The Millionaire's Secret Wish (2 page)

She laughed again. “Have you always been chased? What do you think it is? Were you always good-looking and charming?”

He lifted his lips in a sexy smile that made her heart flutter. “Good-looking and charming. High praise again. Have I always been chased by women? Let’s just say it’s always been easy to find a date. Why? Beats the hell out of me. But I’ve learned an important lesson. Quality is more important than quantity. I’d rather be chased by the one right woman than several not-right women. And when I am chased by the right woman, she will catch me.”

“But what if you need to be the chaser to get the right woman?”

His eyes grew serious. “I can do that,” he said with quiet masculine assurance that did strange things to her nerve endings.

More questions about him filled her mind, but for some reason she wasn’t sure she wanted all the answers yet. Alisa knew she wouldn’t be able to learn everything she wanted to know about this man in one
evening or one month. She reached for his glass of whisky. “Mind if I try it?”

Surprise crossed his face. “Go ahead.”

She took a sip and felt the liquid burn down her throat.

“Like it?”

Making a face, she shook her head and pushed the glass back toward him. “How can you drink that?”

“It’s an acquired taste. Twenty-five-year-old whisky.”

“Geez, then fire a cannon and bury it,” she said, and felt a ripple of pleasure that she made him laugh.

He could turn a woman’s head, she thought. For a moment she feared he would turn hers, then quickly dismissed the possibility. He’d said they were friends, but Alisa wondered how a woman could be friends with Dylan without wanting more. There must be a reason. She would learn that reason soon.

Her shriek woke him from a sound sleep. Dylan sat straight up in bed. Another shriek broke the silence of the night, and he immediately rose from his bed and walked down the hallway to the room where Alisa was staying. The doctor had warned him about her nightmares.

Not bothering to knock, he entered the room and, with the aid of moonlight from the window, saw her sitting up with her head in her hands. Her shaky breaths made his gut twist and turn.

“Alisa,” he said in a low voice so he wouldn’t frighten her. He sat down on the bed beside her.

“Sorry,” she said, shuddering. “Bad dream. I don’t remember much about the accident when I’m awake, but I’ve had a few nightmares. I keep seeing a little boy’s puppy running into the street. The little boy is on crutches and for some reason I know that dog means everything to him. I run after the dog and an SUV whips around the corner. I try, but I can’t run fast enough….”

“The little boy was Timmy,” Dylan said, pulling her into his arms. He knew Alisa was strong, but she felt incredibly fragile to him right now. “Timmy is a neighbor kid with cerebral palsy, and you’ve taken care of him several times to give his single mom a break. You ran after the dog so he wouldn’t.”

“He sent me pictures he’d painted while I was in the hospital.” She took a deep breath and gave a little smile. “The puppy made it just fine, didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Dylan muttered. He slid his fingers through her hair and felt the edge of one of her scars. His chest tightened with the memory of that terrible time just after Alisa’s accident. He could have lost her for good. The world could have lost her, and that would have been one helluva loss. Even though he’d blown his chances with her, just knowing Alisa existed made him believe in the future.

“Every time I have that dream it scares me. I hate being afraid,” she said.

No surprise, he thought, recalling what she’d been
like as a child. Alisa had always fought her fear. “How about a bedtime story?”

She looked up at him, seeming reluctant to pull back from him. Dylan drank in the moment. It had been eons since she’d allowed him to hold her, since she’d wanted him to hold her.

“No puppies or SUVs?”

He shook his head. “No puppies or SUVs. Once upon a time a little girl was surrounded by orphan boys. Day after day, she watched them play baseball. She wanted to play, too, but the boys wouldn’t let her.”

“Why not?”

“She couldn’t catch worth a damn.”

“Oh,” she said with a grimace. “That’s a problem.”

“Yep, and she could see it was a problem. She talked one of the boys into teaching her to catch the ball.”

“How did she do that?”

Dylan remembered how Alisa had begged and pleaded and finally offered a trade. “That’s another bedtime story.”

She smiled and relaxed in his arms. “Okay. So what happened?”

“The little girl was afraid of the ball, and the boy told her that until she stopped being afraid of the ball, the other boys wouldn’t let her play. The little boy and girl practiced every day, and she started to im
prove. She got so much better the boys allowed her to play in one of their games.”

“Good,” she said.

“That’s not the end.”

“Oh, then finish the story.”

“In that very first game, a fastball came flying at the little girl. She didn’t duck and she didn’t bring her glove up fast enough.”

Alisa winced the same way Dylan knew he had winced that day many years ago. “Oh, no.”

