Ladies' Man (7 page)

He was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet. “Are you telling me you don’t want to see me again? Ever?”

“I think it would be better if we didn’t,” Ellen said. “See each other again. Yes. That’s what I’m telling you.” She closed her eyes again. Lord, she was doing this badly. But it was the right thing to do. She knew it was the right thing, the only thing—so why did she feel like crying?

“Oh,” he said. His voice sounded so small. “I see. I’m sorry, I…guess I misunderstood.”

“I’m sorry too,” Ellen whispered. She was. She was very,
very
sorry.

He cleared his throat. “If you, uh…if you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

He hung up without saying good-bye, and for the second time in less than twelve hours, Ellen, who prided herself on her strength, who rarely ever cried, dissolved into tears.

T
.S. gazed sympathetically at Sam over the rim of his coffee mug. “Okay,” he said. “Answer this for me. Would you be as attracted to her if she hadn’t rejected you?”

Sam had been staring sightlessly up at the television set playing silently in the corner of the little coffee shop, but now he looked over at his friend, outraged. “Yes,” he said indignantly. “Jeez, what kind of a shallow, opportunistic bastard do you take me for?”

“The kind of shallow, opportunistic bastard who’s never really felt the sting of rejection before,” T.S. answered, not entirely unkindly.

“If you tell me I should take this as a learning experience, grow from it, and move on, I’m going to have to kill you,” Sam said dangerously.

T.S. just laughed.

“God, I’m miserable.” Sam pushed his cooling coffee away from him in disgust. “And you think it’s funny.”

“I’m dying to meet this woman,” T.S. admitted, his light brown eyes amused behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “I’m having lunch with Bob after he gets back into town next week—Oh, I gave him a call and explained about the confusion at the airport. I had this fear that he was going to say ‘You lied to me! I won’t let you write my biography!’ But he didn’t. He thought it was funny that everyone thought you were me. He’s going to think it’s even funnier when he meets me—you and I are not exactly twins, white boy.” He paused. “
Ellen
didn’t think you were me when you…?”

“No! No way. I told her who I really was right away.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. So the book deal’s final?”

“Contract’s signed,” T.S. told him. “There was even a write-up about it in the
Times
. Everyone’s speculating that I’m going to go on Bob’s show to promote the book.”

“Are you?” Sam asked.

“Are you kidding?” T.S. snorted. He gestured around them at the little coffee shop as he lowered his voice. “Do you think I could sit here and have coffee with you if people knew I was T. S. Harrison?” He shook his head. “I love the fact that sixty million people have read my books, but I want to be able to walk my kids to school, thank you very much.”

“Oh God,” Sam breathed, staring transfixed at the TV screen. “There she is. Dammit, her commercial is on everywhere I go.”

T.S. twisted in his seat to get a look at the TV.

On the small screen there was a close-up of Ellen, gazing into the camera and talking, her lips quirking upward into an almost smile. And then she
did
smile—right into the camera. Right into Sam’s eyes, as if she were looking directly at him.

“She’s an actress?” T.S. was confused. “Wait a minute, I thought you said she was a college professor.”

“She’s both,” Sam told him, unable to tear his eyes away from the screen. Ellen held a bottle of laundry detergent and laughed with a young girl. It was uncanny—the girl they’d found to play her daughter looked almost exactly like her, with the exception of slightly darker hair.

“She’s…not what I expected,” T.S. said. “Somehow, from the way you were talking, I expected, I don’t know, some total babe.”

“She
is
a total babe—although, God, don’t use that word around her. She’s incredible, Toby,” Sam told his friend as the commercial ended and he could once again drag his gaze away from the TV. “She makes me laugh. She’s funny and sexy and…” He buried his head in his hands. “And she doesn’t want to see me again.”

T.S. shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you, man.”

“I should feel relieved.” Sam lifted his head and gripped the edge of the table. “I should be grateful—it was one really incredible night. I keep telling myself that she’s doing me a huge favor by ending this thing before it even starts. And if it had been anybody else,
I
would’ve been the one talking from her side of the table.
I’m
the one who usually wants out of a relationship before it gets too heavy. How many times have I said those exact words she said to me?”

“By my estimation, four or five million?”

“Very funny.”

“So now you know what it feels like to be dumped after one night,” T.S. pointed out. “Welcome to the human race.”

“It
sucks
.”

