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Nick pressed the phone to his ear, closed his eyes to the view of the ocean visible through the French doors and started to speak. But he stopped when he realized it was his voice mail ringing with his messages. He’d put a hold on all calls last night, hoping that whatever illness he had would be gone by morning. But he wasn’t that lucky. Then he heard the machine’s voice saying that the message had been left just about the time he’d gone to bed last night.
His attorney started to speak and Nick silently cursed the quirks of timing that fate seemed to possess. The call was about Samantha.
“Nick, it’s Jerod Danforth. I’d hoped to catch you home. The papers are ready. Come by the office at your convenience to sign them. Then the divorce is final. A few minutes, that’s all. A simple procedure. Call me about it. Oh, by the way, congratulations on getting Griffith off. Very nice indeed. Almost makes me wish I was in trouble with the law to see you do your stuff in court. See you soon.”
Nick dropped the receiver back down with a clatter and sank against the smooth coolness of the bleached wood headboard. Damn it. He didn’t need this. The last thing he wanted to deal with right now was a marriage that had had about as much substance as a flash of lightning. It had been intense and blinding for a heartbeat before it had faded away forever.
“A simple procedure,” Danforth had said.
Nothing had been simple with Sam. Not from his first meeting with her, to the moment when she’d walked out of his world six months ago. He’d go by Danforth’s offices as soon as he could and finally put the madness Sam had brought into his life to rest. Shifting, he could still feel the tight, uncomfortable aching in his body.
Yes, he needed to put this all to rest and forget it ever happened. Then he got out of bed and headed to the bathroom and a cool shower.
SAM WAS JUST ON HER WAY out of her Brentwood hotel room when the phone rang. Hurrying back to the phone by the bed, she picked up the receiver and said, “Yes, hello?”
“Samantha, it’s May Douglas.”
Sam was surprised to hear from her landlady. The elderly widow lived in an old Victorian house on several acres overlooking the ocean in Jensen Pass, a small town in northern California. The cottage where Sam lived and worked had been built for May’s husband, a writer, and Sam—when she was a child—had often thought it looked enchanted. So far it had been a place of healing and a place of safety.
She’d gone to Jensen Pass when she left Nick and found the cottage was available for rent. It had been perfect. The isolation and the peace to be found there were just perfect. Even Mrs. Douglas was perfect. A quiet, interesting lady, she liked roses and afternoon teas. A grandmotherly sort whom Sam had come to like very much.
“Mrs. Douglas, how wonderful to hear your voice,” Sam said. “There isn’t anything wrong, is there?”
“Oh, no, dear, nothing’s wrong. Owen is doing better, but he’s a bit put out because I’ve had to give him medicine that he hates. He just won’t take it nicely. But then again, Owen is so sensitive and opinionated.”
The lady surely hadn’t called to tell Sam about the well-being of Owen or his medicinal regime. “Yes, he certainly is,” Sam said.
“Oh, did you get the showing?”
“The gallery owner is very interested and seems to think the show could do well. I have to ship more pieces down and he’ll make a decision then.”
“He’ll love them, dear. Are you coming back tomorrow?”
“Yes, I plan to. In the afternoon.”
“Wonderful. Tea and conversation, the two things I’ve missed so much until you rented the cottage.”
Mrs. Douglas was tiny and spry with silver hair and the propensity for anything lavender, even in her gardens that hugged the top of the cliff overlooking the beach. “Yes, I’ll look forward to that.” She was about to say goodbye when Mrs. Douglas spoke again.
“Oh, my, I almost forgot why I called. I was at the cottage watering your plants, and the phone rang. I know it could have gone to your machine, but that’s so impersonal, so I hope it’s okay that I took the call?”
“Of course it is. Was it important?”
“Just a minute,” she said, then Sam heard the rustle of paper before Mrs. Douglas spoke again. “Let me see if I can read my own handwriting here. Yes, it was a Mr. Danforth’s secretary calling to let you know that the final divorce papers are ready for your signature and he wants you to contact him at your earliest convenience.”
Sam sank onto the bed, her legs suddenly unsteady. The divorce. Why had she thought she could come to Los Angeles without being touched by Nick in one way or another? “Anything else?”
