Sweet Liar

  When he had leaped around the stairs to catch the football, he had nearly trampled her, and out of instinct, he had caught her before she fell against the spikes of the railing. He had opened his mouth to ask if she was all right, but when he had looked into her eyes, he’d not been able to say a word, for she was looking at him as though she thought he was the best-looking, sexiest, most desirable man in the world. Mike had known since he was a kid that he was attractive to girls and he’d used his looks whenever possible, but no woman had looked at him as this one had.

  Of course he had to concede that maybe he had been looking at her in much the same way. Her big, soft blue eyes had been filled with surprise and desire, looking at him from over a small, pert nose that was set atop a mouth so full and lush that he thought he might die from wanting it so much.

  He’d kissed her, at first not sure if he should, because he didn’t want to do anything to scare her away, but the moment his lips touched hers, he knew he couldn’t stop himself, knew he couldn’t hold back. No woman had ever kissed him as this one did. It wasn’t just desire he felt coming from her, but hunger. She kissed him as though she’d been locked in a prison for the last ten years and now that she’d been released, he was the man she wanted most in the world.

  Right now Mike didn’t understand what was going on with her. How could she kiss him like that and ten minutes later look at him as though she detested him? For that matter how could this proper little lady be the same enchantress who’d wrapped her leg around his waist?

  Mike didn’t have answers, nor did he understand anything that was going on, but he knew one thing for certain: He couldn’t let her get away from him. He had to find out what was making her want to get away from him. For his part he’d like to pick her up and carry her back to his house and keep her there, maybe forever. But if she wanted something from him first, like maybe for him to climb to the heavens, pick up a dozen or so stars, string them together, and hang them in her bedroom, he thought he would like to know so he could start tying ladders together.

  “I apologize for whatever I did to offend you,” he said, although he didn’t mean a word of it. All he could remember was her ankle on his waist.

  Samantha narrowed her eyes at him. “Is that supposed to make me believe you?” Taking a deep breath, she tried to calm down, for she was aware that they were beginning to draw the attention of the people on the street.

  “Couldn’t we go somewhere and talk about this?” he asked.

  “Your house maybe?”

  Missing the sarcasm in her voice, Mike thought that was a fine idea but didn’t say so.

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  This time there was no missing her insinuation that she believed his house to be a den of sin. Mike took a deep breath. “We’ll go back to the house, sit on the stoop—in plain sight of all of New York—and talk about whatever the problem is. Later, if you still want to leave, I’ll help you find a hotel.”

  Samantha knew she shouldn’t listen to him; she should hail another cab and find somewhere to spend the night.

  “Look, you don’t even know where you’re going, do you? You can’t get into a cab and say, ‘Take me to a hotel.’ Not any more. You don’t know where you’ll end up, so at least let me call and make a reservation for you.”

  Seeing her hesitation, Mike took the opportunity to start walking toward his house, hoping she’d follow her suitcase and tote bag. Not wanting to press his luck with the headway he’d made with her, he didn’t say any more as he walked, moving slowly, but stopping now and then to make sure she was following him.

  When he reached the town house, he carried her bags to the top of the stairs, set them down, and turned to her. “Now, you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  Looking down at her hands, Samantha knew that she was very tired from the long, exhausting day. For that matter, it had been a long, exhausting year. “I think the problem is obvious,” she said, trying not to look at him because he had on so very little clothing. While he stood there leaning against the rail, he reached inside the old sideless sweat shirt he wore to scratch his chest, and Samantha saw a stomach covered with washboard muscle. When he said nothing, she spoke again, this time intending to make herself very clear. “I do not plan to live in the same house with a man who will spend his time chasing me all over the place. I am in mourning for my father, I have just ended my marriage, and I do not want more complications.”

  Perhaps Mike shouldn’t have taken offense at her words, but she made him sound like a dirty old man who couldn’t keep his hands off the luscious young girl. Resisting the temptation to point out that he had by no means forced himself on her, he was also tempted to tell her that all they had shared was a kiss, nothing more, and that there was no reason to act as though he were a convicted rapist who’d just tried to molest her.

  “All right,” he said in a cold tone. “What are the rules?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh yes you do. Anybody who dresses as you do must live by rules, lots of them. Now tell me what your rules are.”

  At that Samantha picked up her tote bag and reached for her suitcase, but putting his hand on it, he wouldn’t let her have it.

  “All right,” he said again, this time with a sigh of defeat. “I apologize again. Couldn’t we start over?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not possible. Would you please release my bag so I can leave?”

  Mike wasn’t going to let her leave. Besides the fact that he wanted her so badly there was sweat running down his chest even though it was a cool day, there was his promise to her father. He was aware that she knew nothing about how close he had been with her father, didn’t know that Dave and Mike had spent quite a bit of time together until Dave had told him Samantha was coming home. After that announcement Dave had confined their friendship to letters, which had been sent to the attorney, because for some reason, Dave hadn’t wanted Mike and Samantha to meet, at least not while Dave was alive. Then, two days before Dave died, he had called Mike, although by then Dave had been too weak for Mike to hear all of what he had to say, but Mike had understood the essence of it. Dave had said he was sending Samantha to him in New York and he had asked Mike to take care of her. At the time Mike hadn’t felt he’d had any other choice, so he’d given his word that he’d protect her and watch out for her. But so far, Mike didn’t think these last few minutes were what Dave had in mind.