“The ball hit her in the eye, but she somehow still managed to catch the ball. The boys cheered for her. She tried not to cry, but it was very hard. Her eye swelled up right away, and the little boy who taught her to catch felt like crap. He thought she would never play again, and he kinda hoped she wouldn’t so she wouldn’t get hurt again.”

Dylan remembered how miserable he’d felt when he’d seen Alisa get hurt. Looking at her eye had made his chest feel heavy with guilt.

“If he hadn’t taught her to catch, then she wouldn’t have gotten hurt,” he said, remembering the regret like it was yesterday.

“But she wouldn’t have known the thrill of winning and the lesson of going all-out for something she wanted.” She met his gaze, and he saw a glimmer of fearless Alisa in her green eyes. “Winning is addictive. She played again, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, she did. She hated being afraid. You never liked being afraid, Alisa. You always fought it.”

Hope softened the remnants of her nightmare from her face. “So maybe some things stay the same.”

“Yeah,” he said, knowing her attitude toward him would be one of those things. She closed her eyes, and he sensed the moment she drifted off to sleep. He watched her while she slept, her hair spilling across his arm and her lips gently parted. His heart swelled in his chest. He’d never known how precious her trust was to him until he’d lost it. For this moment she trusted him. But Alisa was recalling new memories every day. It was his job to encourage recollection and healing. It was an ironic twist of fate that he must encourage her toward the very thing that would ultimately turn her against him.

“I
want to visit my apartment today,” Alisa told Dylan as soon as she joined him on the terrace for breakfast.

His gaze played over her from head to toe, acutely reminding her of her femininity. She wondered if he had that effect on every woman and suspected he did. His eyes somehow managed to assess and seduce at the same time. His open-collared shirt revealed a glimpse of his muscular, tanned chest and the sleeves were pushed back to reveal strong forearms. Those same arms had held her last night when she had been afraid, she thought, and felt a ripple of vulnerability. She swallowed over the odd feeling crowding her throat. How did he evoke so many emotions in her?

“No problem,” he said. “I can take you to your apartment. You want to eat first?”

Turning her attention from him to the beautifully set table, she smiled. “Yes, I’d like to eat first. My impatience is showing, isn’t it?”

He shrugged. “Better your impatience than your party panties.”

She blinked at him. An image raced through her mind. “Party panties are panties with ruffles on the back. I had a pink pair.”

“You did. You also had a white pair with red ruffles.”

She shot him a glance of disapproval. “How would you know?”

“Because I saw them,” he said with just a tinge of arrogance.

Curious, she sat beside him at the table and took a croissant from the bread basket. “Were they on a clothesline or on me?”

“You were definitely wearing them.”

The idea that Dylan had seen her in party panties gave her the strangest urge to squirm. “I feel certain I didn’t show my party pants on purpose. I’m sure there were extenuating circumstances.”

“You could say that,” he said with a mocking glint in his eyes.

She poured orange juice from a carafe into each of their glasses. “Okay, I’ll bite. What were the extenuating circumstances?”

“You always had to keep up with whatever the
boys were doing,” he said, pouring milk into a bowl of granola cereal and grabbing a muffin.

“And what were the boys doing this time?”

“It was winter and it had snowed. There was a shortage of sleds, so we made use of trays from the cafeteria. Your mom was so upset I thought she’d give me gruel for a month.” He shook his head. “You wanted to use a tray, too, but you had just returned from church so you were wearing your Sunday dress and knee socks. We told you that you couldn’t tray sled because you were a girl and you were wearing a dress.”

“I have a feeling I know where this is going,” she said. “I decided to prove you wrong, so I got on a tray and raced down the hill.”

Dylan nodded. “The problem was that your guiding system was a little off. The tray spun around, you slammed into a snowbank face first with your ruffles there for all to see.”

She chewed another bite of croissant and swallowed. “I don’t remember this, but I still feel humiliated. I’ll bet you teased me relentlessly about that incident.”

Dylan nodded again as he finished a bowl of granola.

“Are you sure I didn’t secretly hate you?”

He shook his head and met her gaze dead-on. “You adored me,” he said with a combination of conviction and seduction that gave her a knee-weakening thrill.

Alisa was very glad she was sitting down. “I can’t imagine why,” she lied and bit into her croissant.

He lifted a dark eyebrow in disbelief. “Why not?”

“If you were one-tenth as cocky as you are now, you had to be insufferable.”

“You followed me around like a puppy.”

“I absolutely don’t remember that,” she said.

“You got into trouble with your mother for playing in the rain with me.”

She opened her mouth, but a hazy image swam through her mind. She closed her eyes and saw a boy and girl stomping through mud puddles. “You wore tennis shoes,” she said. “I ruined my black patent-leather shoes. Your hair was too long. You seemed tall to me,” she said, concentrating to milk every detail from the memory.

