Harlequin Desire September 2015 - Box Set 1 of 2: Claimed\Maid for a Magnate\Only on His Terms (40 page)

She withdrew a plastic electronic device the size of a toothbrush that, when its buttons were pushed, lit up, made funny noises and was generally annoying. She handed it to Harrison.

“What is it?” he asked.

“A sonic screwdriver like the one Doctor Who uses.”

“But Doctor Who is science fiction. My father hated science fiction.”

“Your father loved science fiction.” She gestured toward the boxes in back. “There's a ton of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison books in those. You'll see.”

Harrison began pushing the buttons on the sonic screwdriver one by one, the same way Harry had on Christmas morning after unwrapping it. Then he grinned. In exactly the same way his father had.

“Okay, here's what I've been looking for,” she said when she uncovered the shoebox with Harry's photographs. She began sorting through them, and then was surprised when Harrison reached in, too, and pulled out a handful to look through himself.

“Here,” she said, pausing on one. “This is what I wanted to show you. It's your dad and his brother, Benjy, when they were kids.”

She handed the black-and-white photo to Harrison. The edges were frayed, the corners bent, and it was creased down the middle, creating a fine white line between the two boys. They were on the front stoop of the brownstone where the family had rented an apartment. Benjy was sitting on a square box nearly as big as he was. Harry had his arm around his brother, and both were grinning mischievously.

“Your dad is on the left,” Gracie said. “He was six in the photo. Benjy was three. The box Benjy's sitting on is where the milkman left the weekly milk deliveries. Harry said the reason they're smiling like that is because they just put the neighbor's cat in the box without telling anyone, and with Benjy sitting on it, the poor thing couldn't get out.”

Harrison nodded. “Now
that
sounds more like my father.”

“He assured me they let it go right after their neighbor snapped the photo, and he promised it wasn't hurt.”

She watched as Harrison studied the photo, but his expression revealed nothing of what he might be thinking or feeling. Finally, he said, “That's my dad, all right.” After a moment, he added, “And I guess that's my uncle. Or would have been, had he lived.”

Gracie sifted through the photos until she found another one. “And here are your grandparents.”

Harrison took it from her, studying it with the same scrutiny he'd given the first photo.

“You look just like your grandfather,” she said. “He couldn't have been much older in that picture than you are now.”

He considered the photo for another moment. “I can't believe my father never told me about any of this. About where he came from, or his little brother, or what his parents were like.” Now he looked at Gracie. “But then, I never asked him about any of it when I had the chance, did I? I never took an interest in where he came from when I was a kid. It never occurred to me that his history was mine, too. I know everything about my mother's family. But they're Park Avenue fixtures. They've been rich since New York was New Amsterdam. My father marrying her was the biggest social coup of his life.”

“Maybe that was why he never talked about his past,” Gracie said. “Maybe he didn't think it could stand up to Vivian's. Maybe he thought you would be ashamed of an alcoholic grandfather and a grandmother who abandoned her only surviving child.”

“The same way he abandoned his family,” Harrison said softly.

Gracie sighed. “Yeah. I guess so.”

He shook his head. “I wouldn't have been ashamed of any of that. I would have felt bad for him. If I'd known how much he lost when he was a kid... How hard he worked to try to keep his family together... How poor they were all along...”

“What?” she asked when he didn't finish.

“I don't know. Maybe it just would have helped me understand him better or something.”

Harrison continued sifting through the photos of his father's family—of his family—lost in thoughts Gracie figured she would probably never be able to understand. Thoughts he would never share with her, anyway, she was sure. Funny, though, how there was a quickly growing part of her that really wished he would.

* * *

Sunlight was slanting into the storage unit in a long beam of late-afternoon gold when Harrison finally closed the lid on the box of things he wanted to take back to New York with him. The rest could wait for him to have it moved professionally. There was plenty of room in his mother's attic to store everything. Not that he had any idea why he wanted to store it all. There was nothing of value among his father's things. The furniture was old and scarred. The clothes were old and worn out. The knickknacks were old and kitschy. Even the books and records were run-of-the-mill titles that could be found in a million places. For some reason, though, Harrison didn't want to let go of any of them.

So everything Gracie had said was true. Neither she nor his father had made up any of it. Harrison Sage, Jr. really had had a little brother. He'd really dropped out of school to go to work—one of the things they'd found was his first union card, issued when he would have been fifteen. And he really had lost his parents in terrible ways—they'd also found diaries written by his grandmother describing it all. Harrison had scanned a couple of them, but he wanted to read them all in depth when he got back to New York.