“No kidding.”

“I keep trying to figure out what I did wrong,” Sam said. “But I didn’t do anything wrong. We connected constantly, all night long. I mean, I know when it’s working. You know me, Tobe, I’m
good
with women. I know when there’s a certain magic there, and it was there, I’m telling you. So why would she run away from that?”

T.S. knew enough not to answer. He knew enough just to listen.

“I keep coming back to the same little piece of our conversation,” Sam continued. “She asked if I had gone to NYU with you, and I told her I hadn’t gone to college. I keep thinking maybe she thinks I’m not good enough for her—I’m not smart enough, not well educated enough.”

“Oh, man, you don’t really think that, do you?”

“I don’t know what to think. You know, she teaches at
Yale
. She’s got all these degrees dangling off her name. Doctor. She has a Ph.D. And me, I barely even finished high school.”

T.S. sighed. “This is all my fault. If I hadn’t agreed to meet Bob’s aunt at the airport before I checked my calendar…”

They sat for a moment in silence, then Sam spoke. “No,” he said quietly. “I would rather have met her than not.”

“What are you going to do?”

Sam smiled grimly. “I’m going to figure out a way to see her again.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

“Well, let’s see,” Sam said. “You’re going to be spending most of your time over the next few months hanging out at Bob Osborne’s house—which happens to be where Ellen is living for the summer. Yes, my friend, I think you can probably help.”

SIX

E
xcuse me, Bob, do you have a minute?” Ellen knocked on the half-opened door, poking her head into Bob’s office. A large, handsome, African-American man—a stranger—was sitting across from his desk, and she instantly backed away. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were in a meeting.”

“No, no.” Bob waved her in from his prone position in his chair, feet up on his desk. “Come in. I want you to meet T. S. Harrison.” He laughed. “The
real
T. S. Harrison.”

Sam’s best friend
. How much had he told T.S., Ellen wondered as she forced a smile and shook the writer’s hand. “I’m Ellen,” she said.

T.S. was tall, taller than Sam, taller than Bob even, with a large frame that was on the verge of being beefy. His face was pleasantly round, his eyes a light shade of brown and magnified very slightly by a pair of stylishly old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses. His hair was dark and curly and he wore it cut very short. He was dressed down in a gray NYU T-shirt and a pair of sweatshorts.

Bob had on similar clothes. “We were just out shooting some hoops,” he told her. “Did you know T.S. used to play basketball?”

“Actually,” Ellen said, “I did know.” She could feel T.S. watching her, still politely on his feet. “Please, sit down,” she told him. She turned to Bob. “If this isn’t a good time…”

Bob glanced at his watch. “No, we were just setting up an interview schedule—it’s weird, for the next however many months I’m going to be talking to this kid about myself. I’m usually the one asking the questions.” He looked at Ellen. “What’s up?”

She sat down on the edge of the other chair positioned across from his desk, glancing briefly at T.S., who was still watching her. “Well, I couldn’t help but notice when I got home a few minutes ago that we’ve gone to DefCon Three. I nearly had to get a retina scan to get past the men with guns who are guarding the doors. I expected them to hand me a clip-on photo ID. What’s going on, Bob?”

“I upped security a little bit,” Bob drawled.

“But you didn’t call the police, did you?”

Bob wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I didn’t think it was nec—”

She stood up. “I knew you wouldn’t. You’re such a baby.” She turned to T.S. “He probably didn’t tell you what happened last night, either.”

T.S. looked from Ellen to Bob. “What happened last night?”

“Nothing,” Bob said.

“Nothing?” Ellen repeated. “The burglar alarm went off at two o’clock in the morning, waking us up and scaring the hell out of all of us. Even those of us who are pretending that it was nothing today.”

“It was pretty exciting for a few minutes there,” Bob agreed. “But my security team got it quickly under control.”

“By finding out that someone hadn’t broken in—they’d broken
out
,” Ellen reminded him. “Someone was in here, some stranger was in this house when we all went to bed last night!”

“It happens sometimes,” Bob said. “Some overenthusiastic fan manages to sneak in, steals the hair from my hairbrush or something equally disgusting, and then leaves. It’s no big deal.”

“Don’t you think it’s just a little bit creepy considering the death threats you’ve been getting?”

T.S. sat up a little bit straighter. “
Death
threats?”