“It usually was. They gave us haircuts once every three months, but mine grew like a weed.”

“You loaned me your camouflage green rain slicker.”

“But that didn’t do a damn thing for your shoes.”

She kept her eyes closed for a long moment and fell back in time. She could hear her mother scolding her, but as a little girl, she was smiling inside. Another adventure with Dylan. Alisa opened her eyes. “Were you always leading me down the road to perdition?”

He rocked his hips slightly in his chair and leaned backward, inadvertently drawing her attention to his
thighs. “I was just teaching you how to have a little fun.”

Swift, hot awareness sped through her. A searing thought that he could teach her about grown-up fun dipped into her mind. She snuffed it out as quickly as it appeared. He was a distracting man, and she didn’t need to be distracted from her quest. She needed to concentrate on getting her memory back instead of what kind of lover Dylan would be. Temptation shimmered stubbornly inside her. Alisa took a long swallow of cool orange juice and told herself to focus on healing. Focus on anything but sex with Dylan.

“Breakfast was lovely. Why don’t I ever see your cook? I’m beginning to think she’s invisible.”

“She likes to set the table, then leave.”

“I’d like to thank her sometime when she comes out of hiding.”

“I’ll introduce you.”

“Good.” She took a deep breath. “I’m ready to go to my apartment anytime.”

His mouth straightened, and she watched his eyes darken with some emotion she couldn’t name. “Then we’ll go,” he said, and she wondered why his words held a hint of ominous foreboding.

“No pictures on the wall,” Alisa said in disapproval as she walked through her apartment. She’d hoped for obvious marks of her personality. “I was hoping for more.”

“You were hoping for billboards with your life history,” he said dryly.

She slid a quick glance at him. How did the man read her mind? “It would have been nice.”

“You hadn’t lived here that long,” he reminded her.

She saw a datebook left open on the kitchen counter and dived for it as if it were the Holy Grail. “This may be the closest thing I’ll get to a diary.” She flipped through the pages. “Busy girl. Cook-out with the Hawkinses on Tuesday night, running date with Paul.” She stopped. “Who’s Paul?”

He shrugged his shoulders and peered over her shoulder. “No idea. Volunteer work at Granger’s,” he said, pointing to a notation.

“Business trip to France,” she said, and a sound of despair squeaked out of her throat. “A week after my accident. Now that is tragic.” She fanned through the previous month’s pages and frowned.

“There’s nothing in here about my mother. I thought—” She stopped in mid thought, her head whirling. “I saw her at Christmas,” she said, a fragment of a memory teasing her. “She was upset with me.” Her chest tightened. Alisa still didn’t like the idea of displeasing her mother, but she was determined to get to the root of the recollection. “She was not happy that I broke off my engagement.”

“Ah, the senator,” he said. “I’m not surprised your mother wasn’t pleased about the breakup.”

“Why?”

Dylan remembered how appalled Alisa’s mother had been when she’d caught him and Alisa kissing. He could tell the truth or he could be kind. Looking into Alisa’s expectant gaze, he swallowed his resentment, or a portion of it, and opted for kind. “She always thought you deserved the very best. She was impressed by prestige and influence and she wanted that for you.”

“Hmm,” Alisa said, and snapped the datebook closed. “I didn’t want him enough.”

Dylan gave her a double take. “You wanna play that one again?”

She wiggled her shoulders. “I don’t remember everything about the engagement, but I do remember that I broke up with him because I didn’t love him enough to marry him.” She sighed. “A shame,” she said. “I have this sense that he was a nice guy.” She pointed toward the hallway. “I want to see my bedroom.”

Dylan tugged at his collar as he watched her whirl around the corner and wondered what was next. Her memories seemed to be returning at lightning speed. Anything could be next. His gut clenched. He could be next. Bracing himself, he slowly walked down the hall and glanced inside her bedroom.

Her closet door was flung open and she had two bureau drawers ajar as she rifled through them. His gaze, however, was snared by the decor. All the effort Alisa had not made to decorate the rest of the apartment had clearly gone into the bedroom. A four-
poster brass bed dominated the room with a swirl of filmy white material looped around the top. The bedspread combined white and cream in the most luxurious silk he’d ever seen. A half dozen books were stacked on the nightstand next to a crystal lamp. He was curious about the titles.

His gaze kept turning back to the bed where several plump pillows were tossed casually atop the coverlet. He wondered what man may have shared that fantasy bed with Alisa and made some of her fantasies come true.

