Three Marie Ferrarella Romances Box Set One (22 page)

“Reese,” she said in a voice that was incredibly calm, considering the fact that she felt like jelly again. “I’d rather not start anything.” She tried to create a space between them, pressing her palms against his chest. She might as well have tried to push aside a mountain with her bare hands.

“You already have,” he told her. “Your kiss brought back a lot of old feelings.”

“Some old feelings are best left to fade away,” she said lamely.

“Come have dinner with me,” he said, ignoring her words. “I can afford to pay for both of us now,” he added with a tender smile. In the old days they had usually been forced to go dutch.

Charley caught herself smiling at the memory before she put her guard up again. Or tried to. “Um, Allison is coming over later ...” she began.

“Allison?”

“That little girl who just left.”

He laughed. “That was not a little girl,” he said.

“Oh?” A thread of jealousy wove its way into her consciousness. What was going on here? she wondered. She was supposed to be trying to harden herself against him, not feeling pangs of jealousy.

“That little girl,” he said with a nod toward the exit, “has the makings of a very sexy woman.”

Charley sniffed indignantly. “Men are all alike.” Her initial surprise about Allison had dissipated. She could see how the congressman had been sucked in: he had started out with a waif and ended up with a sexy, demanding woman.

“If we were all alike,” Reese pointed out, ushering her through the door, “you would have found someone else by now.”

Charley let him guide her without fully realizing he was doing so. “Maybe I’m not looking for another man,” she said.

“Why?” he asked. They sidestepped a derelict as they made their way from the Minskoff Theatre on Forty-fifth and Broadway, heading east.

Charley looked up at the sun. It was a red ball dipping behind one of New York’s never-ending construction sites. It played hide-and-seek between the steel girders of the half-constructed building. Why did he have to ask? What was she going to tell him?

“No time for men,” she said blithely. “I told you, I’m involved in my work.”

“Work’s a poor companion in bed,” he said bluntly.

He had her there. How many times had she missed the comforting sensation of waking up to find his lean, muscular frame protectively fitted against hers, his arm curled about her? Charley felt a lump forming in her throat.

“Work usually has me too tired to contemplate having any companion in bed,” she answered.

He slipped his hand up her spine and rested it on her shoulder. The slight breeze had picked up and was swirling a combination of dirt and discarded newspapers before her. Charley sidestepped it, and instantly felt pressure on her shoulder. Reese obviously thought she was trying to pull away again. She only wished she could.

She still cared. No use trying to tell herself anything else.

“I’m really not hungry,” she said, her voice weak.
Let me go, Reese. Please,
she begged silently.

“Oh, no, you’re not getting away that easily,” he said. “You can’t deny me the pleasure of at least feeding you.”

Food for the soul
? she was tempted to ask, remembering his kiss. Instead she tried to put him off one more time. “I have to study my lines, Reese.”

He just shook his head, not accepting her excuse. “Even though he can be an ogre, Chalmers doesn’t expect you to commit your entire part to memory in one night.” He opened the door in front of them for her. They had arrived at a restaurant without her even realizing it. Some intelligence agent she was, she thought disparagingly. He placed his hand against the small of her back, gently guiding her in. She felt an overwhelming urge to have him encircle her waist and hold her close to him. “You read very well this afternoon,” he said, smiling down at her.

She wished he wouldn’t smile. His smile had always been her undoing. There was something about the way his mouth curved that went straight to her soul. She sighed.

“Do you always receive compliments so halfheartedly?” he asked as a hostess in a peasant dress approached them, carrying an armful of gold menus. “Two,” he said to the young woman, who immediately turned on her heel and led the way back to a table. “I seem to remember a bubblier person.”

“Some of my fizz has disappeared,” Charley said, walking in front of him.

“That I have to see for myself,” he said, ducking his head down to whisper the words to her. His breath tickled her neck.
This was going to have to stop!
she thought frantically. But how could she avoid him? She couldn’t run this time. She had a job to do.

The hostess left them, smiling brightly, and they were alone. Alone in a room full of people all talking at once. Charley heard nothing except for the wild beating of her heart.

