the signals she was sending out that clearly indicated she wasn’t interested in him and was only being polite to an acquaintance of her father’s, he wanted to know more about her. “Are you in the movie industry, too, Miss Moore?”
She shook her head with vehemence. “One in the business is enough, don’t you think? And who could compete with a talent like his?” she added with a flash of a smile in her father’s direction that indicated nothing but daughterly pride. “No, I’m a pr—”
What she’d been about to say was cut off by a gaggle of young and not-so-young women who came up to their table. “May I have your autograph, Mr. DeWinter?” the first woman gushed, thrusting a pen and a piece of paper at Dirk.
Dirk had an unbreakable rule when it came to autographs. As long as he was standing—which he was now—he would sign. If he was seated at a table, either as someone’s guest or with guests of his own, he would politely decline, feeling it would be rude to the people he was with.
He glanced at Josh and Mei-li. “Excuse me for a moment,” he murmured, stepping a little away from them before scrawling his name on the seemingly endless supply of menus and scraps of paper offered for his autograph. But when one young woman with more gall than sense asked him to sign her bra and began tugging down the neckline of her dress, Dirk shook his head in refusal.
“Sorry,” he told her as gently as he could, even though he was disgusted that any woman would be so lacking in decency as to ask this of him in a public place. “That’s where I draw the line.”
It wasn’t the first time someone had requested something similar from him. Women had even asked him right in front of Bree, as if her feelings at having her husband accosted were unimportant, as if those women held his wife in contempt. As if their blatant sexual advances would be welcomed by a man in love with his wife.
And that reminder of his wife, more than anything else, was what made Dirk decide not to pursue this...whatever it was...with Mei-li any further. Because no matter how attracted he was to her, no matter how much his body wanted to make love to her, it could never be more than physical. It can never be what I shared with Bree, he told himself, believing it.
* * *
The streets of Kowloon, one of two mainland districts of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, or SAR, were nearly deserted when Dirk walked out of the soundstage two weeks later and approached the waiting black Rolls-Royce that would take him back to the Peninsula Hotel at the southern tip of the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood. The double-decker buses that ran constantly, day and night, and the people who normally swarmed the streets were nowhere to be seen on this first day of May. Everyone and everything seemed to be battened down in anticipation of Typhoon De-De.
“Thanks, Patrick,” he told his twenty-four-year-old Chinese driver, Shuài “Patrick” Chan, who held the door for him.
“Hotel, Mr. DeWinter?”
“Dirk,” he reminded his driver.
“Yes, sir,” Patrick said, closing the door firmly behind Dirk and climbing into the driver’s seat.
Dirk smiled to himself as he leaned back against the leather upholstery. He’d yet to break his driver of addressing him formally, and probably never would, any more than he’d been able to break his employees of that habit. His housekeeper, Hannah, insisted on calling him Mr. DeWinter, too, and the others in his household followed her lead. “And yes, the flags are out,” he said, “So I’d better hightail it back to the hotel.”
The flags were out. Not literally—actual flags to warn mariners hadn’t been hoisted in the Hong Kong SAR in years. But Signal Three had been issued early that morning—which meant schools were closed and the government was shut down, as well as the financial markets and a majority of the private sector. And the Hong Kong Observatory had issued a Signal Eight SE warning a half hour ago. That had caused the studio to reluctantly shut down filming for the day and send everyone home until further notice.
Typhoon De-De was bearing down on Hong Kong from the southeast—a month early for the normal typhoon season, which usually didn’t begin until June. All public transportation had ceased, especially the double-decker buses that were so susceptible to being blown over by strong winds. The ubiquitous red taxis were still running, as were a few green ones, but without the buses traffic was sparse, and the Rolls made good time as it headed down Kowloon Park Drive toward Salisbury Road.
A gust of wind out of nowhere slammed into the limo, causing it to swerve and throwing Dirk against the door. “Sorry, sir,” Patrick said, quickly bringing the Rolls back on course.
“Not a problem. Good thing we don’t have far to go.” He thought for a minute. “You live on the island, don’t you?” he asked, referring to Hong Kong Island itself.
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t think you’ll make it home safely today. Not now. You probably should just join me in the hotel—my suite is plenty big enough, and I’m sure Vanessa and the twins won’t mind.”
Vanessa Riordan was the woman who’d been his twin daughters’ nanny since the day they’d been released from the neonatal intensive care unit—or NICU—at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles. Dirk had tried calling Vanessa at the hotel earlier, but there had been no answer and he wondered absently about that now. He pulled out his smartphone and tried calling his suite again, then Vanessa’s cell phone, but still no luck.
Dirk’s eyes met Patrick’s in the rearview mirror, and he could tell his driver was of two minds about accepting the offer to take shelter from the typhoon with Dirk and his family. Patrick lived with his parents, and Dirk figured the young man was worried about them. “Call your parents,” he told Patrick. “I’m sure they’ll tell you the same thing. Better safe than sorry.”
Patrick Chan wasn’t a limo driver by trade—he was an engineering student at the University of Hong Kong, working on his master’s degree. The young man held down two jobs—teaching assistant at the university and driving the Rolls—to put himself through school and help out at home.
Dirk had done something similar, working three jobs to make ends meet—including movie stuntman—to support Bree and himself before he got his big break in the movies. He’d never been afraid of hard work. Neither had Bree. But Dirk had been too proud to ask her to marry him until he’d snagged his first starring role. Until he could support her in the style she deserved. Until his success meant Bree didn’t have to work at the menial jobs she’d taken in order to stay at his side through thick and thin as he chased his dream of movie stardom...and long before that.
Pain stabbed through him as it always did at the thought of Bree. He could never forget that, because God was punishing him for something that had happened aeons ago. Bree had died. And their daughters had nearly died, too. Only a miracle wrought by the doctors and nurses in the Cedars Sinai NICU had kept their premature twins alive.
Dirk’s phone sounded the tune he reserved for his closest friends, and when he swiped a finger over the touchpad and saw who the call was from, he smiled and answered. “To what do I owe the honor of this call, Your Majesty?”
The voice of Queen Juliana of Zakhar sounded in his ear, prefaced by a very unqueenly snort. “Cut that out,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m still Juliana to you?”
“Ahhh, but what would your husband, the king, say to that?” he teased gently.
They
