Unwrapping the Playboy / The Playboy's Gift: Unwrapping the Playboy

She shook her head with feeling. “No, not an idiot, a hero.” Her eyes held his. He saw the passion within them as she told him, “You saved me.”

He had no recollection of any heroic act on his part, other than exercising an almost superhuman effort to restrain his raging hormones and abide by her wishes even though, more than anything on earth, he longed to be intimate with her.

“Saved you?” he echoed.

Lilli nodded. “If you hadn’t been so patient with me, so kind, if you hadn’t gone out of your way to be there for me,” she underscored, “I would have killed myself.” And she meant it. She’d been completely hopeless, and he’d given her hope.

I would have killed myself.

It was a phrase tossed around easily, especially by younger people. He was all ready to discount it, but he saw the look in her eyes. Young, talented, smart, she had everything to live for, but she was obviously dead serious.

“Why?”

She shook her head again. “I don’t want to go into that, Kullen,” she told him solemnly, then drew herself up to her short stature. “I’m sorry I wasted your time like this. Send me the bill for this appointment and I’ll reimburse you. It’s the least I can do.”

No, the least she could do was explain herself, but he knew better than to press her. Instead, as Lilli reached for the doorknob a third time, he asked, “Where are you going?”

“I have to find a lawyer.”

“I’m a lawyer,” he reminded her. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing. But I thought that you don’t want to take my case—”

Kullen had no idea what he would do next or how any of this would turn out. Despite everything, he didn’t want to see her walk out that door.

“I didn’t say that. I don’t even know what your case is,” he reminded her. “What, exactly, is your case?”

She put it into terms as succinctly as she could. “It’s a custody battle.”

“Then there is a father,” he concluded. And whoever the man was, he wanted custody of the child they’d had together.

“No, there’s a grandmother.”

Saying the words, she caught herself almost smiling. The flamboyant Elizabeth Dalton would have balked at the label, telling whoever called her a grandmother what he could do with the label and where he could put it. In the eyes of the press, Elizabeth Dalton strove to be seen as an ageless, benevolent goddess of timeless beauty. Her image, her reputation, were all-important to her.

Lilli had no doubts that if Elizabeth won custody of Jonathan, her well-adjusted little boy would be a emotional wreck in a matter of months. Perhaps sooner. All she had to do was remember the way Elizabeth’s son had turned out. And what he did. It put cold fear into Lilli’s heart.

“Your mother?” Kullen guessed.

“No, Elizabeth Dalton,” she told him.

The mention of the high-profile socialite threw him for a moment. “The widow of the pharmaceutical heir?” he questioned. Lilli nodded. “What does she have to do with it?” he asked.

“She’s the one who wants custody of my son.” Lilli took a deep breath, as if trying to protect herself from the words she was saying. “And she’s already told me in no uncertain terms that she will stop at nothing to get it.”

Chapter Three

Like a traffic cop, Kullen held up his hand, stopping her before she went off in another direction.

“Back up. Why does Elizabeth Dalton want your son?” The flamboyant socialite took to the spotlight like the proverbial moth to the flame, but this sounded a little bizarre even for her. “Exactly what right does she have to him?”

As he waited for an explanation, he watched the wariness entering Lilli’s eyes. How many times had he seen that before? Eight years ago it had taken him weeks to get her to trust him, to realize that all he wanted was for her to be happy.

She pressed her lips together before saying, “I’d rather not go into all the details right now.”

There were those damn walls again. Isolating her. Keeping him out.

But this time it was different. This time it wasn’t personal. She’d sought him out in his professional capacity. She wanted his help as a lawyer, and as such he needed to establish some ground rules for them.

“If I’m going to be any use at all to you, Lilli,” he said, cupping her elbow and ever so subtly guiding her back to his desk, “I’m going to have to know everything.” He pulled out the chair for her but Lilli remained standing, in silent, stubborn defiance of his request. “Any lawyer will need all the details in order to properly represent you and your case.”

Her case.

That made it sound so austere, so clinical. It wasn’t a case, she silently insisted. It was a boy. A beautiful, sweet-tempered, innocent, blond-haired little boy. A little boy who was her reason for getting up in the morning, for her very existence. And she would die to protect him, to keep him safe and out of Elizabeth Dalton’s clutches.

Lilli was still silent. Kullen sighed, attempting another approach. He sat down. “All right, I’ll fill in the blanks. Stop me if I’m wrong. Elizabeth’s son is the boy’s father.”

He paused a moment for her to contradict him, even though he was certain that, given the circumstances, she couldn’t. Lilli sat down, but the uncomfortable silence continued.

“And now, out of the blue,” Kullen went on, “he and his mother want custody of the boy.”

Lilli looked down at her hands. “Not ‘he,’ just his mother,” she corrected woodenly.

Kullen went with the tide. “Okay, so the boy’s father doesn’t want him—”

“His father didn’t want him,” she said tersely, changing the tense that he’d used.

Kullen paused. “Did something happen to make Dalton change his mind?”

“No,” Lilli answered. Her voice sounded hollow to her own ears, stripped of emotion. It was the only way, even after all this time, that she could bring herself to talk about the man who had so savagely changed her life. “He’s dead.”

The moment she mentioned Dalton’s death, Kullen vaguely recalled hearing a sound bite on the news one evening summarizing Erik Dalton’s shallow life. If he remembered correctly, that was about six months ago. Thinking, he tried to summon up the details of the incident.

“It was a skiing accident, wasn’t it?” he asked.

Lilli shook her head. “Boating,” she corrected, then added, “From what I heard, he liked people thinking of him as some kind of a daredevil.” She used the impersonal pronoun he, unable to make herself even say Erik Dalton’s name.

Kullen continued studying her. There was so much she wasn’t saying, he thought. “And that daredevil image didn’t include being a father,” he guessed.

Lilli could feel hateful, disparaging words rising to her lips. She’d never hated anyone, but she hated Erik Dalton with the last fiber of her being. But she had always been a truthful person and, in all fairness, in this particular situation Dalton didn’t technically deserve to be called a self-centered scum.

She shrugged, trying to seem indifferent. “I never gave him the chance to turn that role down.”

Damn it, Lilli, I loved you. I would have put the world at your feet if you’d married me. Was this why you left? To run into this soulless jerk’s Armani-covered arms?

Kullen struggled to keep the anger out of his voice but he couldn’t help asking, “Exactly what was it that you did give him?”

Here come the tears again, she thought, fighting to will them back. Despite her mental pep talk to the contrary, she felt terribly vulnerable and exposed. She didn’t know why she felt that way, but she did.