“No, not really. Except you told me you were only married for three months. I would have thought you could just have gotten an annulment instead of a divorce. I mean, after three months, that’s hardly a marriage.”
The elderly lady was more right than she knew about her marriage hardly being a marriage. “Nick took care of it, and I told him to do whatever he needed. He’s an attorney, so I assumed he’d know how best to handle the situation.”
Sam closed her eyes but opened them immediately when a vision of Nick popped into her head. Damn it, she’d been trying to put him behind her for six months. She’d changed her life by putting almost the entire state of California between them and rebuilding her own life. But suddenly he was there, tall and lean, his face a mix of planes and angles, eyes so intense she’d been sure he could see into her soul.
One of the many things she’d been wrong about with Nick was that he hadn’t been able to see into her soul. He’d never even known her. He’d wanted to be with her but had never wanted the marriage she’d finally insisted on. Just a few of the many things she’d found out about too late. She shook her head and banished the thoughts and memories.
“There’s no point in looking back,” she said. Especially not when all that did was stir up a sense of loss and frustration and pain. A sense of being so wrong.
“You’re right, Samantha. The future is where your life is going. You’re young and have your whole life ahead of you. And you know, dear, you can never go back.”
She wouldn’t want to. “Thanks for the message, Mrs. Douglas. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Have a safe trip, dear, and come by the house to let me know when you’re home.”
“Yes, I will,” she said, and hung up.
The divorce was a formality. A legality. Nothing more. But that logic couldn’t shut out memories of that horrible conversation she’d overheard the night her marriage had ended. Nick and his partner and friend, Greg O’Neill, had been out on the deck of the house in Malibu, drinking in the darkness. She’d heard their loud conversation all the way from the living room.
“My God, Greg,” she’d heard Nick say, “I’ve gotten myself in a real mess. This marriage…” She’d heard the clink of glass on glass and looked through the doorway out to the deck. She’d barely been able to make Nick out as he stood with his back to the house, staring at the ocean. “I don’t even know how it happened,” he’d said to Greg. “I’d only known her two weeks.” She tried to stop the memory but it kept going.
“You bribed a judge, didn’t you?” Greg had replied with a burst of laughter. She’d stopped a few feet from the door and waited for Nick to join in, to make it all a joke.
But that hadn’t happened. “‘Bribe’ isn’t the word, but he owed me a favor. If I’d had to wait three days, who knows?”
“You wouldn’t have done it?” Greg had asked.
“I would have come to my senses,” he’d said after a long, painful pause. That had been the truth. She’d heard it in his voice. There was a blur of hurtful words, then Nick saying, “Marriage isn’t a normal state. Who ever thought up this concept of ‘forever’ with one person?”
Sam had known things were bad between them, that they were strangers in so many ways. As much as she’d craved a family, a connection that she’d never had from her life growing up in foster homes, she’d known at that moment that happily-ever-after was never going to happen with Nick.
Pain and sorrow had filled her and she’d known what she had to do then. As she knew what she had to do now. Once she signed the divorce papers, she could go back to her real life and start forgetting Nick…again.
Chapter Two
Late that afternoon, when Nick got to Danforth’s plush offices he was beyond sick. He had aches where he’d never felt aches before, and there was an unwelcome sense of his world not being right. He had to make a conscious effort to walk into the beige-on-beige reception area and get the day over with.
A simple nod to the receptionist who sat behind an intricate marble desk cost him dearly when a throbbing headache materialized behind his eyes. He grimaced. “Marge. I just need a minute of his time,” he said.
“I’m not sure he’s free to—”
“I won’t take a minute,” he said as he kept going, unnerved by a wave of weakness that washed over him.
God, he hated weakness of all kinds, especially in himself. He dealt with it all too often with his clients, and the only concession he’d made to being sick today was to take his medication.
But the medicine was hardly helping at all. And it hadn’t helped earlier when he’d had three cases on the docket and had to deal with one client who had been a no-show at a bail hearing. And he’d been trying to figure out for the past hour why a case he should have been able to plea-bargain had gone to trial. Now he had to sign the divorce papers.
