.

reached for the cell phone, and since she was holding it between her breasts and the contact was a little too intimate, she let him take it from her.

      “Jade? Hi, it’s Sam. Good to hear your voice again, too. No problem, somebody had to do it. Hysterical?” He grinned at Jolie, who glared daggers back at him. “I wouldn’t say exactly hysterical. But you know how she is…yeah, right. Sure. See you then.”

      “You know how she is what?” Jolie demanded, following him up the three shallow steps to the front door. “How is she, Sam?”

      He placed his thumb against a small, discreet panel cut into the woodwork of the doorjamb, and the door swung open soundlessly. “How she’s prone to be a bit dramatic at times,” he said as Jolie stared, bug-eyed, at the panel. “But that probably comes with the territory with actresses, right?”

      Jolie pointed at the panel. “It beats being paranoid, Chester. And why not a retinal scan? Or didn’t you want to be seen as going overboard? Jeez.”

      “Ah, that brings back memories. I haven’t been Chester for a long time. And I took the security system in exchange for a pair of Ming-dynasty floor vases I’d been trying to unload for two years. I don’t even need to key in a code once I’m in the house, thanks to the thumb pad. Clever, yes?”

      “Uh-huh,” Jolie muttered vaguely as she entered the large flagstone-floored foyer, mentally throwing away the key to Sam’s front door that she’d refused to part with for five long years. She stopped to take a look around, wondering what else had changed in her absence.

      But she should have known. Furnish your house in antiques and you don’t exactly go running out to JCPenney every couple of years for a new pseudo-suede lounge chair with built-in cup holders and a pocket for the TV remote.

      She removed her sunglasses and walked straight ahead, into the living room that stretched nearly across the entire rear of the house. A person could bowl in Sam’s living room, which he sometimes called “the lounge” or “the salon.” But only when trying to impress somebody who wanted to be impressed, as she recalled. “How long before Jade and Jessica show up?”

      “Two hours or more, I guess. They’re going to go out for lunch once they can get shed of the aunts—Jade’s words, not mine—and then they have to give the reporters the slip. That reminds me—I have to call down to Bear Man and alert him that they’re coming. Why do you ask?”

      He asked the question from only a foot or two behind her, so that Jolie found herself beating a retreat to one of the sets of French doors that led out to the flagstone terrace and the Olympic-size reflecting pool that stretched lengthwise away from the house between two rows of slim, tall Italian something-or-other evergreens. We made love in the pool, too…more than once…

      When she turned around, it was to see that Sam had also removed his sunglasses. And loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top button of his crisp white dress shirt. How she longed to feel his arms around her, to feel something other than grief.

      Distance. She needed to put some distance between them. Fast.

      “I just…I feel grubby. Do you mind if I take a shower?”

      Sam bowed his head slightly and waved her toward the foyer and the wide circular staircase that led upstairs. “Be my guest. You know where everything is. Oh, and I think there’s still a few pieces of your clothing in a bottom drawer in my dressing room.”

      “You think?” she asked, her heart beginning to do its pounding-too-hard thing again.

      “All right, Jolie, I know. I had the bathroom and dressing room remodeled last year, and Mrs. Archer asked me what to do with a few things.”

      “And you told her to put everything in a bottom drawer? Why, Sam?”

      He looked at her levelly, a muscle working in his cheek. “Just go take your shower, Jolie, all right? I’ll find Mrs. Archer and have her make up some sandwiches for us before she leaves for her sister’s anniversary party.”

      She caught her bottom lip between her teeth as she nodded. It took everything she had not to run from the room but to only walk away and not look back.

      But that wouldn’t work. It hadn’t worked then, it wouldn’t work now. She’d been looking back for five long years…

       Chapter Two

      SAM PLACED THE TRAY OF sandwiches on the round table in the alcove in front of the windows and turned to look across the large room. Jolie’s slingback heels sat on the floor at the bottom of the bed, her black silk dress spilled across the burgundy and gold striped raw silk coverlet.

      He fought the urge to pick up the dress, hold it to his face, breathe in the scent of the perfume she always wore. Amazone. He’d bought it for her, and she still wore it. There should be a law that no other woman could ever wear that fragrance. It belonged to Jolie.

      “Keep it up, Sam, and soon you’ll be writing bad poetry,” he mumbled beneath his breath as he slipped out of his suit jacket and settled it over the back of a chair. He was just sliding his tie out from beneath his collar when the door to the bathroom opened and he turned, his hand still gripping the tie, to see Jolie standing in the open doorway.

      She was wrapped in a large white, monogrammed Becket Hotels bathrobe belted tightly at her waist, and was rubbing at her wet head with a matching white towel. “Oh, you’re up here. That’s some bathroom you’ve got. It took me five minutes to figure out how to work the shower,” she said, dropping the towel. She then bent at the waist so that her shimmer of medium brown hair hung down as she ran her long fingers through it. When she stood up once more, giving her head a quick backward flip, every last damn strand of hair fell away from her face and sleekly to just beyond her shoulders, as if styled by a master.

      God, she was gorgeous. Tall and slim, her beautiful face bare of makeup. Not the movie star. Jolie. She reminded him of a young thoroughbred. His lovely, vulnerable, always skittish Jolie.

      She leaned against the doorjamb and returned his look.

      Just looked at him, her eyes so incredibly sad.

      “Are you all right, Jolie?”

      “No, Sam, I’m not. I’m not anywhere close to all right,” she said quietly, her hands untying the sash as she walked toward him. “Make me all right, Sam. Don’t talk, don’t say a word. Just make love to me. Please.”

      Her sea-blue eyes were turning liquid, and he could drown in them, if he let himself succumb. He caught her at the shoulders, holding her at a distance. “I’m going to hate myself for this. No, Jolie, we can’t. It’s not a good idea.”

      “Why not? Why, Sam?”

      He pulled the lapels of the robe together as she retied the sash. “You just buried your father, sweetheart.You’re going through hell. I don’t want you to do anything right now that you might regret in a few days.”

      Jolie’s bottom lip began to tremble as a single huge tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, as if ashamed of her show of weakness. Which, she couldn’t realize, only made her seem that much more vulnerable. Sam had to look away from her or else pull her close, comfort her, do anything she wanted him to do.

      And then, in a few days, he’d also probably regret what they’d done.

      She stepped away from him. “You’re probably right. What I don’t need in my life right now is another complication. I’ve only got two weeks here before I have to go back to California.”

      “You’re beginning a new movie?”

      She shook her head, cinching the sash tighter before sitting down at the table. “I don’t go on location for nearly a month. This is promo for Small-Town Hero. It premieres then, with the usual round of talk shows, interviews. I’m dreading them.”

      Sam pulled out the facing chair