Lying in Your Arms

One brow shot up.

She flushed. “I mean, they can put me in another room. You’ve already settled in.”

“I really don’t mind being the one to move. You look like you need to stay right in this bed until tomorrow.”

Yeah, and she couldn’t deny she wouldn’t mind if he stayed in it with her. Well, she couldn’t deny it to herself, anyway. She’d deny it to her last breath if he accused her of feeling that way.

“Long trip?”

“You have no idea. I’ve been traveling for what seems like days.”

“From where?”

“Hmm, kind of all over,” she said, thinking about the crazy whirlwind her life had become in the past few weeks, ever since she’d become the woman who’d betrayed the beloved Tommy Shane. Whore, slut, bitch, user, taker, Jezebel—some preacher had lobbed that one from a pulpit—those were some of the names that had been launched at her.

So much for thinking she would escape the breakup unscathed. Could she possibly have been more naive? She’d never in a million years imagined that by becoming the bad girl who’d broken the heart of Hollywood’s golden boy, she would be loathed, vilified and reviled all over the freaking country.

She’d had paparazzi follow her wherever she went. People who recognized her from her picture on the cover of every tabloid on the newsstand greeted her with catcalls and jeers. Her life had been ripped to shreds on blogs and Hollywood gossip shows. A woman had even spit on her while she was grocery shopping.

So she’d taken off to northern California. Unfortunately, everyone knew she had a twin sister who lived in Napa, and she hadn’t been hard to find. Poor Candace and Oliver, who liked to live quietly, had come into the limelight, too.

Then it was off to Florida to visit her parents. Same story. She hadn’t stayed there long. It had been way too much to ask for them to play along when they saw how horribly she was being treated. They knew better than anyone that she and Tommy hadn’t had a real engagement, and her father had been dying to defend her. Or at least to punch a few photographers. Heaven forbid she be the cause of his next heart attack!

So distraught over the whole thing that he’d decided to come out, Tommy had planned a press conference. Madison had told him to forget it. What he needed to do was buy her a ticket to somewhere warm. Before long, she was headed for the airport again.

Costa Rica. It should be far enough away for her to regain her sanity. Lord, did she hope so. If this scandal hadn’t blown over by the time she went home, she didn’t know what she would do.

“Hello?”

She realized her mind had drifted. She cleared her throat. “What?”

“Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere I want to return to,” she insisted vehemently.

“You’re on the run, huh?”

“You might say that.” Something prompted her to add, “You, too?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Not a bank robber, are you?” she asked, her tone light and teasing, even though the possibility that he was an ax murderer had flashed across her mind. Of course, if he’d wanted to chop her into kindling, he could easily have done it while she was unconscious. Besides, nobody with eyes as warm and kind as this man’s could ever be the violent sort. He looked and behaved like a real-life hero.

“No. I stick strictly to convenience and liquor stores for my life of crime.”

“Penny ante,” she said with an airy wave of her hand.

“What about you? Are you a secret double agent seducing your way into state secrets?”

She batted her lashes. “You think I could?”

“Honey, I know you could.”

The vehemence in his tone made her smile fade a bit. They were no longer teasing and joking. The attraction between them had been thick from the moment he’d turned around and found her in his room, but they’d been successfully hiding from it. Except, she suddenly remembered, for that long, heated moment when he’d held her in his arms after he’d caught her. She wasn’t a mind reader, but she’d had no difficulty seeing what was going through his head. Probably because the same wild, erotic thoughts had been going through hers.

Sex with a stranger. Nameless, guiltless, hedonistic. Wild and unforgettable and something never to be regretted.

Oh, yes. She’d definitely been thinking those thoughts.

The fact that he had, too, and that he hadn’t taken advantage of the situation, reinforced her hero assessment. She couldn’t think of him as merely a nice guy...that didn’t do justice to this man. She barely knew him, yet she knew he was ever so much more than that.

As if he’d noticed the warm, approving way she was looking at him, he cleared his throat and slid off the bed, standing beside it. “Think you can sit up?”

She nodded, knowing she could do it on her own but somehow unable to refuse his help when he bent and slid a powerful arm behind her shoulders. He helped her into a sitting position and it was all she could do not to turn her head and nip at the rigid muscle flexing near her cheek, or to breathe deeply to inhale his musky, masculine scent.

Tommy had obviously been right. She needed sex, badly. And for a moment, she found herself wishing her first impression had been correct and the man had been for hire. Because completely unencumbered, drop-your-pants-right-now-and-make-me-come sex sounded pretty damned awesome right now.

“By the way,” he said as he stepped away from the bed, “I’m Leo. Leo Santori. What’s your name?”

“My name?” Considering how desperately she’d been trying to evade the scandal her name created lately, she had to think for a second about how to respond.

“You have one, don’t you? It’s the thing they give you at the hospital before you get to go home.”

“I thought that was a blanket.”

“I don’t think they give you the blankets anymore.”

“Pacifier?”

“Judging by the number of kids my cousins have had, I’m thinking they pretty much ship you out the door with just a red-faced mutant and a big old bill.”

She snickered, liking the good humor in his tone. Then she seized on the rest of his comment. “So you don’t have any of your own?”

“Pacifiers?”

She smirked. “Kids.”

“Nope.” He hesitated the briefest moment before adding, “And there’s no one waiting in the wings to supply any.”

So, he was single? How interesting that he’d felt the need to point that out. How fascinating that the knowledge made her heart leap in her chest.

“What about you?”

“No pacifiers. No kids. Nobody trying to get me to have them.”

“Well, that covers just about everything,” he said. “Except one... Are you going to tell me your name?”

“It’s Madison,” she said.