He rapped on the door and flinched slightly from the headache that had just kicked up a notch and from Danforth’s booming greeting as the man opened the door. Danforth looked a little surprised to see him.
“Wasn’t expecting you,” he said in a baritone that served the man well in court but seemed brutally loud at that moment. “You never called back so I didn’t know if you’d picked up the message.” He moved back a bit. “But come on in.”
“I got your message first thing this morning,” Nick muttered as he entered the office. “So I came by after—”
His words stopped dead as the dream from the night before materialized not more than ten feet from him. A couple of long strides and he could have touched Sam, a Sam in a clinging blue sundress. Her blond curls had been all but banished by a short wedge cut that made her face all the more delicate-looking and her eyes all the more green.
A dream? A hallucination induced by the medication? He instinctively took a step forward but stopped as the image took one sharp breath and whispered his name.
“Nicholas.”
He heard it, really heard it, a voice that he’d almost forgotten existed until that moment. A voice that belonged to the only person he didn’t want to see right then. This was no dream, no illusion or hallucination, but reality. Samantha was real, so painfully real that he longed for the dream. Something he could vanquish simply by waking up.
He regrouped, more shaken then he could comprehend, and gasped for control. He took a breath of his own, then was able to speak in a remarkably normal voice. “Sam. I had no idea you were in Los Angeles.”
“I…I’m just in town for a few days. I’m going back tomorrow.”
He tried to remember where Danforth had said she’d gone, what her mailing address had been. Jensen Pass. That was it—a tiny coastal village north of San Francisco. That’s where she was supposed to be, not standing motionless by a massive cherry desk, with papers in her hands, staring at him as if he were an alien life-form. She was making him feel even more disoriented than he had been.
As Sam stood a bit straighter, Danforth spoke quickly. “This situation might be rather awkward for the two of you,” he said. “Tell you what, Nick. I can have the papers messengered over to your office tomorrow.”
Nick needed air, but he didn’t leave. Instead, he pushed aside everything that seemed to be bombarding him and took control. He wasn’t about to have this hanging over his head for one more day. “No reason to put it off,” Nick said. “Let’s get it over with.”
The words came out with an edge he hadn’t intended, and he didn’t miss the way Sam’s expression tightened. Or the fact that he had to narrow his eyes to dull the sharp vividness of her being. But narrowed eyes couldn’t stop the unsteadiness that persisted inside him or the way his head continued pounding.
“Actually, I was ready to leave,” Sam said, and her lashes lowered just enough to shadow her eyes and guard her emotions. She was putting the papers in a large envelope, talking as she slid them inside, her voice in some way filtering into his consciousness. “I’m finished here. I just came…” She exhaled , and the sound echoed through Nick. Not that there was an echo in the luxurious office. The echo was inside him, another extra from being sick that he didn’t welcome. Her gaze went to Danforth. “I’ll read them, then get them back to you as soon as I can.”
“I can send a messenger to your hotel for them if you just call the office when they’re ready.”
“I won’t be there. I’m leaving first thing tomorrow, so I’ll get them back to you.”
“You’ve got Express Mail in—what’s it called, Jensen Pass?” Nick asked with no idea why he would say something that sounded so sarcastic.
She turned to him, holding the envelope in one hand, her other hand nervously twisting her locket. The locket had been her mother’s and at one time had held a picture of him. “Ever the logical mind,” she said, bitterness edging her words. “Rest assured we have all the amenities in Jensen Pass. Electricity, running water, indoor plumbing and Express Mail. We’re not exactly in the boondocks there.”
He had no idea what Jensen Pass was or wasn’t, but he did know that for some reason his sarcasm was growing. “You left all those luxuries behind to come here to get the papers?”
She glanced down at the envelope in her hand as if she’d all but forgotten about it. “Oh, no, I had no idea…”
Her tongue touched her pale lips, and the sight sent a jolt through him that he found himself clearing his throat to control. God, what was so wrong with him that he could literally taste her in his mouth?
“I was in the city to see about a showing. This whole paper-signing thing…it’s just a…” She nibbled on her bottom lip and he filled in the word for her.
“A bonus?”