As he gazed upon the boxes and bags that held all his father's worldly possessions—or, at least, all the worldly possessions he had wanted to surround himself with as his life drew to a close—Harrison tried to understand how and why his father had lived his life the way he had. How and why a man who'd had
everything
in New York had preferred to spend his last years in a place where he had had nothing.

Gracie's words echoed through Harrison's head.
There were hundreds of people who attended the funeral.
A lot of them were people Harrison had met yesterday. Kids who loved terrible jokes. A World War Two veteran whose only visitor most weeks had been Harry Sagalowsky, who brought him a magazine and a cup of coffee, then stayed to talk baseball. A homeless mother he'd helped get a job at a local factory, who was then able to move herself and her kids into their own place and start life anew.

Big damn deal.

There would have been
thousands
of people at his father's funeral if he'd died in New York. And they would have
really
known him. They would have known how much he was worth and recognized his accomplishments in the business and financial worlds. They would have known what companies he'd acquired, which ones he had shed and which ones he had his eye on. They would have known which of his latest ventures had been most profitable. They would have known his favorite drink, his favorite restaurant, the name of his tailor. Hell, they would have known who his current mistresses were and where he was keeping them.

But here? What was the value in delivering a magazine or helping in a job hunt or making kids laugh? What difference did it make if Harry Sagalowsky had shared part of his day with others, supplying simple pleasures and favors to people who needed them? Who cared if one person took time to acknowledge another person's existence in the world and share a little bit of himself in the process? What was so great about making a connection with other people to let them know they were important? Who needed to be remembered as a normal, everyday person who made other normal, everyday people happy when he could be remembered as a titan of commerce who'd made billions of dollars for himself instead?

Thankfully, Harrison's spiel was in his head. Because if he'd said those things out loud, Gracie would have read him the riot act. And he probably wouldn't have blamed her. Okay, maybe he was starting to see why his father had wanted to spend his final years here. Because here, with people who didn't know him as Billionaire Harrison Sage, Jr., he could live a life free of that image and be...well, some guy named Harry who did nice things for other people. Things that maybe didn't change the world, but things that made a difference on a smaller scale. Things that would maybe make up for some of the stuff Billionaire Harrison Sage, Jr. did during his lifetime, like putting money ahead of everything else.

Like turning his back on his family.

Not that Harrison thought what his father had done here in Cincinnati would ever make up for that. But he could see where his father might think it would.

“Did you get everything you want?” Gracie asked.

Her question registered on some level, but Harrison didn't know how to answer it. No, he didn't get everything he wanted. There were still answers to some questions about his father. There was still his father's estate. There was still fifteen years of his life that his father could have been a part of but wasn't. And the other fifteen years when his father was around, but not really part of his life, either. And then there was still the most maddening thing of all that he wanted.

There was still Gracie Sumner.

The trip to Cincinnati had been as eye-opening for him where she was concerned as it had been where his father was concerned. A lot of the kids on the baseball team had responded to her with genuine affection, even begging her to do an impression of a rival coach they must have seen a dozen times before, but still left them rolling with laughter. She'd stopped for five dozen doughnuts before they'd hit the veterans' hospital, and the staff had received them with thanks in a way that indicated it was something she'd done all the time when she lived here. At the homeless shelter, she'd shared fist bumps with a half-dozen men and asked them how things were going. More to the point, she'd listened to each of them when they replied.

And tonight, she wanted to take Harrison to a place called the Moondrop Ballroom. Somehow, he was certain she would know people there, too. And that they would love her the same way everyone else in this city seemed to.

All of these things made him wonder again about this Devon person whose name had come up more than once today—never in a good way. And every time, Gracie's reply had been the same before she'd changed the subject:
that's all in the past
. But how could it be in the past when everyone kept bringing it up?

“Harrison?” she asked.

Only then did he realize he hadn't answered her question about having everything he wanted from the storage unit. “For now,” he said. “I'll get the rest of it as soon as I can.”

He turned around in time to see her struggling to lift a box that was too wide for her to carry. When she began to pitch backward with it, Harrison lurched toward her, grabbing the box from the side nearest him. For a moment, they grappled to stabilize it, and then, as one, they set it down where she had been aiming. That, however, left the two of them standing literally shoulder-to-shoulder, something that each seemed to notice at once, and something that left them both speechless. They were also unable to make eye contact, since every time their gazes met, they glanced away from each other.