  Mike looked down at Samantha’s two bags. “Which one has your overnight things in it?”

  Samantha thought that was a very odd question, but then the last few minutes had been the oddest of her life.

  Not waiting for her answer, he picked up her tote bag and opened the door to the house. “Five minutes, that’s all I ask. Give me five minutes, then ring the bell.”

  “Would you please give me back my bag?”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Quarter after four,” she answered automatically after a glance at her watch.

  “Okay, at twenty after ring the bell.”

  Shutting the door behind him, he left Samantha standing alone on the stoop, half of her luggage missing. When she pressed the doorbell, there was no answer. She was tempted to take her large case and leave, but the fact that her remaining money was hidden in her tote bag made her sit down on her suitcase and wait.

  Trying not to think of her father, trying not to ask herself why he had done this to her, and especially trying not to think of her husband—correction, ex-husband—she forced herself to look at the sidewalks and the street before her, forced herself to look at the people, at the men dressed in jeans and the women in outrageously short skirts. Even in New York, the air seemed to be full of the laziness of a Sunday afternoon.

  This man, this Michael Taggert, had said he wanted to start over, she thought. If she could, she’d like to start her life over, like to start from the morning of the day her mother died, because after that day nothing in h
er life had ever been the same. Today, having to be here, was part of all the pain and trauma that had started that day.

  Looking at her watch again, her first thought was that maybe she could pawn it, but the watch had cost only thirty dollars new, so she doubted that she could get much for it. Noticing that it was twenty-five after four, she thought that maybe, if she rang the bell now, Michael Taggert would answer and maybe he’d give her back her bag so she could find a place to stay. The sooner she got started on this year-long sentence the sooner she could get out of this dreadful city.

  Taking a deep breath, smoothing her skirt, making sure her hair was tightly in place, she put her finger on the doorbell.

  2

  When the man opened the door promptly at Samantha’s ring, she stood for a moment blinking at the change in him. He was wearing a clean blue dress shirt, partly unbuttoned but still neat, a loosened silk tie, dark blue tropical weight wool trousers, and perfectly polished loafers. His thick growth of black whiskers was gone and the black curls of his hair had been tamed into a conservative, neatly parted style. Within minutes he had gone from resembling the sexy, rather dangerous leader of a gang of hoodlums to looking like a prosperous young banker on his day off.

  “Hello, you must be Miss Elliott,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Michael Taggert. Welcome to New York.”

  “Please give me back my bag.” She ignored his outstretched hand. “I want to leave.”

  Smiling, acting as though she hadn’t spoken, Mike stepped aside. “Won’t you please come in? Your apartment is ready for you.”

  Samantha did not want to enter this man’s house. For one thing, she found it disconcerting that he could change his looks so quickly and so completely, that within minutes he could go from looking like a muscle-bound jock who’d never done anything more intelligent than memorize a few football plays to looking like a young professor. If she had met this man first, she wouldn’t have guessed what he was really like. As it was now, she wasn’t sure which man was the real one.

  When Samantha saw her tote bag at the foot of the stairs, she stepped inside the house to get it, but as her hand touched the handle of the case, she heard the door close behind her. Turning toward him in anger, her lips were tight, but his glance didn’t meet her eyes.

  “Would you like to see the house first or just your apartment?”

  She didn’t want to see either, but he was standing in front of the door, blocking her exit, as big as a boulder in front of a cave entrance. “I want to get out of here. I want—”

  “The house it is, then,” he said cheerfully, as though she’d answered positively. “The house was built in the twenties, I don’t know the exact year, but you can see that the rooms have all the original moldings.”

  Refusing to move away from her bag, she stood where she was.

  But Mike forced her to participate, however reluctantly, as he put his hand on her elbow and began to half pull, half push her out of the foyer, propelling her toward the living room. She saw a large room, with big, comfortable-looking black leather chairs and a couch strewn about, a rough, hand-woven carpet on the floor, folk art from all over the world tastefully scattered about the room, as well as two enormous palm trees in the corners by the windows. Several masks hung on the walls, as well as Chinese tapestries and Balinese paintings. It was a man’s room, with dark colors, leather, and wooden objects—the room of a man of taste and discrimination.

  The room didn’t look much like a bordello as she would have thought from her first impression of him. In fact, the man beside her, the one wearing the banker’s clothes, looked more at home in this room than the jock she had first met.

  Aware that Mike was looking at her face, she sensed that he seemed to be pleased with what he saw, because the pressure on her arm lessened. Reluctantly, but with less anger, she followed him from room to room, seeing a dining room with a large table from India and a magnificent cinnabar screen against one wall, then a powder room papered with Edwardian caricatures.