Bob pooh-poohed it. “Oh, I’ve gotten a few odd letters this past week. Nothing really that unusual. People are weirdos. And they think just because they can see me on their TV set every night that I’m talking directly to them. Some of them write back.”

“What about those obscene phone calls?” Ellen asked. “How did they get your phone number?”

“That reminds me,” Bob said to T.S. “I’m getting a new line. It’s going to take a few days, but my number’s going to change. Call Zoey, my assistant at the studio. She’ll give you the new number when we find out what it’s going to be.”

“I don’t know what to do—he won’t call the police,” Ellen said to T.S.

“He hates it when his favorite niece talks about him in the third person, as if he weren’t in the room,” Bob said loudly.

Ellen turned to her uncle. “Bobby, I want you to call the police. I don’t want you to end up like John Lennon.”

Bob sighed with exasperation. “Sweetie, I promise I’m being very careful. But I can’t just call the police every time some nut wants a piece of me. I’m in contract negotiations with the network, and I don’t want any negative publicity circulating for them to throw in my face. To be honest, every time I contact the police about some security problem, the incident shows up on the front page of
The Daily Star
—along with a sidebar that brings up my lurid past and a headline that suggests I’ve been drinking again.” He shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t need that right now.”

T.S. cleared his throat. “I could give Sam a call.”

Ellen froze.

“Who?” Bob asked.

“Sam,” T.S. repeated. “Sam Schaefer. A friend of mine who’s a police detective. He’s the guy you met at the airport, picking up your aunt. You thought he was me? Remember, I was telling you about him just a little while ago. We were going to call him to come play b-ball with us tomorrow.”

“Sam. Right. He’s a cop? No kidding.”

T.S. nodded. “He works out of the Twentieth Precinct—it’s not too far from here. I’m sure he can be very discreet.”

Bob pushed his telephone toward T.S. “Okay, call your friend. See if he’ll come over and tell us exactly what we know—that some nut’s just trying to get a little attention.” He turned to Ellen. “We’ll all talk to T.S.’s friend Sam. Does that make you happy?”

“Um,” said Ellen.

S
am heard the sound of Ellen’s footsteps out on the marble tile of the entrance hall and he took a deep breath, trying to slow his accelerated heartbeat.

He couldn’t believe his luck. He and T.S. had been thinking for days, trying to come up with a way to finagle an extra invitation to dinner at Bob Osborne’s, and wham, this opportunity seemed to fall into their laps. Crank phone calls and a couple of negative letters from some disgruntled crackpot. It was surely nothing to worry about, yet it gave him one damn fine excuse to be sitting in Bob Osborne’s living room, about to see Ellen Layne again.

“Here comes Ellen now,” Bob said. “She and Lydia are the ones who’ve gotten the nasty phone calls. Jamie and I have both answered the phone and had the caller hang up—it’s happened too often to be a wrong number.”

Jamie and Lydia. Bob had mentioned those names before, but Sam hadn’t had a chance to inquire. Other people must be living here besides Bob and Ellen.

And then Ellen appeared, and Sam forgot about everything else. She was wearing jeans shorts, cuffed at the bottom, a T-shirt that managed both to cover her thoroughly and look utterly sexy, and sneakers. Her gleaming reddish blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

She looked gorgeous.

She didn’t quite meet Sam’s eyes. Instead she smiled vaguely in his direction as she moved soundlessly now across the deep reds and blues of the Persian carpet that stretched over the wide living room floor.

“Ellen, you remember Sam, don’t you?” Bob said.

“Of course.” She turned toward Sam and forced a smile.

Sam stood up, holding out his hand to shake, and she had to take it.

“How are you?” she asked politely, hesitating only slightly before slipping her fingers into his.

Her hand was warm and faintly damp, cluing him in to her nervousness. He held on to it longer than he knew he should, but dammit, he didn’t want to let her go. “Actually, this past week has been just short of hell.”

She looked up at him then,
really
looked into his eyes. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” she murmured.

She was embarrassed—he could tell. She was embarrassed and uncomfortable to see him again after what they’d done in that limo a little over a week ago.

God, how often had
he
been the one who was embarrassed when he ran into some woman with whom he’d had only the briefest of encounters and then hadn’t bothered to call again?

But there was more than embarrassment in her eyes. There was attraction too. It was unmistakable. He knew just from looking that the spark was still there. He knew without a doubt that once hadn’t been enough for her either. So why was she pretending it had been?

