With practiced ease, I popped the cork and filled the two glasses, handing him one. “Sam, will you please stay and have a drink with me?”
“Why, Martha, I’d love to.” His big hand took the delicate glass from me. Everything about the man was solid, bulky. Not my usual type at all. Next to Sam, I felt positively delicate. Hilarious when you considered how many men I’d scared out of a second date. He made me wish I knew anatomy better. So I could put a name to all of the bumps and bulges in his shoulders and arms. His steamy wet shoulders and arms. “You’re staring.”
“Hmm?” I asked.
“You’re staring at me. Sit down.”
“Oh.” I sat.
“No need to frown.”
“I’m not frowning.”
“Whatever you say.” His voice was all placid and happy now. I amped my expression up to a scowl. An arm stretched across the edge of the tub, he put the glass to his lips, taking a sip. A wince. “Do you actually like this shit?”
“I don’t mind it. Why, what do you drink?”
He took another sip, gaze thoughtful. “Red wine, beer, bourbon if I’m in the mood for liquor.”
“The beer and bourbon make sense, but I’d never have picked you as a red wine aficionado.”
“No? Nice to know I can still surprise you.”
“Oh, you’re all about the surprises lately.” I stared off into the distance, sipping at the champagne. Between him and the view, the latter would be far less likely to land me in trouble.
“Am I?”
No way was I going there. “Are you aware that answering a question with a question is really annoying?”
“Is it?”
I narrowed my eyes at the man.
But he just laughed. “There, there, Martha. Everything’s fine. Relax and drink your champagne.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I said, sitting back and taking another sip.
“How did the rest of your day go with Gib?”
“Good, actually. I mean, he half-heartedly kind of threw a couple of peas at me during dinner. But then he asked for me to tell him a bedtime story instead of Liz.”
“I said he’d grow to like you. Just needed a little time.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Where’s your pool housemate, Adam? Off writing another heart-rending ballad about casual sex?”
Sam snorted. “No. Off getting some casual sex, I think. His cell goes off at all hours. I can’t keep up.”
“Ah to be so young, dumb, and beautiful.”
“You know, you’re not that much older than him. And while you’ve made some mistakes, I’ve never thought you were lacking in smarts,” he said. “But you’ve always been beautiful. You always will be.”
“Thank you.” I averted my eyes, downed the last of my champagne, and reached for a refill. “That’s very kind of you.”
“Compliments always did make you squirm.”
“Stop it. You don’t know everything about me.”
“No. But I intend to.”
“Why?” My hand jumped as if to punctuate the statement, the cool fizz of champagne sliding over my skin. A pity to waste the good stuff. So I licked it up. There could be no imagining the way his gaze darkened, watching me. Holy cow.
He cleared his throat. “Why what?”
“Why do you want to know everything about me?”
“C’mon, Martha, I only just finished saying you weren’t lacking in smarts. Don’t prove me wrong.”
I huddled into my corner of the hot tub, clutching at my drink. Not feeling defensive, just…all right, so I was feeling defensive. “Maybe I just want to hear you say it. Everyone else seems to have a damn opinion about us. Who knew rock stars were such damn gossips? Sticking their collective noses in everybody else’s business all the time.”
“They care about you, that’s all.” Sam placed his glass on the side and stood, moving over to sit beside me. Very close beside me. Our knees were even touching, all intimate-like. Then his gentle fingers turned my chin, making me face him. “Let me see.”
“What?” Ever so carefully, he wiped away the worst of my concealer and makeup from beneath my right eye. His calluses slid across my skin in a not un-nice manner. “Yuck. Don’t. It’s ugly.”
“Just let me see.”
“Maybe I should have worn big sunglasses around all of the time and told everyone I was permanently hungover. They probably would have believed it.”
“Then you’d have had Jimmy dragging you off to rehab and offering to be your sponsor.”
“True.” I grimaced. “You were the only one in there today who wasn’t angry at me.”
“About holding on to the bag instead of letting the robber take it?”
“Yes.”
He half-smiled. “Martha, my dear, I was fucking furious. But it was neither the time nor place to get into it with all of the guys gathered around.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is…if you were mine, I’d have turned your ass bright pink for what you did,” he said, all scarily matter of fact. “Thinking a handbag was more important than your life.”
My eyes opened wide in surprise.
“What kind of ridiculous shit is that?”
“Guess I’m not as smart as you thought I was.”
“No. You just don’t know how loved you are,” he corrected, his thumb stroking across my cheek. The man touched me like I was precious. But also like he already owned me and for some reason I didn’t have it in me to disagree. “For a woman with so much pride, Martha, you have a very thin grasp of your own worth.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Yet what with his hands suddenly grasping my waist and lifting me onto his lap, any attempt at coherency on my part fled the tub completely. Since when exactly did we start sitting on one another?
“At any rate, you and I are going to start doing some self-defense work together,” he announced. “Should anything like it happen again in future, you’ll know how to react. Regardless of what fucking designer handbag you’re carrying.”
“Are you giving me orders?”
“Do you disagree with the idea?”
“Well, no. But you could have asked instead of phrasing it the way you did.”
“I’ll make a note of that for next time. Now,” he said. “I believe you wanted some sort of statement from me as to my intentions.”
“Your intentions?”
Sam lifted the bottle of champagne out of the bucket of ice and topped up my glass. Next his arms wrapped tight around me before any kind of escape could be attempted. The man knew exactly what he was doing. But if ever a man was bound to have a plan, it would be him. “Have a bit more to drink. It’ll make you feel better.”
“I’m fine. Or I was fine where I was. What am I doing sitting on your lap?”
“You never did like being out of control of a situation.”
“Stop acting as if you know what’s going on in my head all the time. You don’t!”
He chuckled, the sound and the vibration of his strong chest against my side much too pleasant. “Considering I’ve been waiting for you for almost a decade, I think I’ve got a pretty good understanding of what goes in that gorgeous head of yours.”
“Almost a decade?”
“Mm-hmm.” He took a drink from my glass, wrinkling his nose at the taste. “No, I definitely don’t think that champagne’s going to grow on me anytime soon. Anyway, where was I?”
“Almost a decade…”
“Right. So—”
“That’s not possible.”
“Of course it is.”
I shook my head. No one had ever wanted me for anywhere near so long. David and I had barely lasted half that amount of time before outgrowing each other and breaking up in a spectacularly messed-up fashion. Though mostly, he’d outgrown me. Left me far behind and largely forgotten. Or at least that’s the way it felt at the time. Since then, I’d dated men for a month or two at most. Then dumped them before they could dump me because better safe than sorry and hurt. Yet with Sam came a strange sense of safety. He provided exactly the sort of shelter I’d fled New York in search of, if I was being totally honest. The comfort of loved ones, family, and maybe even friends. Things I hadn’t had for a long time. Things I hadn’t quite been able to provide for myself, irritatingly enough. But to maybe need someone, to actually make myself vulnerable…
“This doesn’t make sense,” I said in a quiet voice.