Where before the air in the storage unit had just been uncomfortably warm, it suddenly felt like a sauna. It was a really bad analogy, Harrison decided, since it also brought to mind naked, sweaty bodies wrapped in towels. Towels that could be removed with the simple flick of a wrist, thereby allowing lots of other, infinitely more interesting ways for naked bodies to get sweaty.

“Well, that was close,” he said. Not that he was talking about the box they'd just saved, but Gracie didn't have to know that.

“Yeah,” she said breathlessly.

A little too breathlessly. Maybe she wasn't talking about the box, either. Maybe she'd been having some sauna ideas, too. As if triggered by such a possibility, a single drop of perspiration materialized from behind her ear, rolled along her jaw, then down the front of her neck, before finally pooling in the delectable divot at the base of her throat. Harrison watched its journey with the same single-minded fascination a cheetah might show toward a wildebeest, wanting to pounce the moment the time was right. Like right now, for instance. But Gracie lifted a hand to swipe the drop away before he had the chance. Dammit.

But when his gaze met hers again, he saw that the reason for her reaction wasn't because she'd felt the perspiration running down her neck. It was because she had noticed his preoccupation with it. Their gazes locked for a minute more, and the temperature ratcheted higher. A single strand of damp blond hair clung to her temple, and it was all he could do not to reach for it and skim it back, and then follow his fingers and brush his lips over her damp skin.

“We, uh, we should get going,” she said roughly, the words seeming to echo into his very soul. “We have to...to get cleaned up before going to the Moondrop. And we need to have, um...” She hesitated just a tiny, telling moment before finally concluding, “Dinner. We need to have dinner.”

Dinner
, he echoed to himself. Yes, they would definitely have that before going to the Moondrop. But maybe later, if the stars were aligned—and if they were both still having sauna thoughts—they could have something else, too.

After all, dancing could really work up a sweat.

Eight

H
aving known the Moondrop Ballroom was one of the places where she would take Harrison, Gracie had packed the dress and accessories she'd bought for the Dewitts' party and instructed Harrison to bring a suit. So it was a surprise when she answered his knock on her hotel room door to find him on the other side wearing a tuxedo. He even had a white silk scarf draped around his neck. She battled the wave of heat that wound through her at the sight of him, so dashing and Hollywood handsome, and the feeling was not unlike the one she'd experienced in the storage unit that afternoon.

And what the hell had that been about? One minute, she'd been about to drop a box on her toe, and the next, Harrison had been staring at her neck as if he wanted to devour her. His damp T-shirt had been clinging to him like a second skin, delineating every bump of muscle on his torso. His dark hair had been falling rakishly over his forehead, his blue eyes had been hot with wanting, and...and... And, well, suddenly, she'd kind of wanted to devour him, too.

“You look...nice,” she finally said.

He smiled. “You look beautiful.”

“Thanks,” she replied, the heat in her belly nearly swamping her.

“So what time does this thing start?”

When Harry was alive, he and Gracie had been regulars at the Moondrop for Fox-trot Fridays, with an occasional appearance for Samba Saturdays and Waltz Wednesdays. Her favorite nights, however, had been Tango Tuesdays, which, as luck would have it, was tonight.

“There's a beginner's hour at seven,” she said, “which is where the instructors give some basic lessons for people who've never been dancing before. The main event is at eight. If you want to go early for the first hour, though, we can,” she added, thinking Harrison might not be comfortable jumping in with both feet, especially with the tango, since that was probably the hardest dance to know where to put both feet.

“You know what you're doing, right?” he asked. “I mean you said you and my father did this sort of thing on a regular basis.”

“Yeah, but Tango Tuesdays tend to be tricky.”

He smiled at her unintended alliteration. “But aren't you trained in tango? A tip-top tango teacher I can trust?”

Gracie smiled back. “Totally top-notch.”

His eyes twinkled. “Terrific.”

Another moment passed where they did nothing but smile and twinkle at each other. Then Harrison, at least, seemed to recall that they had something to do.

“So...do we have time for dinner?”

“Sure.”

She gathered her purse and exited, pulling the door closed behind them. When Harrison proffered his arm with all the elegance of Cary Grant, it somehow felt totally natural to tuck her hand into the crook of his elbow. The warmth in her midsection sparked hotter, simmering parts of her that had no business simmering this early in the evening.

Or ever, she hastened to correct herself. At least where Harrison was concerned. That way lay madness.