Something inside him growled at the thought. He took a deep breath and looked at Alisa. In one hand, she held a black silk teddy. In the other a pink satin chemise. He swallowed an oath. The contrast of the image of Alisa in the bad girl and lady lingerie was enough to make him sweat.

“Well, I’d say I like pretty things,” she said more to herself than to him. “These are almost as good as billboards.” She glanced up at Dylan, and her expression gradually turned self-conscious. She stuffed the lingerie back in the drawer and pushed it closed. “Well, that’s probably enough for now,” she said, standing. She smiled and clasped her hands together. “I think I must’ve just gotten started with the decorating. Who would have guessed?” she said, and walked from the room.

Dylan’s gaze turned helplessly to the bed. It was all too easy to visualize Alisa spread on that bed
wearing the black teddy or the pink chemise, or for that matter, nothing at all.

Dylan had known Alisa intimately when she was much younger. The image he’d stored of her all these years had been one of innocent passion. She had clearly grown up.

“Can we leave now?” she called back to him.

Dylan shook off the steamy images simmering in his mind. “Sure,” he said, taking one last look at her bed and leaving the room.

Alisa’s head was spinning with all the new information she’d gleaned about herself from her apartment. It was too much to assimilate at once, so she turned her attention to the breeze on her face as Dylan drove his Jaguar convertible back to his estate just outside St. Albans.

“Did visiting your apartment answer some of your questions?” he asked.

“Yes and no. Most of the time I felt as if I were visiting someone else’s home.”

“And your bedroom,” he ventured.

She felt another wave of self-consciousness. Even though she couldn’t remember decorating the room, Alisa felt protective of it. It was obviously a place where she indulged in sensual luxury. Her one extravagance in a life filled with practicality. “The bedroom raises questions, but that’s for another day. After looking at my datebook, I’ve figured out why I’ve been a little difficult at times lately.”

Dylan looked over at her at a stop sign, then gave a half grin as he accelerated. “Oh, really. I could’ve sworn you said you are not difficult.”

Alisa fought a niggle of irritation. “I’m not. I mean, I’m sure I’m not difficult as a rule. I just might be a
little
difficult lately,” she said, but didn’t want to dwell on the fact. “The reason is I get tired of thinking and talking about me. It’s so self-absorbing and well, depressing. I need to spend some time focusing on someone else.” She smiled. “Today, that would be you.”

He glanced at her with a combination of wary sexiness that made her wonder if he was still thinking about her bedroom. “How were you planning to focus on me?”

“Just a few questions,” she said quickly. “You told me the story about how you didn’t find out who your father was until he died and left you an inheritance, but I don’t remember if you have any half brothers or half sisters.”

“Two half brothers and one half sister, which in reality adds up to none,” he said cynically.

“Why none?”

“Because nothing would make them happier than if I didn’t exist. They do their best to disassociate themselves from me.”

She shook her head. “I can see why it might be awkward, but it’s not as if you’re an ax murderer. You’re not a dud. You’re intelligent and talented. Af
ter they got over their initial discomfort, I would think they’d see you as ‘the bonus brother.”’

“They’re not over their initial discomfort,” Dylan told her.

“How long have they known?”

“Six years,” he said grimly.

Alisa looked at him and turned the unusual situation around in her head. “You’ve said what they want. What do you want?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you want with your half brothers and half sister?”

“Nothing,” he said with an apathy that rubbed at a tender place inside her. She sensed he’d learned that apathy from being disappointed.

“I would love to have brothers and sisters.”

He shrugged. “In my case, blood isn’t thicker than water. I’m not much for family ties. There’s my mother, but that’s always been an on-again, off-again thing.”

“On-again, off-again?” she asked as he pulled into the long drive to his home.

“She’s been married several times. Don’t get me wrong. She’s a nice lady, but her romantic relationships got in the way of having a normal life and being a single parent. I can’t give her a normal life, but I bought a house for her where she can stay regardless of whatever man blows in or out of her life. Since I technically own it, it’s safe from divorce proceedings.”

Alisa absorbed his words and closed her eyes for a moment, searching her memory for a glimmer. None came. “I don’t remember any of this about your mother.”

“Yeah, well it’s pretty forgettable. I never spent much time thinking about it.”

Or talking about it, she suspected. “About your father,” she began.

“I don’t think about him at all,” he said, his voice cold. “When I was a kid, I would’ve traded the world to know who my father was. When I finally found out who he was, he was dead. He might have been rich, but he was a coward. I’ll take the money. My half siblings can have his name and everything that goes with it.” He pulled the car to a hard stop next to the house and narrowed his eyes at her. “That covers everything about my so-called family,” he said as he got out of the car and opened her door for her. “No fairy-tale endings.”