Her expression tightened again, this time drawing a fine line between her eyes and compressing her mouth. Color touched her cheeks. “Not hardly,” she said as her chin lifted just a bit. “But it is convenient.”
Suddenly, his legs felt rubbery and he moved farther into the room. Veering away from Sam, he reached for the closest chair and gripped the high leather back with one hand. Danforth was talking, and Nick had to force himself to focus on the lawyer to comprehend what he was saying.
“Actually, Samantha’s right. It is convenient. You’re both here, so we can get this over with right now.”
Nick actually needed the support of the chair, and if he hadn’t been so distracted by Sam’s unexpected appearance, that would have really annoyed him. “Sure, whatever,” Nick muttered.
“I don’t want anything from Nick,” Sam stated, “so it should be very simple. I just don’t see why we couldn’t have gotten an annulment.”
Danforth looked at Nick. “You never mentioned that.”
“I never thought of it,” he murmured, his hand tightening on the leather chair. “But if Sam wants to do that instead of—”
“Well, you’d need proof of fraud to get an annulment since I assume the marriage was consummated.”
“No, no,” Sam said quickly. “This is almost finished. That would be foolish.”
Nick saw the color in Sam’s cheeks rise even more, and she was staring hard at the envelope in her hand. Fraud? How about stupidity? And the marriage had been consummated—over and over again. Sex had been just about the only thing between them that they had both wanted—except for this divorce.
He felt a treacherous response to the memories as they started to return, and he moved carefully to sink into the chair.
“A divorce is fine,” Sam was saying, holding on to the envelope with her left hand, a hand without a ring. The single diamond was where she’d left it—in the side drawer of his desk. He hadn’t looked at it since she’d walked out. “But I need to read the papers before I sign,” she continued.
“Of course,” Danforth said.
Sam let go of the locket and skimmed her hand behind her neck, lifting her chin slightly and exposing her throat for a flashing instant. Nick was suddenly bombarded with the memory of the feel of her skin against his, that heat and silk, the pleasure that came in waves, the sensation of her pulse against his lips. He cleared his throat abruptly, tightening his hands on the arms of the chair and forcing himself to make small talk. “How’s your work going?”
Her green-eyed gaze turned to him, and the impact made his head swim. “Fine. I’m working on several paintings, actually. They might be picked up for the Orleans series.” He must have looked blank because she went on to explain. “It’s a children’s series of morality books.”
“Morality books,” he repeated.
“Honor, truth, loyalty…doing the right thing.”
He had the strangest idea that she was rebuking him somehow. “It’s a series?”
“Five titles in the planning. They saw some other children’s illustrations I did and they liked them.” She shrugged slightly. “They liked them very much.”
For a moment, he thought she was going to smile and he found himself bracing for the impact. He remembered her smiles, and he remembered what her smile had done to him when he first met her. He remembered and wished he hadn’t.
“Obviously, you’re good,” he murmured. “It sounds as if you’re doing well.”
Looking up at her now, he found himself confused about why he’d let this woman walk out on him. He tried to focus, to grab at a reason, then it came to him in a wrenching thud when she spoke again.
“I am. I love working on things for children.”
Children. At least he remembered one of the many reasons why their marriage had dissolved. They’d been on the beach at dawn, watching the sun rise, and she’d hugged her legs, staring out at the water.
“What a place for kids to grow up.”
He’d made some noncommittal answer like “Yeah, great,” but he’d been paying more attention to her tiny blue bikini and wondering how soon they could get back to the house so he could make love to her.
“I’ve always wanted to raise my kids by the ocean. That was the best time of my life, up in Jensen Pass. The ocean was like freedom to me, and I always knew that when I got married, I’d be by the ocean, and my kids would swim like fish.”
He’d been tracing her jawline with the tip of his finger but stopped. “That’s a nice fantasy,” he’d murmured, hoping he could banish the whole idea that easily.
But nothing about Sam had been easy. “It’s what I want. What I’ve always dreamed of. A husband and children. All the trimmings.”
He couldn’t pass that off as another rough spot in a rushed marriage. They were two people who had met and married in two weeks, two strangers who had desperately tried to reach out to each other. He hid from her words, from a dream life that he didn’t want. All he wanted was her.