“They serve strawberry ice-cream sodas here,” Reese said.

He remembered,
she thought. She had a passion for strawberry ice-cream sodas.

“I try not to indulge too much,” she said, patting her stomach. “Not much call for an out-of-shape actress. And I’m not old enough for character parts yet.”

“Oh, I don’t know. As I remember it, you were
quite a character, Charley. Quite a character,” he repeated softly, his gaze caressing her.

She could barely hear him for the din in the restaurant, but she could read his lips. She looked away, not because of what he was saying, but because of the way he made her feel. This was getting way out of hand. All he had done was kiss her once and her whole body was rebelling against her. She wanted him so fiercely, it scared her. She could tell by the look in his crystal-blue eyes that the evening wasn’t going to end with an ice-cream soda or a stroll down memory lane. It was going to end in his apartment, and she just couldn’t allow that to happen. Life was complicated enough right now without the added worry of what might happen to Reese because of his connection to her.

Besides, she had a six-o’clock meeting on the other side of town. What excuse could she give Reese so that she could just get up and leave? A half-truth perhaps?

“Reese,” she said, “I really can’t stay for dinner. It’s my uncle Max. I’m having dinner with him tonight. Sorry. Gotta fly!”

Reese watched, stunned, as she jumped to her feet and bolted from the restaurant.
 

What the hell was going on
? he wondered. She was reacting to him as if he had the bubonic plague. He was certain he hadn’t misinterpreted her response to him. He knew her well enough to realize that when he touched her, even casually, she wanted him to hold her, kiss her, make love to her again. So why had she run . . . now, and a year ago?

He shook his head at the waitress, who was ready to take his order, then stood and strode from the restaurant. He wasn’t going to let Charley off that easily this time. And the first thing he was going to find out was who the hell Uncle Max was.

Chapter Three

Outside the restaurant, Charley filled her lungs with a deep breath, taking in some exhaust fumes. Traffic was heavy. Traffic, she thought dryly, was always heavy in Manhattan. She glanced from side to side, waiting for the light to turn green.
Hurry up
, she thought impatiently, looking over her shoulder.
No Reese. Thank heavens
.

Still, as she fairly galloped across the wide avenue, Charley felt a pang of disappointment. She would have been lying to herself if she pretended that she hadn’t wanted to spend the night in Reese’s arms, to have him make love to her over and over again. But that was a luxury she couldn’t afford at the moment. Max would be waiting for her in a deli on Third Avenue. Seeing Reese had almost made her forget about Max.

That wasn’t surprising, though. Over the past year memories of Reese, of the love they had shared, had often threatened to muddle her thinking. Even the pain of their parting had not lessened with time. At first she had tried to tell herself it was just the rigors of the FBI training program getting to her.
 

But the heartache had lingered long after she had left the National Academy headquarters at Quantico, Virginia. She’d tried to vanquish the emptiness by telling herself it was for the best. For his good as well as hers. The life she had claimed as her own was not your normal, run-of-the-mill life—unless you happened to be Mata Hari. If anything had ever happened to Reese because of what she was doing, she wouldn’t have been able to live with herself. She could, however, live with bittersweet pain.

She glanced at her watch as she crossed Fifth Avenue, and saw that she was going to be late. Max would be worried. Max was like that. Except for the fact that he had a grizzled salt-and-pepper beard and weighed in at well over two hundred pounds, he had a lot in common with her mother.

The muscles in the backs of Charley’s legs ached as she hurried through the sea of people on the crowded sidewalk. Finally the deli’s green neon lights came into view. Grabbing the long brass handle, she pulled open the door. The deli was dimly lit, and sawdust was liberally spread on the wooden floors. The atmosphere made her think of an old-fashioned bar, but the delicious aromas of various meats mingling with that of beer and pickles proclaimed the place a genuine New York deli.

As she edged past the people waiting to get a table, Charley felt the wood shavings on the floor work their way into her open-toe shoes. The shavings itched. Why did Max pick these kinds of places? Why not rendezvous in the park, feeding pigeons, the way they did in spy thrillers? Actually, she knew why. Max liked eating better than anything. Why should he feed a pigeon, when he could feed himself instead?

