Onions, red wine vinegar, lettuce, fruit pieces, masses of strawberries, alfalfa sprouts. He laid them all out, then started on the salad dressing. This was going to be a work of art.
He could hear Dominique moving about upstairs, the sound of the shower. He prepared coffee and laid the breakfast bar to tempt a lady. He was a master of presentation.
Her eyes gleamed when she saw the trouble he’d taken for her, and she gave him her most winning smile.
“Darling Luke, you’re so sweet.”
“Wait until you see what I’ve created for you,” he said, pulling out a high stool and seeing her into it with a flourish. He laid the beautiful dish before her. “Less than two hundred calories, but full of nourishment.”
“Mmm! Looks delicious.” She put the first forkful into her mouth and made a face of ecstasy. “Heaven! And you invented it just for me.”
And for the customers who would pay $25 a throw, and a few hundred thousand people who watched every Tuesday and Friday.
“Just what a hard-working model needs,” he assured her. “Only three grams of fat. I measured each gram personally.”
“What about each calorie?”
“All 197 of them.”
She chuckled. “Oh, Luke, darling, you are a fool. It’s why I adore you so madly. And you adore me, too, don’t you? I can tell by the way you like to do things for me.”
Sensing the conversation straying into dangerous waters again he filled her coffee cup and kissed the end of her nose.
But Dominique wasn’t to be diverted. “As I was saying earlier, we go together so perfectly that it seems to me…” Just in time her eyes fell on the picture. Luke breathed a prayer of heartfelt relief.
“I’ve never seen that before,” Dominique said, frowning.
“What—oh, that? I just had it out for a moment,” Luke said quickly, moving as if to hurry the picture away, but actually relinquishing it into her imperiously outstretched hand.
“‘Daddy’?” she echoed, reading the inscription. “You been keeping secrets, Luke? Is this your ex-wife?”
“No, Pippa and I weren’t married. I knew her in London when I worked there eleven years ago. She still lives there.”
“The child doesn’t look anything like you. How do you know she’s yours?”
“Because Pippa wouldn’t have said she was if she wasn’t. Besides, Josie and I talk over the Internet.”
The supreme idiocy of this last remark burst on him only when it was too late. Dominique laid down the picture and regarded him very, very kindly.
“You talk on the Internet, and therefore she must carry your genes? I guess it beats DNA testing.”
“I didn’t mean that the way it came out,” he said hastily.
“Darling, don’t treat me like a fool.”
No. Big mistake. Dominique’s eyes were sharp as gimlets. They always were when she was in an acquisitive mood, he realized.
“Josie’s mine,” he repeated. “We have a very good relationship—”
“Over the Internet? Boy, you’re really a close father, aren’t you?”
“Considering we live on different continents, I’m a very close father,” he said, stung.
“Luke, honestly, there’s no need for this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that this child is no more your daughter than I am. You’ve probably never even met her mother. I expect you picked this up in some junk shop and wrote the inscription yourself. It was a clever idea putting ‘and Josie’ in different writing, but you were always a man who thought of the details.”
He took a long, nervous breath. This wasn’t going right. He grasped her hand.
“Dominique—sweetheart—”
“Luke, it’s all okay. I understand.”
“You…do?”
“It’s natural for you to be a little scared at first. You’ve avoided commitment for so long, and now that things are changing, well—I guess it’s all strange to you. But you show me in a thousand ways what I mean to you, and I can hear the things you don’t say aloud.”
Luke gulped. When a woman got to hearing things a man hadn’t said, he was in big trouble.
“Dominique…I swear to you that picture is genuine. Josie is my child, and Pippa is the very special lady who bore her—”
“Shh!” She laid a beautifully manicured finger over his lips. “You don’t have to keep this up. We understand each other too well for pretenses.”
Luke couldn’t speak. Now he knew how a drowning man felt when he was going down for the third time.
It was the perfect moment for a shadow to appear outside the back door, for a tap on the frosted glass, for him to open the door, for Pippa to be standing there with Josie, and for Josie to hurl herself at him with a cry of “Daddy!”
Chapter Two
The first words Luke Danton had ever spoken to Pippa eleven years before were, “Get out of here, quick!” after she’d barged into the kitchen of London’s Ritz Hotel, where he’d been working.
He’d followed it up by grasping her elbow and hurrying her out of the door about as ungallantly as possible.
“Hey!” she objected.
“I didn’t want you to be in trouble, and you would have been. You had no right to be in there.”
“How do you know I haven’t?”
“Because you’re a chambermaid. I’ve seen you coming to work, and I asked about you.”
“Oh,” she said, taken aback.
“What time do you finish?”
“In an hour.”
“Me, too. I’ll meet you in the park, on the bench near the entrance. Don’t be late.” He was gone before she could answer.
She scooted back to her own work, indignant, or trying to be. Suppose she didn’t want to meet him in the park? He had an almighty cheek. But he also had laughing eyes and a vibrant presence, not to mention being tall and handsome. In fact, she didn’t mind at all that he’d been asking about her.
After work she quickly changed out of her uniform and into her normal clothes. Not that most people would have called them “normal.” They were young and crazy and turned heads wherever she went. The tight orange jeans shrieked at the purple cowboy boots. The big floppy hat was deep blue, and the multicolored sweater went with everything almost, and nothing exactly. She was eighteen and sassy. She could carry it off.
She checked herself in the mirror, pushing back a strand of her red-brown curly hair. Then she ran all the way to Green Park, the huge swath of grass and trees that stretched behind the hotel. It annoyed her to realize that she was actually hurrying so as not to miss him.
Glorious as a peacock, she sat on a bench that gave her a good view of the path he would have to take, and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
She leaned back, resting one elegantly booted ankle over the other knee, the picture of impish nonchalance. After a while she changed legs.
And