“Did Bob show you the letters?” she asked, extracting her hand from his. “The death threats?”

“I thought I’d let you do that,” Bob said, standing up and all but tossing a manila file folder at her. “You’re the one who thinks there’s a problem. I’ve got to head over to the studio.”

Bob was leaving. Sam and Ellen would soon be alone. Sam’s luck was definitely starting to change.

Ellen blocked Bob’s path. “You can’t just leave!” There was a trace of panic in her voice.

“Of course I can,” her uncle told her cheerfully. “You and Lydia are the ones who got the phone calls.
You’re
the one who thinks there’s a real problem—the one who wanted Detective Schaefer to come out here in the first place. I’m the one who thinks I’ve just temporarily captured the attention of some weirdo who will quickly lose interest in me just as soon as Paris Hilton comes back to town.”

“But, Bob—”

He kissed her on the cheek. “I have to go to work.” He turned to Sam. “If you have any questions, call me at the studio. Oh, and also feel free to talk to Tran Minh Hyunh, my security chief. She’s going to be here at home all day, running a test on the security system. Maybe between the two of you, you can convince the worrywart here that there’s nothing to be afraid of.” He stepped around Ellen and breezed out of the room. “See you later, kids.”

Ellen stood clutching the file folder, staring after her uncle. As his footsteps faded into the distance she turned and smiled weakly at Sam. “Well. This is awkward.”

“It’s nice to see you again, Ellen,” Sam said quietly.

In some ways it was nice to see him again too. He looked delicious. He was dressed almost exactly the same as he had been the night they’d met. Jeans, sneakers, sport jacket, white shirt, tie. Only this time he was carrying a gun. She’d caught a glimpse of it beneath his jacket as he’d leaned forward to shake her hand.

He smelled good too. The faint scent of his cologne brought back sudden vivid memories that she desperately tried to banish from her mind. His mouth and hands, touching, kissing. The smooth, hard muscles of his back beneath her palms. His body filling her…

“This is
very
awkward,” she said again as she tossed the file folder down on a coffee table and sat on the plush golden-colored sofa. “For the record, it was T.S.’s idea to call you. There wasn’t much I could do to stop him, short of asking if he wouldn’t mind calling a different detective. I mean, there must be at least a thousand New York City police detectives that I
haven’t
slept with.”

Sam laughed at her blunt honesty as he sat down some distance from her on the couch. “‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she walks into mine,’” he quoted from
Casablanca
. “It’s not really coincidental, though. Or even fate. As far as I know, I’m the only cop T.S. knows. You and I were destined to meet again.” He paused. “God knows I’ve been running into you often enough on my television set.”

Ellen couldn’t help feeling a flash of pleasure. “You’ve seen the commercial?”

He smiled into her eyes. “Yeah, I’ve seen it. About four hundred times. It’s great. Every time it comes on, I’m mesmerized. You’re incredibly photogenic.”

His eyes were much too warm and she had to look away. “Thank you.” She opened the file folder on the coffee table. “You’re here on business—we should probably get to it.”

“I’ve got time,” he told her.

She glanced at him, remembering what had happened the last time he’d told her that. She pushed the file with the letters in his direction, choosing to ignore his softly spoken words. “This is the latest file of what Bob calls ‘questionable’ mail.”

Sam gazed at her as he pulled the opened file closer, but it was clear she wasn’t going to look back at him again. So he looked at the file.

The letters—if you could call them letters—were drawn in crayon on white lined loose-leaf notebook paper, but other than that, there was nothing childish about them. Sam flipped through the pages quickly. From what he could see, there were three different letters, each separately paper-clipped, each several pages long. They all had a similar last page—a rather expertly drawn picture of eyes and words printed in block letters in black crayon: “I am watching you.”

It was decidedly creepy.

“The first one is on the bottom,” Ellen told him. “It arrived just about a week ago, on June twenty-eighth. I remember because Lydia had a callback that day.”

Sam nodded, looking at that one first. He took a small notebook from his jacket pocket and scribbled a few notes. “Did these all come in the mail?”

“Death” was the only word on the first page, and the picture was a rather graphically drawn illustration of death by gunshot. Whoever had drawn this was quite an artist, particularly considering he or she was using only crayons. The victim was grimacing as bullets exploded through his chest.
Her
chest? It was hard to tell, actually.