Maybe this part of his Harry tour hadn't been such a good idea. If this was the way her body reacted when it was just hand-to-elbow contact, what was going to happen when they got into dance mode? Sure, ballroom dancing in its purest form allowed for space between the bodies, but there were still a lot of parts touching. Not just hands and elbows, but shoulders and backs. Waists. Hips.

Yikes.

Then she remembered this was tango Tuesday. Uh-oh. That meant leg contact. Torso contact. Damn. Why hadn't they been in town for open dance night instead, where she could have insisted they do the bunny hop or something? And now she'd gone and told him she would be his top-notch tango teacher. Tsk, tsk.

Note to self, Gracie
, she thought as they waited for the elevator—and her stomach did a little cha cha cha.
It's a treacherous tactic, teaching tango to a tempting, um, guy.

* * *

Stepping into the Moondrop Ballroom was like stepping back in time. Not just because it had been beautifully preserved in all its postwar elegance since opening in the 1940s, but because the people who came here did their best to dress as if they'd been preserved from that period, too. Most of the regulars were elderly, people who remembered coming here or to ballrooms like it when they were young. That was why Harry had liked the Moondrop so much. But many were Gracie's age or younger, newcomers to ballroom dancing who loved the period and wanted to experience the manners and styles of the time, if for just one evening. Even the orchestra dressed the part. The ceiling was painted the colors of twilight with twinkling white lights that looked like stars. Each wall had a silhouette of the 1940s Cincinnati skyline, topped with more stars. Between the décor and the music—the band never played anything written after 1955—it was easy to forget there was another world beyond the front doors.

“Wow, this place is like something out of a movie,” Harrison said when they entered, clearly having fallen under the spell of the ballroom as quickly as Gracie had the first time she was here.

“Isn't it wonderful? It's exactly like I remember.”

“How long has it been since you were in town?”

She stiffened at his question, even though it was one she'd fielded in one way or another ever since her arrival. “I left six months after Harry's funeral,” she told him. “I haven't been back since.”

“But you have so many friends here,” he said. “I mean, all those people yesterday obviously knew you pretty well. But it sounded like you haven't stayed in touch with any of them.”

“That's because I haven't.”

“Why not?”

He didn't seem to be asking out of idle curiosity. But she told herself she was imagining things. She was just hypersensitive because of all the questions she'd fielded about Devon since she'd come back.

All she said was “It's complicated, Harrison.”

He looked as if he might let it go, but then said, “Because of Devon.”

For some reason, hearing that name spoken in Harrison's voice was far worse than hearing it in anyone else's.

“Yes,” she said. “Because of him.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She shook her head. And she told Harrison what she'd told everyone else, what she told herself whenever Devon invaded her thoughts. “That's all in the past.”

Harrison looked like he was going to say more, but the band saved her, striking up the first notes of “La cumparsita.”

“Well, aren't you lucky?” she said. “You're going to wet your tango feet with the mother of all tango tunes.”

He listened for a moment. “I recognize this song. This is in
Some Like It Hot
when Jack Lemmon is tangoing with Joe E. Brown.”

And when Tony Curtis was making out with Marilyn Monroe, she thought, but hopefully neither of them would mention that part. Judging by Harrison's expression, though, he was definitely thinking about it. And also judging by his expression, he knew she was thinking about it, too. Damn.

“Shall we?” he asked, tilting his head toward the dance floor, where a number of people were already in full tango mode.

She smiled in a way she hoped was flirtatious. Not that she was flirting with him or anything. She was just keeping in the spirit of the Moondrop Ballroom, that was all. “If you think you're ready for it.”

He smiled back in a way that went way beyond flirtatious and zoomed right into bewitching. “I'm ready for anything.”

As if to prove it, he extended his left hand, palm up. The moment she placed her right hand against it, he closed his fingers over hers, drew her close and lifted their hands to chin height—his chin, not hers—so her arm was higher. Then he pressed his other hand to the small of her back and drew her body, very firmly, against his. There was nothing tentative in his hold. His confidence was absolute. Her own body's response was just as fierce. In every single place they touched, little explosions detonated under her skin, rushing heat to every other part of her body.

The moment she was in his arms, he assumed a flawless tango stance, placing his right leg between hers and his left alongside her right. Then he began to guide her forward. Well, for her it was backward, since—obviously—he intended to lead. His first step was with his left foot, all fine and good—except for how Gracie's insides were turning to steaming lava—and his next was with his right, which would have also been fine if Gracie had reacted the way she was supposed to and stepped backward.

