back for five long years…
Chapter Two
SAM PLACED THE TRAY OF sandwiches on the round table in the alcove in front of the windows and turned to look across the large room. Jolie’s slingback heels sat on the floor at the bottom of the bed, her black silk dress spilled across the burgundy and gold striped raw silk coverlet.
He fought the urge to pick up the dress, hold it to his face, breathe in the scent of the perfume she always wore. Amazone. He’d bought it for her, and she still wore it. There should be a law that no other woman could ever wear that fragrance. It belonged to Jolie.
“Keep it up, Sam, and soon you’ll be writing bad poetry,” he mumbled beneath his breath as he slipped out of his suit jacket and settled it over the back of a chair. He was just sliding his tie out from beneath his collar when the door to the bathroom opened and he turned, his hand still gripping the tie, to see Jolie standing in the open doorway.
She was wrapped in a large white, monogrammed Becket Hotels bathrobe belted tightly at her waist, and was rubbing at her wet head with a matching white towel. “Oh, you’re up here. That’s some bathroom you’ve got. It took me five minutes to figure out how to work the shower,” she said, dropping the towel. She then bent at the waist so that her shimmer of medium brown hair hung down as she ran her long fingers through it. When she stood up once more, giving her head a quick backward flip, every last damn strand of hair fell away from her face and sleekly to just beyond her shoulders, as if styled by a master.
God, she was gorgeous. Tall and slim, her beautiful face bare of makeup. Not the movie star. Jolie. She reminded him of a young thoroughbred. His lovely, vulnerable, always skittish Jolie.
She leaned against the doorjamb and returned his look.
Just looked at him, her eyes so incredibly sad.
“Are you all right, Jolie?”
“No, Sam, I’m not. I’m not anywhere close to all right,” she said quietly, her hands untying the sash as she walked toward him. “Make me all right, Sam. Don’t talk, don’t say a word. Just make love to me. Please.”
Her sea-blue eyes were turning liquid, and he could drown in them, if he let himself succumb. He caught her at the shoulders, holding her at a distance. “I’m going to hate myself for this. No, Jolie, we can’t. It’s not a good idea.”
“Why not? Why, Sam?”
He pulled the lapels of the robe together as she retied the sash. “You just buried your father, sweetheart.You’re going through hell. I don’t want you to do anything right now that you might regret in a few days.”
Jolie’s bottom lip began to tremble as a single huge tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, as if ashamed of her show of weakness. Which, she couldn’t realize, only made her seem that much more vulnerable. Sam had to look away from her or else pull her close, comfort her, do anything she wanted him to do.
And then, in a few days, he’d also probably regret what they’d done.
She stepped away from him. “You’re probably right. What I don’t need in my life right now is another complication. I’ve only got two weeks here before I have to go back to California.”
“You’re beginning a new movie?”
She shook her head, cinching the sash tighter before sitting down at the table. “I don’t go on location for nearly a month. This is promo for Small-Town Hero. It premieres then, with the usual round of talk shows, interviews. I’m dreading them.”
Sam pulled out the facing chair and sat down. To him the answer seemed simple. “So ban all questions about your father. You can do that, can’t you?”
Jolie held up a finger as she chewed on a bite of ham-and-cheese sandwich, her favorite. Everyday American cheese, the sort that comes individually wrapped, and sliced boiled ham from a local butcher shop on white bread. He doubted she’d had either while in California. “Oh, this is so good. This ham is from Harry’s, isn’t it? His special wedding ham? It has to be. And we can’t do that, Sam. Make not talking about Teddy a deal breaker and it assures us that someone will bring it all up. Hell, they’ll make a story about how I don’t want to make Teddy a story.”
“Is this where I ask Why don’t you just tell them all to go screw themselves and walk away? and you say What, and give up showbiz?”
She smiled around another bite of her sandwich. “I really have missed you, Sam. Even with all this—” she indicated the room, the house, Sam’s whole world, he imagined, with one graceful sweep of her arm “—you’re still the most sane and normal person I’ve ever known. Well, normal multimillionaire anyway, I guess. I, uh, I’m sorry I sort of pushed myself at you there a minute ago. It wasn’t fair of me.”
“Good. Now do something about that gaping neckline or I might forget how normal and sane I am,” he told her, and she quickly pulled the lapels of the robe together across her magnificent breasts. He got to his feet. “Did you find the clothing I told you about?”
“I did, yes, and I can take a hint. I’ll finish my sandwich, get dressed and meet you downstairs, all right? Better yet,” she added, putting down the sandwich and getting to her feet, “I’ll go get my clothes and get dressed in another bedroom, because you probably came up here to shower and change into something more—Sam?”
He’d closed the gap between them before he could think of any good reason not to, and cupped his hands on her shoulders. He began to knead at the hollows beneath her shoulder blades with his thumbs, vaguely aware that the terry cloth was damp, that she must have used the robe in lieu of a towel. More than vaguely aware that the robe was all she wore.
“Sam…?”
There had been other women since Jolie. He wasn’t a saint, and she’d been gone for five long years. But none of them had ever been allowed here, in his house, in his bedroom, naked beneath his robe. He’d reconfigured the master bathroom with her in mind, knowing that was insane. But a man without hope might as well just pack it in and start collecting stamps or something.
“You were wrong a while ago, Jolie. I did miss you enough. For the first year I believed every day that you’d be home again. For the second, I told myself you were just trying to build up the courage to admit you’d been wrong, that Hollywood wasn’t the place for you. And then…and then the movie came out and I knew.You had only a couple dozen lines of pretty lousy dialogue and appeared in only three scenes—I counted. But when you were up there on the screen, nobody else was there, nobody else mattered. You were magnificent. That’s when I knew, Jolie. That’s when I knew you weren’t ever coming home.”
She lowered her gaze. “I got lucky. I was ready to come home by the end of that second year, my tail between my legs, when that horrible movie came out. Walter put me in his next movie, and I’ve been working steadily ever since. Things…things happen the way they’re supposed to happen. If I’d come home a failure I wouldn’t have been worth anything to anybody, Sam, not to you, not even to myself.”
As she spoke, he was using his massaging thumbs to slowly push aside the lapels of the robe. “And you did it your way.”
“Meaning not your way?” She put her palms against his chest and slowly eased them lower until they rested at his