  Relaxing more every minute, she was shown a library paneled in oak with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books. She was impressed by the sheer number of books until she saw that, as far as she could tell, all the books dealt with American gangsters: their origins, biographies, even books on the economics of being a gangster. Looking away from the books with a grimace of disgust, she saw in the corner of the room, near a big desk heaped with papers, large white cartons labeled with the names Compaq and Hewlett Packard. Surprise showing on her face, she turned to look at him.

  “Your rent,” he said in answer to her silent question. “A whole year’s rent is in those boxes, and I have no idea what to do with the damn things.”

  “I could—” Samantha stopped herself, knowing she was feeling a computer aficionado’s heartfelt lurch at seeing powerful computer equipment sitting unused in boxes. It must be how a doll collector would feel at seeing boxes in an attic labeled, “Great-Granny’s dolls” and not being allowed to open the boxes.

  “You wouldn’t by chance know which end of a computer to use, would you?” he asked innocently, knowing full well that she was a whiz with computers. He’d bought what Dave Elliot, in one of his letters, had told him Samantha said he should buy.

  “I know a little about them,” she said vaguely, slowly turning away from the boxes.

  Leading her upstairs, he showed her two bedrooms, both of them decorated with plants and art from around the world, one of them furnished with wicker chairs with pillows printed with ivy vines.

  “You like it?” he asked, not attempting to control the eagerness in his voice.

  Samantha smiled before she caught herself. “I do like it.”

  When he grinned in response to her assertion, Samantha almost felt her breath leave her. He was even better looking when he smiled like that, such a smile of pleasure, untainted by any other emotion. Feeling that it had suddenly become very, very hot in the room, she started toward the door.

  “Want to see your apartment now?”

  Looking away from him, looking at anything but him, she nodded.

  She followed him up the stairs to the third floor. When Michael opened the door to the first room, Samantha forgot all about New York and this man who unsettled her, for she could feel her father in this room. Her father had always said that if he had to start from scratch, he would decorate his house in green and burgundy—and this living room had been made for her father. A dark green couch had been placed at an angle to a green marble fireplace, with two big, comfortable-looking green-striped chairs across from the couch, all of them set on an Oriental rug handwoven in colors of green and cream. Around the room were pieces of dark mahogany furniture, not one piece having spindly legs that would make it easy for a man to knock over.

  Walking to the mantel, Samantha saw several framed photos of her family: her mother, her parents together, her paternal grandfather, and herself from infancy to one year ago. Tentatively, she picked up a silver-framed photograph of her mother and, holding it, she looked about, closing her eyes for a moment. The presence of her father was so strong in the room she almost expected to turn and see him.

  Instead, when she turned, she saw a stranger standing in the doorway—and he was frowning at her.

  “You don’t like it,” Mike said. “This room’s not right for you.”

  “It’s perfect for me,” Samantha said softly. “I can feel my father here.”

  Mike frowned harder. “You can, can’t you?” As he spoke, he looked at the apartment with new eyes, seeing that it wasn’t a room for a pretty blonde female. This was a man’s room. Specifically, it was David Elliot’s room.

  “The bedroom’s through here.” As Mike walked behind Samantha, he saw every corner through different eyes. His sister had decorated these rooms as well as the ones downstairs. At the time, Mike had bragged to Dave that all you had to do was tell his sister what you wanted the finished product to look like and she could do it. Dave had said he wanted his apa
rtment to look like an English gentleman’s club, and that’s what it looked like. Now Samantha looked as out of place amid the dark colors as she would have in an all-male club.

  In the bedroom the walls were painted dark green and the windows leading onto a balcony were hung with curtains of green-and-maroon-striped heavy cotton velvet. The bed was a four-poster with no canopy, and the linens were printed with plaids and sporting dogs. Watching, he saw Samantha lovingly run her hand over the comforter. “Did my father ever stay here?”

  “No,” Mike said. “He did everything by mail and telephone. He was planning to come here, but—”

  “I know,” she said, looking at the dog prints on the wall. Being in this room was almost as though her father weren’t dead, almost as though he were still alive.

  Mike showed her a wine safe next to the bedroom, then two bathrooms done in dark green marble, a sitting room with red and green plaid chairs and bookshelves filled with the biographies her father loved. On the fourth floor was a guest bedroom, and a study with a heavy oak desk and French doors opening onto a balcony. Opening the doors, she stepped out and saw the garden below.

  She had not expected a garden in New York—certainly not a garden such as this one. In fact, looking at the lush green lawn, the two tall trees, the shrubs about to burst into bloom, and the beds of newly set annuals, she could almost forget she was in a city.

  Turning back to look at Mike, her happiness showing on her face, she didn’t notice his frown. “Who takes care of the garden?”

  “I do.”

  “May I help? I mean, if I were to stay here, I’d like to help in the garden.”

  His frown gave way to a slight smile. “I would be honored,” he said and should have been pleased by her words, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what was bothering him. He wanted her to stay, but now he was almost wishing she wouldn’t, and his ambivalence had something to do with the way she moved about the rooms—Dave’s rooms. Something about the way she was still gripping that photo of her mother to her breast made him want to tell her to leave.