Hired Wife

Kim’s heart turned over and she didn’t hear Marcus’s voice anymore.

“Sam?” she echoed. “You mean Samiir?”

CHAPTER TWO

EVEN after all those many years, just hearing his name was enough to set Kim’s pulse racing. She amazed herself. How ridiculous could a person be? She swallowed hard. Sam, short for Samiir, the Arab sheikh of her fanciful girlish dreams. She hadn’t seen him in close to eleven years, not since she was fifteen and had been hopelessly, embarrassingly in love with him. He’d been twenty-three. Oh, Lord, she’d made such a fool of herself then.

Sam was Marcus’s college friend and Marcus had brought him home for weekends and holidays when they’d been in graduate school. She’d been in awe of his dark, handsome looks and his calm, self-possessed manner; mesmerized by his enigmatic dark eyes that held a wealth of intriguing secrets and deep passions. He was so…mysterious.

Sam was in reality no sheikh but a full-fledged, passport-carrying American citizen whose Jordanian father and Greek mother had emigrated to the United States when he was ten.

“You remember Samiir, don’t you?” Marcus asked.

She sucked in a deep breath. “Yeah, vaguely,” she said casually.

Marcus gave a hearty laugh. “Sure, sure.”

He wasn’t deceived, of course. Unfortunately Marcus had been keenly aware of her amorous adoration of his friend, but not, she sincerely hoped, of her secret fantasies about him.

A hopelessly romantic girl with a fertile imagination, Kim had often envisioned Sam in long flowing white robes and a cloth covering his head. She’d made up elaborate scenarios of being lost in the desert and being rescued by Sam on a camel, who then brought her back to his tent, full of beautiful rugs and copper pots and large platters of sugary sweets and fresh figs. He always, of course, fell passionately in love with her.

Sam, however, had assured her once, when she had asked, that he had never owned any white robes or worn a cloth on his head. He had smiled magnanimously. “I was ten when I left Jordan, Kim. I wore jeans and T-shirts.” Then he’d laughed. “Don’t look so disappointed, kiddo.”

Kiddo. He’d called her kiddo. She’d been crushed. Well, what could she expect? She was fifteen and looked twelve. She was short and skinny and wore braces on her teeth, and she was his friend’s little sister.

Kim relaxed her fingers around the receiver and tried to focus on the conversation at hand. What had Marcus been saying? She wished her silly heart would calm down.

“What did you say about Sam being in New York?”

She’d heard little about Sam in the past eleven years; Marcus had once told her that he roamed the globe working for his family’s international electronics company.

“He’s here just for a month or so. Rasheed’s Electronics is setting up another manufacturing company on Java and he’s going to live there for who knows how long. He wants someone to get him a house and furnish it and hire servants and that sort of thing.”

“Doesn’t he have a wife to do that?”

“No wife,” said Marcus. “Too much trouble, I think. All the demands she’d make on his time…and then she’d want children, just imagine.” Kim heard the humor in his voice. Marcus was quite happily married himself with four-year-old twin boys, terrors, and the new baby was due soon.

“Anyway,” he continued, “he mentioned Java and I thought of you, how you’ve always wanted to go back. You could do the job easily and you’d be really good, too. I don’t know how much time you’d have for your own artistic and professional pursuits, but you could negotiate an arrangement, I’m sure.”

The Far East. The island of Java.

Sam.

Setting up house for Sam.

Was this a fortuitous opportunity or a temptation to withstand?

A fortuitous opportunity, surely. Kim preferred to look on the bright and positive side of things; it made life so much more exciting. And hadn’t she wondered, a couple of days ago, if she should have a change of scenery? A foreshadowing thought, of course. She believed in omens, in dreams, in intuition.

“He’s coming to my office later this afternoon,” she heard Marcus say. “We have some business to discuss. Why don’t you come by here, say…six? I’d make it dinner, except he has to be somewhere else, so that’s out.”

