman said, pursing hot pink lips. Delaney’s gaze swept from the woman’s honey-blond mane of tangled hair past impossibly blue eyes, cute little ski-jump nose and neon mouth, only to come to a grinding halt on the woman’s truly spectacular breasts. Whoa! They were so large and so tightly outlined by a white tank top that Delaney could barely pull her gaze away. And she was a woman! She felt a small stab of pity for the male of species. Against breasts like these, most men were powerless.
“Sorry,” she muttered, stepping aside to let the other woman pass.
Jessica Rabbit flashed a tight little smile before strutting away, ass wiggling in her high stiletto heels and short leather miniskirt, despite the fact that there was no one but Delaney to notice.
A true professional, Delaney thought, always committed to the cause.
She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to look like that and walk like that and behave like that. She and Jessica Rabbit might as well come from different planets. Delaney glanced down at her own slim, boyish figure. If the bra manufacturer was on the generous side with their measures, she was a B cup. But more often than not she was an A. And where the other woman’s waist swerved in and out again like the corner of a racetrack, her own body sort of ran straight down, sidestepping the need for such womanly accoutrements as an hourglass waist or childbearing hips. Narrowing her eyes, Delaney decided that she might rival the other woman in the legs department, however. She had a good four inches in height on Jessica, and much of that was leg. And she’d been told she had a nice ass, firm and small.
She sighed and pushed her bangs off her forehead. Why was she standing on the threshold of her business taking stock of herself like this?
Because you know what that woman was doing in this building, she told herself. Or, more accurately, who.
Steeling herself, Delaney pushed open the door and strode into the reception area of their small offices. Debbie looked up from her computer screen and broke into a welcoming smile.
“Hey, Delaney! Thank God you’re here—Sam has been driving us crazy, asking if anyone’s heard from you,” Debbie said.
Delaney’s treacherous heart leaped in her chest, but she barely gave it the time of day. She was used to the damned thing lurching around inside her whenever Sam was in the vicinity. Occupational hazard of having an unrequited crush on her best friend.
“He’s highly excitable,” she said, and Debbie blushed a little.
Delaney gave Debbie an intent look. Yep, all the signs were there—Debbie had a crush on Sam. The poor fool.
Great. Another receptionist bites the dust.
Delaney wondered how long it would take before Sam had to deliver the “I don’t dip my pen in the office ink” speech to Debbie, leading their receptionist to quit so he could go out with her. Judging by the depth of Debbie’s glow-on, not long.
“Your messages are in your office. Sam handled most things, but a few clients only wanted to speak to you and they said they would wait until you got back,” Debbie said.
Delaney nodded her acceptance of this. She was largely responsible for the advertising sales side of the business, while Sam supervised and wrote for the editorial half of the magazine. While he could step into her shoes on occasion and schmooze with the best of them, it wasn’t his natural element.
“About time, lazybones,” a deep male voice said from behind her, and all the small hairs on her forearms stood on end.
“Sam,” she said, bracing herself for the first sight of him after two weeks away.
As usual, absence had made the heart grow fonder. He looked taller, broader, sexier than ever in his worn, faded denims, crumpled T-shirt and scruffy skate shoes. His skin was always tanned thanks to his weekly surfing sessions, and he was still sporting the ridiculously clichéd dreadlocks that he’d been cultivating for the past year. A mixture of his natural chestnut and sun-bleached blond, they hung to his shoulders in thick, matted ropes. On any other thirty-year-old man dreadlocks might look like a pathetic attempt to cling to their youth, but Sam pulled it off with ease.
Bright blue eyes sparkling with pleasure, he stepped forward.
“Laney!” he said, scooping her into his embrace.
For a few heady seconds she was held tight against his hard, hot chest, and his smell swamped her—a mixture of sun and pine forest and spice. Probably soap and laundry detergent, knowing Sam. He famously decried aftershave as being “one step too close to being a she-male” for his tastes, and any scent he had was all his own.
If Calvin Klein bottled it, he could buy himself the World Bank, she figured.
“Sorry I’m late. I had some stuff to take care of,” she said evasively as she extracted
