In Serena's Web (2 page)

“Exciting, isn’t it?”

He stared at her. “I knew you were up to something. Dammit, what’re you up to?”

Serena returned the stare, her expression utterly guileless. “Well, Brian, you’ve convinced me that I need … someone to take care of me.”

“And so?” Foreboding was heavy in his voice.

“I thought I’d get married,” she told him in the casual tone of one deciding which wine might go with dinner.

After a long moment Brian—not trusting his voice—sent an inquiring glance toward Long’s table before staring again at Serena.

She nodded. “I should think he’d know how to manage me, wouldn’t you?”

Brian ignored the question to ask one of his own. “And is he aware of the treat in store for him?”

If Serena was irritated by his sarcasm, it certainly didn’t show on her lovely face. “Not yet. But he will be soon. Very soon.”

“Rena, we’re going on to Flagstaff tomorrow,” he reminded her carefully.

“You can, if you want,” she murmured in an absent tone, her eyes once more fixed on the table across the room. “I like Denver. I think I’ll stay on here for a few days. Or a week.”

“Rena—” Brian began to rise as she did, but he was delayed by the necessity of signing the check. By the time he could catch up to Serena, she was
already halfway out of the restaurant. With a choice of two exits, she had chosen the one across the room, which meant she would pass Joshua Long’s table. And pass it she did, Brian reflected, unsure of his own emotions as he watched her gliding, graceful movements. She walked, he thought, the way Eve must have walked for Adam.

Long’s gaze was drawn away from his blond companion to appreciatively observe that walk, and Brian was near enough to see the arrested expression in the other man’s cool blue eyes as Serena sent him a glance over her shoulder.

Catching up to his wayward charge, Brian grasped her elbow firmly and steered her hastily from the restaurant.

“You spoiled the effect,” she told him in mild annoyance as they stood inside the elevator and he released her arm. She rubbed it, sending him a reproachful look, and added, “Brute.”

“I am not,” he said coldly, “going to let you get into trouble again.
Especially
not with Joshua Long. You were unattached when I met you in
London, and you’ll be unattached when I deliver you to your father in California.”

“Deliver me,” she murmured. “Like a parcel all tied up with string.”

Something about her gentle voice sent Brian’s inner alarms—sharpened by the past three weeks—jangling. He backed up rather hastily. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Didn’t you?” The deceptively tranquil gray eyes studied him for an unnerving moment. “I believe you did, Brian.”

He could think of no response until the elevator let them out on their floor. Then, as he walked beside her down the hall, he said carefully, “Rena, we’ve gotten to be friends these last weeks, haven’t we?”

She sent him a glance. “You’ve threatened to murder me at least half a dozen times. I suppose that constitutes friendship. Of a sort.”

Brian cleared his throat strongly. “The point is that friends watch out for each other. And I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I let you … get involved with a man like Long. My responsibilities to your father aside, Long would only hurt you.”

Serena halted at her door, digging in her spangled evening purse for her key. “I can take care of myself, Brian. I am, as you pointed out earlier, twenty-six, and I’ve seen something of the world.” Locating her key, she unlocked the door and sent him a last, direct look. “I don’t need a Galahad.”

Brian gritted his teeth. “Long was with someone. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

Reflectively she said, “I’m not planning to dye my hair blond, so I suppose I’ll have to teach him to love brunettes.”

“Rena, he’ll only hurt you.”

“You forget, Brian”—she stepped inside the door and smiled very gently at him as she started to close it—“I’m not in his web. He’s in mine. Good night.”

Serena tossed her bag on the wide bed and stood for a moment in her dimly lighted room gazing at her reflection in the mirror over the dresser. Her thoughtful gray eyes met the reflected ones briefly, then went on to study the rest of herself methodically and critically.

The thick hair piled atop her head was an
unusually dark, rich brown, almost black at certain times, but showing coppery highlights in strong light. Her face was delicate, the features finely formed; her large, tranquil gray eyes gave her the unguarded look of a kitten.

She was a tiny woman who appeared amazingly fragile, but her slender figure boasted startling curves that were shown to advantage in the midnight-blue dress she wore; it was low cut and clinging, and though jeans inevitably made her look sixteen, a dress such as this one turned her into a smoky-eyed siren.