There he was. Charley made her way across the restaurant and sat down across from him. On the table were platters of meats and vegetables, along with a pitcher of beer and two mugs.

“You’re late,” Max said, hardly looking up from his meal. One bearlike paw was wrapped around an oversized ham sandwich. “I took the liberty of ordering for you, but it was getting cold ...”

“So you decided to go ahead without me,” she finished for him. She sighed. “Max, why didn’t you tell me?”

He raised a shaggy brow. “Tell you what?” he asked.

“That Reese McDaniel was the stage manager.”

“So?”

From his tone, Charley gathered that the name didn’t mean anything to him. She was surprised he hadn’t been informed. She was of the opinion that everyone in the department, save her, knew everything about everyone.
Maybe she had been reading too many paperback novels
, she thought.

She realized that Max had stopped eating and was waiting, quite intently, for her answer. He might love food, but he never let that love get in the way of doing a good job. Max left no detail uninvestigated if it meant something to a case he was working on.

Charley suddenly felt awkward. She looked down at the tarnished metal clasp on her shoulder bag as if she had never seen it before. “We . . . .um, used to go together, sort of . . .”

“You were lovers,” Max said flatly.

She jerked her head up, then smiled, the tension gone. “That’s what I like about you, Max. You’re so tactful and delicate. Yes,” she said with a sigh that had more than resignation in it, “we were lovers. I thought you knew. I thought it was in my file somewhere.”

Max shook his head. “Is it going to get in the way?” he asked. With one hand he speared a good-sized forkful of potato salad.

“Honestly?” she asked.

“Honestly,” he said, the potato salad disappearing without a trace into his mouth.

“I don’t know. I hope not.”

“Don’t let it,” he said simply.

She laughed. “Easy for you to say. Well, maybe not. Not with that mouthful of food. Max, don’t you ever get tired of eating?”

“Never,” he said without a moment’s hesitation.

“So what do you have to tell me?” she asked, glancing at her watch. It was a quarter past seven. She was going to have to hurry back to her apartment. Allison would be arriving there any time now, and Charley didn’t want the woman waiting for her.

“I have a little update on your baby-sitting assignment,” Max said.

“Oh?” Charley leaned closer.

“She’s not an agent. She’s a pawn, just like the congressman. Seems she was approached over a year ago by our friends with the fur hats and told that wonderful things would happen to her rather lifeless career if she played ball with them. She played.” He watched as Charley unconsciously glanced at her watch again. “Am I keeping you from something?”

“Got a new roommate,” she said, smiling.

“Reese?” Max asked with feigned casualness.

“No. Our ballplayer.”

“Very good. Best way to baby-sit is to keep ‘baby’ in sight. How’d you manage it?”

“Actually, I’m not sure. She may have arranged it herself.” Charley pulled her chair in closer, although the noise in the deli would probably cover her words anyway. “Think she knows that I know who she is?”

“Not bright enough,” he said. “Sounds like you’re developing a roaring case of paranoia.” Before she could protest, he went on. “That’s good. I was beginning to worry that you were getting too confident.” He poured some beer into a mug. “Play it close, as if she knew. Probably doesn’t, though you never know.” He paused, then, seeing her gaze still on his mug, said, “It’s light beer. Half the calories.”

“Max, why do you even bother?” she asked, tapping the pitcher. “You like regular beer better.”

“Every little bit helps,” he said. “Gotta watch my waistline.”

“Well, it’s right out in front, where you can do that,” she said dryly.

“If I gave in to my every whim, this’d be twice as big as it is now,” he said, patting his stomach for emphasis.

“Heaven forbid!” Charley said fondly. She rose to her feet. “Well, I’ve got to go.” She arranged to meet Max again two days later.

Before turning away she pushed a platter closer to him. “Take care of that for me, will you, Max?”

“I intend to, Charley. I fully intend to.” She left the deli and made her way toward Second Avenue and her apartment. It was totally dark by the time she got there. As she had feared, Allison, with all her worldly possessions in tow, was waiting for her.