“Six,” she repeated. “Okay, I’ll be there.”

“She’s perfect,” said Marcus, looking at Kim and then back at Sam, who stood casually by the large window of Marcus’s plush office, suit jacket open, hands in his pockets, radiating masculine appeal. He was observing her closely, seriously doubting her perfection, she was sure.

He was even more handsome than she remembered; older, more mature, his face all hard angles, his body lean and muscled under the expensive suit. He’d briefly taken her hand and smiled politely when she’d come in. “Well, hello, Kim,” he’d said. “What a pleasant surprise to see you.”

“It’s nice to see you, too,” she’d replied, her heart about to jump out of her chest. She was grateful he hadn’t mentioned how she was all grown-up now and not the little girl he remembered.

“She’s absolutely perfect,” Marcus emphasized.

Kim felt like a piece of merchandise and suppressed a grin. She tried to look serious and dignified, which wasn’t easy. Being serious and dignified did not come to her naturally. She wished she hadn’t worn the purple dress she had on, even though it was one of her favorites; it was too frivolous and too short and now that she sat there in Marcus’s sumptuous office, facing the sophisticated Sam she wondered what had possessed her to wear it.

“I am,” she said, summoning confidence, looking right into Sam’s eyes. “Absolutely perfect.” Her heart was doing a little dance of excitement. She wanted the job. She wanted to go to the Far East again. She wanted…

“She speaks Indonesian,” Marcus went on. “How perfect can you get?”

“That’s certainly an important asset,” Sam acknowledged calmly. He looked so cool and composed, everything she was not. She pushed a curl behind her ear, wishing she had twisted her hair up in some elegant style instead of having it hanging loose in all its wild and untamed glory.

“And she’s very good with people,” Marcus continued. “She can even cook! Imagine a nineties’ woman who can actually cook real food.”

“Impressive, indeed.” Sam’s mouth quirked up at the corners as he met Kim’s eyes. “Do you do windows?”

“No, but I can type,” she said with mock seriousness.

“She’s being modest,” Marcus commented. “She knows computers, word processing, how to find her way in cyber space, all that stuff. Very useful in case of an emergency.”

Sam’s left eyebrow arched up slightly. “Really?”

Kim nodded. “Really.” He must be finding it hard to believe that the dizzy little blond thing he had known eleven years ago was capable of anything so complicated as operating a computer.

Marcus leaned back in his leather chair. He was enjoying himself. “And she knows how to entertain. She gives fabulous parties,” he boasted. “People even pay her sometimes to throw parties for them.”

“And I can fix things around the house,” she supplied. “Leaky faucets, electrical plugs, that sort of thing. I’m a handy person.”

“She’s not afraid of snakes and cockroaches, either,” Marcus added.

“I’m a true Renaissance woman.” She smiled brightly into Sam’s face.

Sam was smiling now, and Kim’s heart turned a somersault, much to her annoyance. Why was she reacting this way? He wasn’t her type. She liked the more casual, easygoing type of man, the kind of man who wore jeans and sweaters.

But here he was, in his impeccable suit, his dark eyes mesmerizing her, and she felt fifteen again. She was an idiot.

“I’m impressed,” he said. His voice was deep and resonant, a wonderful voice, that would wrap itself around your heart and give you warm fuzzy feelings. Actually maybe even more than warm fuzzy feelings. Oh, shut up, she said silently to herself. He’s not your type. He’s too cool, too self-contained.

“And she comes cheap,” her brother was saying, as if he were selling her off like a slave trader, he a graduate of Harvard Business School.

Kim glared at him. “I am not cheap,” she countered. “I insist on being paid fairly for my services.” She groaned inwardly as she heard her own words. She sounded like a call girl. This whole exchange was beginning to have farcical overtones, which was not a good omen. She needed to present herself as serious, efficient and competent if she wanted to have any chance with the imposing Sam, the successful international business executive.