Serena sighed softly and shook her head. She wasn’t given to longing for what she didn’t have, but a few more inches of height and ash-blond hair would have served her purpose better at the moment.

Remembering the blondes Joshua Long had escorted around the hotel during the past three days, Serena sighed again. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand and then sat down on the bed. He’d bribe the waiter to tell him who had sent the champagne, she knew, and would either
call or knock on her door. In the meantime, however, she really should talk to her father.

Before Brian did. Serena knew her parent too well to think he’d give Brian permission to spirit her away to California, but she’d always kept him informed of her plans, and this plan was no exception. She placed the call, and shortly heard her father’s vague, affectionate voice.

“Hi, honey. Brian hasn’t murdered you yet?”

Serena laughed and leaned against the pillows banked up behind her. “Not yet, Daddy. He’s threatened to, though.”

“Yes, he’s called every other day or so,” Stuart Jameson said in an absent tone. “He seemed to think I’d be angry that he hadn’t kept you out of jail and out of the Mississippi.”

“He’s being very stuffy,” Serena told her father severely.

“Rena, stop playing your tricks on the man.” Her father’s tone matched hers now. “I’ve had twenty-six years to learn how to cope, but he hardly knows you.”

“He’s learning.” She was unrepentant.

“In self-defense, I’m sure.”

She laughed. “He’s holding up, Daddy. He may be calling you tonight, by the way.”

“What’ve you done now?”

“Nothing,” Serena answered placidly. “Not yet, anyway. It’s just that I’ve decided to get married, and Brian thinks I’ve chosen the wrong man.”

As her father had said, he had been granted some years to become accustomed to her sudden fits and starts. So he didn’t deafen her with exclamations of horror or surprise. He merely said politely, “You’re getting married?”

“I thought I would.”

“And who is it that Brian disapproves of?”

“Joshua Long.”

There was a long silence, and then her father murmured, “Joshua Long. I see. He’s in Denver? You
are
still in Denver?”

“Yes to both questions.”

“And you told Brian you’d decided to marry Joshua Long?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He believed you?”

“He doesn’t know me very well,” Serena explained tranquilly. “Not yet, anyway.”

“I see,” her father murmured. “I think. Brian disapproved—uh—strongly of these impending nuptials, I take it?”

“Well,” she said, faintly dissatisfied, “not strongly enough. But I expect he’ll get better at it.”

“With a nudge from you?”

“That,” she said, “is the plan.”

There was silence, and then a soft chuckle. “Rena, when you were a child, I believed you’d gotten few of my brains but all of your mother’s sweet temperament. Through the years, I’ve had to revise that deduction. You got your mother’s temper, all right—and my brains—and the cunning of the two pirates and three politicians on the family tree.”

“Thank you,” she responded gravely. Then her amusement faded. “Daddy? Any more calls?”

Stuart Jameson sobered as well, but his voice was reassuring. “No mention of you since New York, honey. You’ve lost them, I’d say. Does Brian know—?”

“No, I haven’t really found the right opportunity to tell him. I think it’s time, though. He’s
going to be angry when he finds out he’s been in the dark during all of this.”

“I have a feeling,” the elder Jameson said dryly, “you’ll know how to handle him.”

“Well, I’ll certainly try. D’you think it’ll be all right for us to stick around here for a while?”

“Yes, but keep your eyes open, honey.”

“I always do.” Serena smiled to herself. “We’ll stay awhile, then, Daddy.”

He laughed again. “Then I won’t look for you until I see you. Should I start shopping for a wedding present?”

“Just be ready to give me away.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he offered dryly. “Otherwise I’ll have to get ready for a funeral. Yours. One of them’s bound to kill you.”

“Oh, I think I know what I’m doing. See you, Daddy.”

“Bye, honey.”

She had barely cradled the receiver when a knock sounded on her door. Smiling, she went to answer it, and found a tall, dark, undeniably handsome man leaning against the jamb.

“Thanks for the champagne,” he drawled, blue eyes quizzical.

