Sweet Liar (16 page)

Pulling her into his arms, her head on his bare shoulder, he stroked her back. He put one hand on her head, cradling it as she struggled with breath after breath, her chest heaving in little spasms.

Feeling Mike turn away when he heard a crash, she knew without looking that the intruder had regained consciousness and had leaped from the balcony.

“I hope he breaks his bloody neck,” Mike whispered, but they both heard the man as he ran away across the garden below. No doubt he had leaped from one balcony to the next to reach the garden, then vaulted over the fence.

Still holding her, Mike reached for the bedside telephone and punched the buttons. “Blair,” he said into the phone. “I need you. No. Strangulation. Get here quick.” He put down the phone.

“Mike,” Samantha tried to say, but he told her to be quiet and continued holding her.

He felt her shaking against him, felt the fear in her as she clung to him, clung like a frightened child to its father, as he soothed her, rubbing her back, stroking her hair. When she continued to shake, he slid down in the bed with her, then wrapped his arms about her body, pinning her arms against his chest. He moved a leg over her, as though to completely encase her in a cocoon of safety.

“I'm here, baby,” he whispered, frowning into the darkness as she seemed to try to get closer to him.

A wounded bird, she'd said. She'd said that she wasn't one of his wounded birds, and he was sure she'd heard that particular bit of idiocy from Daphne. If Mike were into “wounded birds,” he would have been madly in love with Daphne.

Samantha intrigued him; she'd intrigued him since before he'd met her.

After he found the newspaper clipping of Sam and Maxie in his uncle Mike's belongings and had searched out Dave Elliot, Mike had spent some time with Dave. Mike hadn't meant to stay in Louisville, but he and Dave had liked each other. Dave was lonely, what with his only child all the way out West and, as Dave said, happily married. Maybe Mike was a little lonely too since the death of Uncle Mike. Together, the two men had come up with the scheme to live together in New York in Mike's town house, where Dave could spend his retirement looking for his mother and helping Mike with the biography of Doc. Mike had liked the idea, liked having someone help him with the research.

Then, after Dave had commissioned Mike's sister to decorate the apartment just as Dave wanted, he had called Mike and said he wasn't going to be coming to New York after all. He wouldn't tell Mike what the problem was, but Mike knew something was wrong, so he got on the first plane to Louisville and appeared at Dave's door, suitcase in hand, and demanded to be told what was going on. Dave had blurted what he'd been told only a few days before: He was dying of cancer. Mike had wanted him to call his daughter and tell her, but Dave had said no, that Samantha had had enough death in her short life and she didn't need to see any more.

So Mike had moved in with Dave for a month. Dave had said he was fine, but Mike hadn't been able to leave him, for he couldn't bear to see the man alone when he knew he had so little time left.

For some odd reason, Dave had insisted that Mike stay in Samantha's room, not in the guest room. When Mike saw the room, he had laughed, for it was a child's room.

“Samantha and her mother picked out everything together,” Dave said with a smile and a fond look about the room.

It was on the tip of Mike's tongue to point out that Samantha's mother had died when Sam was twelve, but he hadn't. He'd set his suitcase down on the rug that had little pink and white ballerinas dancing across it and looked at the bed: a white four-poster draped in gauzy pink cloth tied back with big pink bows. There was a little dressing table against one wall, draped in white-dotted swiss, the top of it covered with a child's dresser set. Looking about, Mike expected a ten-year-old girl to walk in the room at any moment.

Yet he knew Samantha had lived in this room until she'd left with her husband. Opening the closet door, he expected to find frilly little dresses, but instead there were adult clothes: boring, shapeless, obsessively neat clothes, but clothes sized for an adult.

Over the next few weeks, Mike's curiosity about this daughter who grew up in a child's room increased. Dave had pain pills that made him sleep a great deal, so Mike had time on his hands that he used to explore Samantha's room. At first he did so tentatively, knowing that what he was doing was none of his business, but as the days followed and he had little else to do, he grew less embarrassed at looking through drawers and cabinets.

Dave described his daughter as a feisty, opinionated, go-getter. If that was so, why had she spent all those years living in a child's room?

When Mike found a scrapbook kept by Samantha, he looked through it with interest. She'd cut out pictures of movie stars and rock singers; there were a couple of pressed flowers. It all seemed normal for a twelve-year-old—except that ten pages from the back of the book was a clipping from a newspaper: an obituary of her mother. After that there was nothing else in the book. Search as he might, he could find no scrapbooks that dated after her mother's death.

He found five diaries written by Samantha, all of them written in a child's round hand, all of them full of whispered secrets with other girls and who she loved at the moment and who her friends loved. She wrote of fights with her mother and how wonderful her father was.

Smiling, Mike remembered how, as a child, all his fights had been with his father. His mother was a saint, and he couldn't understand why his sisters sometimes got angry at her.

There were no diaries after 1975, after Allison Elliot died.

By the end of his month's stay, Mike was more puzzled than ever by what he'd found in the Elliot house. Sometimes it seemed as though Samantha and her father had stopped counting time on the day Allison had died. Dave talked about Samantha as a child, telling stories of her only during her first twelve years. He never mentioned what she had done during high school or when she'd lived at home and gone to the University of Louisville.

Mike had asked questions about Samantha, pointed questions, about her life after her mother's death, but he'd never been given any direct answers. Dave had been vague, often changing the subject.