He didn’t want children. He didn’t want to be tied down. But he wanted her. He’d stood, lifted her into his arms and carried her to the house. Their lovemaking that time had been explosive, and it had also been the last time he’d touched her.
Their relationship had been too intense and all-consuming. All he’d known while they were together was that nothing else mattered. Not when she smiled. Not when she touched him. At least, not at first while they were lost in each other’s arms.
“Children. Good.” He spoke past an odd tightness in his throat. “I’m glad things are working out for you.” He looked away, the thought of that last day bringing bitterness in a rush. He’d been wrong, so wrong. His mistake. His impulsiveness. His decision. A marriage that should have never been. She’d needed the commitment of marriage, and he’d gone along with it, never thinking about the consequences of two people finally looking at each other and finding out they were strangers. Husband and wife, but strangers.
“How have you been doing?” Sam asked abruptly.
He looked back at her, bracing himself this time, expecting that rush of need and desire that came no matter how rationally he tried to fight it when he was near her. “Working. I keep busy.”
“Of course, I remember,” she said softly. “Still fighting for the bad guy? Giving a defense to those with no defense?”
His headache increased as echoes from the past bombarded him. “How can you defend me when you know darn well that I did all that stuff the judge read to you? I mean, I didn’t intend to do it, but I’m guilty.”
His response now came as easily as the same response had come so long ago. “Everyone deserves a defense and I’m good at it.” He’d gotten her off with a fine, driving school and a restricted license for three months. A slap on the wrist after everything she’d done. “I got you off, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did,” she said, and his headache grew when her chin lifted just a fraction of an inch. “But then again, I wasn’t a serial killer.”
“You drove like one,” he said.
Sam felt her face burn, and she was furious that she was still so vulnerable to everything Nick said or did. It had to be the shock. When she’d come to Los Angeles, she’d known she wouldn’t be going anywhere near Malibu and she certainly hadn’t expected to see him walk through the door. Not any more than she’d expected that the sight of him would rock the world under her feet.
She turned from him and the way he seemed to fill all the space in the room, the way he’d always filled the space around her. She concentrated on the attorney behind the desk. But nothing she did could stop her from feeling Nick’s presence beside her. She didn’t have to inhale to know that he was so close she almost felt the air stir as he shifted in the leather chair.
She didn’t have to turn to be assailed by his image, an image burned into her mind. The navy suit, the pin-striped shirt with a deep red tie. His hair, a bit longer than it once had been, swept back from a hard face. Angles and planes. Those eyes. The one constant with Nick was that he was as sexy as hell. Even when he looked as if he wasn’t feeling well.
She couldn’t block out the image even when she wasn’t looking at him. He still had the same effect on her as he had the first moment they’d met, the first time he spoke to her in that low, rough voice, the first moment he touched her. She took a deep breath and knew she needed to go home, but she couldn’t till tomorrow morning. Until then, she just needed to be out of this office and to put Nick behind her.
“Mr. Danforth, I tell you what. I’ll get these back to you before I fly out tomorrow,” she told the attorney.
“That’s fine.” The man frowned at the two of them, probably glad that she was leaving and any explosion wouldn’t happen. “Just fine.”
She picked up her small white purse, then turned and walked away. The door was close enough for her to reach out and touch when she heard Nick’s voice call out, “Sam?”
She stopped but didn’t turn around. She didn’t need to look at Nick, the man she married, the man whose touch could make all reason flee, the man who could make her ache with just the sound of his voice. She held the doorknob so tightly her hand ached. All she wanted to do was cross the room and make some contact with him. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
Sam stood very still, his words hanging between them, and she didn’t know what to do. He was sorry. For some reason, that centered her. It killed whatever had been happening, whatever craziness was growing inside her, and in its place came a startling anger. She remembered. That moment she knew she’d have to leave. That moment she realized that Nick was a stranger.
Nick and Greg O’Neill on the deck of the Malibu house. She’d been gone, losing herself in her painting. The morning had started badly with a sense of something wrong, but she hadn’t been able to figure it out. There had been so many rough spots in the short marriage, but that morning, something had changed.