    Coat and tie discarded, Brian paced his room restlessly. He was briefly tempted to call the genius who was in charge of the research and development division of Ashford Electronics and give him a piece of his mind. Several reasons kept him from making that call, one of which was Stuart Jameson’s probable response. He’d laugh.

Brian had already given up attempting to understand the workings of Jameson’s mind. On the one hand, he’d seemed indulgently amused by Serena’s plan for a leisurely trip across the country; on the other hand, he had hinted strongly that if someone—unnamed—didn’t watch out for his daughter, he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on his work. His important work.

He was not the type of genius who threw temper tantrums in order to get what he wanted, or threw his weight around in any other fashion; Brian simply assumed strong paternal feelings and volunteered to escort Serena home from Europe.
Jameson accepted the offer instantly, fixing Brian with his vague gray eyes and assuring him that he knew his daughter would be safe in his hands. Completely safe.

The last comment Brian had taken to mean that Jameson wasn’t worried his daughter would acquire an electronics magnate as a lover along the way. It hadn’t been an implied warning; Stuart Jameson never implied anything. He either said something flat out or said nothing at all. If he said his daughter would be safe in Brian’s hands, then that was what he meant. Period.

Finding his charge waiting for him at Heathrow in London, Brian had mentally reminded himself of Stuart’s confidence. He’d had no idea of Serena’s age then, and had assumed she was leaving school in Europe to come home. When he’d found her in the airport surrounded by the baggage she’d just brought over from Paris, he’d seen instantly that Daddy’s little girl was little only in terms of physical size; there was nothing small about her effect on people. Particularly men. Like an oasis of calm in a violent storm, she sat atop a large suitcase and listened with apparent interest
while a Frenchman and an Englishman argued in earthy terms about who would have the privilege of carrying her luggage out to the taxi queue. Since both men were dressed in immaculate three-piece suits, Brian gathered they didn’t usually do this sort of thing.

Their meeting, Brian knew now, should have warned him of things to come. She had sweetly dismissed her knights-errant upon spotting Brian—she’d seen his picture in the newspapers, she told him blithely—and two skycaps had appeared out of thin air when she glanced around once with a lifted brow.

“Would you have let them fight it out?” Brian had asked her curiously on the way to the hotel they would stay in for several days.

Serena had smiled guilelessly at him. “Of course not, Brian.”

She hadn’t explained how she would have prevented it, but Brian knew—now—that she would have.

They were three weeks into the trip at this juncture, and Brian had learned that Serena Jameson could do just about anything she wanted—the
consequences be damned. He had bailed her out of jail for punching a policeman in the eye, fished her out of the muddy Mississippi River—“But I’ve always wanted to swim in it, Brian.”—watched her single-handedly start a soup kitchen for street people in one large city and refurbish an orphanage in another city, and carried her bodily from a picket line she’d joined after hearing ten minutes of passionate rhetoric on a street corner.

He was torn between an urge to tie her up and load her instantly on a plane to California, and the fascinated desire to see what she’d do next.

Serena never
tried
to get into trouble, Brian thought with a sigh as he paced. She was soft-spoken, sweet-natured, tenderhearted, polite … and somewhere underneath all those gentle layers was the soul of a kamikaze pilot.

She could punch a cop in the eye for threatening to arrest a derelict old man (whom Serena had just met), then tie on an apron and ladle out soup in a kitchen founded—in a single afternoon out of Brian’s sight—in an abandoned building while various bewildered businessmen found themselves unloading their personal cars full of contributions
of canned goods or their personal wallets of dollars for Serena’s cause.

She could dive gleefully over the side of a steamboat on the Mississippi because she wanted to swim, then offer to baby-sit three toddlers so that their mothers could have an hour or so of peace on the boat. She could defeat Brian soundly at poker by dealing with a dexterity that would have had her instantly blackballed in any casino in the world, then drag him to a movie during which she could cry silently over the death of the hero.

She could stand up to the Scrooge-like administrator of a tumbledown orphanage and call him names that had made
Brian
blush, then sit among a group of enthralled children while telling gentle fairy tales.

Three weeks …

Brian felt that he hadn’t quite dared to breathe during those weeks. It was an emotion somewhere between fascination and horror, leaving him with sleepless nights but a smothered chuckle somewhere deep inside him.