It had been Mike who had insisted that Dave allow him to tell Samantha that he was dying. Mike said it wasn't fair to Sam not to know about her own father. At last Dave had agreed, but then, oddly enough, Dave had insisted that Mike not meet Samantha. He said Samantha could be told, but he didn't want Mike to do it, didn't want Mike calling her, and he wanted Mike out of the house when she arrived.

Mike couldn't help being hurt by this pronouncement. It was as though Dave thought Mike was an unsavory character, not good enough for his precious daughter. But Mike had done what Dave wanted and asked a neighbor to call Samantha, then Mike had boarded a plane and gone back to New York.

Two weeks later, Dave had called Mike and told him he was sending Samantha to him to take care of after he was gone. The way Dave sounded, he could have been talking about an orphaned child—or an express package.

Reluctantly, Mike had agreed to turn Dave's apartment over to Samantha, but truthfully, Mike had been dreading dealing with her. She must have a case of arrested development if her little-girl room was any indication of her personality.

But the woman he had met and the girl he'd been expecting were two different creatures. One moment she was hot and full of passion; she was the little girl in the diaries who wrote of arguments and escapades. The next moment she was terrified of her own shadow. And the next she was cold and hard, shutting the world out, not allowing anyone near her.

Yet, he thought, she wasn't cold and hard. She fought him; she pushed him away at every opportunity, but sometimes she looked at him with such need and longing in her eyes that he didn't know whether to reach for her or run away.

The day he'd bought her those clothes, she had looked at him with such gratitude that he'd almost been embarrassed. Most women would have been happy about the clothes, but Samantha had been more than happy. In fact, it wasn't the clothes that had delighted her, but…the attention? he wondered. It was almost as though she were grateful that someone had acknowledged that she was alive. He wasn't sure what had given her so much pleasure that day, but something had.

What happened to her after her mother died? he wondered. What had changed her from a normal, outgoing, gregarious child who had friends and went to parties to a young woman who could spend weeks sleeping?

Now, she was clinging to him in a way that he'd never seen or felt in another person. Yes, she was frightened, and, yes, she had every reason to be, but there was something more to the way she clung to him. It was as though she needed him.

Maybe wanting to get away from his hometown was one of the reasons Mike had moved to New York, that and wanting to go to a place where he wasn't “one of the Taggerts” but a person in his own right. A place where he could be an individual, not part of the pack.

Smiling, Mike stroked her hair and kissed her forehead. When you grew up in a family as large as his, feeling that
you
were needed was not something you experienced very often. Early in life you found out that if you didn't do something, there were others to do it. If you didn't feed the horses, someone else would. If someone was upset there were at least a dozen people to offer comfort. As far as he could remember, no one had ever said, “Only Mike can do this job,” or “I need Mike and no one else.” Even in school girls had been as content to have one of his brothers as to have him. It didn't seem to make any difference to them.

But Samantha needed him, he thought, trying to pull her closer. She didn't need his money; she didn't need his body; she needed
him.

He clutched her to him. Before he'd met her, when he thought of her living in his house, he'd thought of her as an obligation, a burden, actually, rather like a permanent blind date. Then, for a while, his only objective had been to get her into bed, and she'd rather forcefully told him she wasn't interested—forcefully, hell, he thought, she had been snide and nasty and downright insulting. He had lost interest in her for a while, letting her stay in her room and sleep. He'd allowed her to do whatever she wanted. Then Daphne had made him realize that Samantha wasn't just sleeping.

Mike put his hand over her ear. She was so small and so alone and maybe it was his vanity, but he felt as though he'd saved her life twice, once when he'd kept her from “sleeping forever” as Daphne called it and tonight when he'd had to break down a door to get to her. Tomorrow he'd have the windows measured for steel grills, grills to keep her safe.

“You're going to be safe, baby,” he whispered. “I'll keep you safe.” And I'll make you laugh, he thought. And I'll make you stop moving away from me when I reach out to touch you.

It was a while before Samantha could stop shaking, before she could breathe enough to think. Opening her eyes, she looked out the bedroom door. Down the hall, she could see the hole in the apartment door, the hole Mike had had to make to reach through the door to unlock it.

“How…?” she whispered, wincing at the pain in her throat. She was clinging to him, holding him as tightly as possible, as he was holding her. She didn't want to think about her fear, fear that was making her quiver.

“I heard you,” Mike said. “I heard the thumps on the wall and I knew something was wrong. I thought maybe you'd fallen or hurt yourself. I didn't think—” He wasn't going to tell her what he'd felt when he'd seen the bastard trying to kill her. Now he marveled that he hadn't killed the man on sight, but his number one priority had been to get back to Sam, to make sure that she was all right, and he hadn't wanted to waste even a second pummeling the guy.

“Just be still,” he said softly. “Blair will be here in a few minutes. I want her to look at you and make sure you're all right.”

“A cousin?” Samantha managed to choke out, pulling her head back to smile up at him.

Mike didn't return her smile. Now that his immediate fear for her was under control, he could think. When he'd seen the man hanging over Sam, he hadn't given any thought as to why the man was there or why he was trying to kill her. Mike's only concern had been to save Sam, but now he wondered why the robber had been trying to kill her. Why couldn't he have taken what he wanted from her jewelry box or whatever without trying to commit murder?