she felt bad about that. No, he hadn’t told her exactly who he was, but it had been cold and sleeting, and not knowing how long she’d been out there, maybe he’d just wanted to get her warm again as quickly as he could. The blankets and the flannel shirt attested to that.
Now she felt worse than bad.
She glanced toward the room he’d disappeared into, her stomach churning with regret. She thought about knocking on his door to say she was sorry, but with her rapist-murderer accusation still rattling around inside his head, she didn’t think he’d want to hear anything from her right about now. Tomorrow morning might be a better time for apologies.
She went over to the wall and flicked out the light. By the faint glow of a streetlamp coming in through metal casement windows, she scurried back to the sofa, quickly peeled off her wet clothes and slipped into the shirt. It hung all the way to her knees, but what a feeling. Warmth.
She tossed the pillow at one end of the sofa, then spread out the blankets. She laid her wet clothes over a chair in the kitchen area and eased down on the sofa, tucking herself beneath the blankets.
In spite of the weird situation, she found her thoughts drifting to the man in the other room. He might have been big and scary and all those other things, but as she played the past half hour over in her mind, she realized that a knight on a white horse couldn’t have done a better job of rescuing her.
Yes, she thought sleepily. She had to tell him she was sorry. He deserved it. And on the selfish side, an apology might keep him from kicking her out the door first thing tomorrow morning before she had a chance to get her bearings.
Right now, her situation looked a little scary. Okay, a lot scary. She had no money, no car, no clothes. Nothing but the wallet in her pocket, which held maybe five bucks and zero credit cards. But she always landed on her feet, and this time wouldn’t be any different. That was what she told herself, anyway, to keep from bursting into tears.
You can’t do this. You’ve hit a dead end. Go home.
In the next instant, she slapped herself for that thought. She didn’t care if she had one foot dangling over a cliff with a seventy-mile-per-hour tailwind, she was going to hang on by her fingernails if that was what it took. Aside from her once-a-year holiday trips to see her family, she had no intention of going back to obscurity again. She thought about the factory where she’d worked for four years alongside her parents, her eight siblings and just about every other resident of Glenover, Iowa. It was just what you did when you graduated from high school. A regular paycheck. Sick days. Job security. Yuck.
She’d had bigger dreams.
When she was a senior in high school, she’d starred in Glenover High’s productions of Our Town and Bye, Bye Birdie, and for the first time in her life, she felt truly special. Raised in such a large family, the spotlight rarely made its way around to her, so those few magical nights had been intoxicating.
For the next four years, the thrill of it stayed in the back of her mind, until finally she couldn’t stand it any longer. She left behind the dreary, monotonous, unremarkable town where she’d been raised and headed for the bright lights of the New York stage, knowing in her heart that she was destined to become a star.
Three years, six dead-end jobs and eighty-seven auditions later, she realized she’d made a small miscalculation. In New York, they expected superior craft and exceptional talent and years of paying dues, so actors built careers with the speed of glaciers melting. But in Hollywood…
Now, there was a place where a person could shoot to superstardom overnight. Life was too short to wait around. Once the lightbulb had gone on and she’d realized the error in her thinking, she’d felt compelled to move on as quickly as she could, determined to make something happen now.
Through a friend of a friend, she’d managed to hook up with an agent who’d promised he could get her the contacts she needed, and she knew how to make the most of them. Talent wasn’t a list-topping requirement on the West Coast, so the fact that she was a pretty decent actress meant she was already ahead of the game. She had smarts, she had ambition and she had the right look. Or most of the right look, anyway. She could buy the rest of the appearance she needed just as soon as she found a way to get five thousand dollars back in her pocket again.
Wendy settled back on the pillow and closed her eyes, feeling exhausted right down to her bones. All she needed was a good night’s sleep, some morning light on her face and a cup of coffee past her lips. Once her brain was working, she could formulate a plan to get herself out of this mess and back on the road to Los Angeles, and everything would look rosy again. Her parents, her brothers, her sisters and every other resident of Glenover, Iowa, might be satisfied living as faceless human beings in nowhere jobs, but she’d never be content with that. She was going to make her mark in this world.
No matter what she had to do.
MICHAEL WOLFE LAY IN BED, staring through the darkness, trying to keep his anger in check. He’d been called a lot of things in his life by people with vocabularies that could blow a freight train off its tracks, but rapist and murderer hadn’t been among them.
He’d saved her, and this was what he got?
If only he’d realized how soon the storm was going to hit, he never would have set out for that bar tonight in search of Feliz Mendoza, a burglar on bail who’d decided to skip his court appearance. He never would have gotten caught in plunging temperatures and a sleet storm. And he never would have happened upon a half-frozen woman looking beyond pathetic, her dark hair plastered against her head, her sweater wet and misshapen, shivering so hard she could barely speak.
Given the fact that it was nearing midnight, sleet was pounding the city, the police station was four miles away and the women’s shelter even farther, he’d brought her here. Then she’d shocked him by trying to run right back out into the same crappy situation he’d just rescued her from. Thirty more minutes on that freezing, deserted street without a coat could have put her in the hospital or worse, especially since there wasn’t much of her to begin with.
But it wasn’t until he’d hauled her away from the door, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him, that he realized just how small and delicate she really was. Suddenly he’d felt as if he was holding something terribly fragile, and if he made one wrong move, he’d break her. She’d felt all soft and willowy and…
He started to say warm, but she hadn’t been warm in the least. She’d been a walking, talking, screaming ice cube.
Look at you! You’re big, you’re scary looking, and I’m pretty sure you could bite the head right off somebody’s shoulders if you wanted to. What was I supposed to think?
Well, he had to admit that was nothing new. He’d been frightening people to death since he was thirteen years old, and now, at age thirty-one, the fear factor had only escalated. He was used to the world looking at him as if he ate little children and climbed tall buildings to swat at airplanes. And women certainly weren’t exempt from that assessment. They all stopped dead in their tracks at the sight of him, and not because he was so damned good-looking. About the only women who didn’t cross to the other side of the road when they saw him coming were those who were as tough as he was, who knew the streets, who’d seen far worse things in their lives than a man with a face like his.
So why had this woman’s reaction bothered him so much?
Because she should have been thanking him for rescuing her instead of flattening herself against that door, breathing like a teenager in a horror flick and staring at him as if he was some