But thanks to the little-explosions-of-heat thing, not to mention the steaming-lava thing, she wasn't exactly on her game. So his step forward pressed his thigh into the juncture of her legs, and
wow
, talk about an explosion of heat
and
steaming lava. Her entire torso seemed to catch fire and melt into his. Even though she was pretty good at the tango, she stumbled those first few steps, something that made Harrison splay his fingers wide on her back and pull her closer still, and—
Oh. My. God. She was going to spontaneously combust!
After that, it was all Gracie could do to just try and keep up with him.

He led her deeper into the crowd of other dancers with a few perfectly executed
barridas
, sweeping his feet along the floor in a way that made hers move that way, too. Then he spun them in a perfect
boleo
, punctuating the move with a beautiful
gancho
, wrapping his leg briefly around hers before turning her again. Then he threw in a
lápiz,
tracing a circle on the floor with his free foot—he was just showing off now—and followed with a
parada
, where he suddenly stopped, literally toe-to-toe with her, to perform a really delicious
caricia.
He drew his leg slowly up along hers, then pushed it slowly back down again, generating a luscious friction. She wished he would do it again, and he did. Then he did it again. And again. And—holy mother of mackerel—again.

By now Gracie's heart was hammering hard inside her chest, even though they'd only been dancing a matter of minutes, and he'd been doing most of the work. Harrison had to feel the pounding of her pulse, too—their bodies were so close, in so many places—but he didn't say a word. He only held her gaze tight with his and began to dance again, with all the grace and style of a
vaquero.
As the final notes of the song came to a close, he pulled her close one last time, and then—of course—he tilted her back until
her head was nearly touching the floor, in a dip that was nothing short of spectacular.

At that point, they were both breathing heavily, a combination of both the dance and their heightened awareness of each other. They'd also earned an audience, Gracie realized, when she heard applause. Or maybe that was just in her own brain, acknowledging his skill at...oh, so many things, because she honestly wasn't even conscious of anyone in that moment but him.

Still poised in the dip, her free arm looped around his neck, she said breathlessly, “You've been holding out on me.”

He grinned. But he didn't let her up. Instead he only roped his arm more possessively around her waist and pulled her closer to him. He, too, was out of breath, his voice quiet when he spoke. “My mother made me take cotillion classes when I was in middle school. I hated it until I realized how many points knowing how to dance earned me with girls. Knowing the tango multiplied those points by about a thousand.”

“I can see how that would work in a guy's favor.”

Still, he didn't let her up, and still, Gracie didn't care. For one interminable moment, it almost seemed as if he were bending his head closer to hers, as if his mouth were hovering over hers, as if he actually intended to—

She closed her eyes, and for the merest, faintest, most exquisite millisecond, she thought she felt the brush of his lips over hers. But when she opened her eyes, he was levering her to a standing position, so she told herself she'd only imagined it.

The crowd had dispersed, caught up in another song, another dance, another moment. But Gracie couldn't quite let this moment go. Their fingers were still curled together, her other hand still curved around his nape while his was still pressing into the small of her back. Although they'd stopped moving, she couldn't seem to catch her breath. And in spite of the music that still swirled around them, she couldn't seem to make herself move.

But neither, did it seem, could he. His breathing was as erratic as hers, and he wasn't any more inclined to move than she was. And that maybe-imaginary, maybe-not kiss still had her brain so muddled, she wasn't sure what to do. Even when he began to lower his head toward hers—there was no mistaking his intention this time—she didn't know how to react. Not until his mouth covered hers completely. After that, she knew exactly what to do.

She kissed him back.

The feel of his mouth on hers was extraordinary, at once entreating and demanding, tender and rough, soft and firm. He kissed her as if he had done it a million times and never before, confident of his effect on her and tentative in his reception. Gracie kept her hand cupped over his nape, and with the other, threaded her fingers into his hair. It had been so long since she had been this close to a man, so long since she had allowed herself to get lost in the sensation of two bodies struggling to become one. She didn't want it to stop. She wanted to stay here in this spot, with this man, forever.

By the time he pulled back, her brain was so rattled, her body so incited, her senses so aroused, all she could do was say the first thing that popped into her head. “I thought you didn't like me.”

He nuzzled the curve where her neck joined her shoulder. “Oh, I like you very much.”

“You think I took advantage of your father.”

He nipped her earlobe. Gracie tried not to swoon. “I don't think that at all.”

“Since when?” she asked, her voice barely audible.