Bringing Down Sam (6 page)

"I'm doing it because you three begged me to. I wish I'd never agreed to it," Eve retorted.

She'd seethed throughout the twenty minute drive from the parking garage to the exclusive condominium building where she was staying. Not even the opulent apartment could brighten her mood. In fact, it worsened it. Because she was here under false pretenses. Sure, Diana had the authority to let her use the condo, which was, apparently, vacant much of the year anyway. But Eve's stay was definitely not legit. She sure as heck wasn't the latest discovery of
His World
and never wanted to be.

"I feel like such a fraud," she sighed. "This is nuts. It's juvenile. It's something my con artist father would have done to try to get money out of someone!"

She nearly bit her tongue, wishing she hadn't brought up the subject of her father. Though Leanne had been her roommate for four years during college, and her best friend for nearly ten, they had never talked too much about Eve's past. One night after a few sangrias, Eve had broken down and spilled her guts about the darkest parts of her childhood to Leanne and Diana. Ruthie had been out on a date that night. Even tipsy, Eve would never have gotten into such a painful topic if Ruthie had been around. Her bubbly friend tended to like things light and happy and would never have understood. Diana and Leanne, however, had their own stories to tell. The three of them had cried and laughed and cried some more well into the morning hours.

"Oh, my God, Eve, I am so incredibly sorry!” Leanne exclaimed. “I never even considered that. Of course, if you're uncomfortable and you want to back out, we'll understand. We never meant to hurt you, or bring up any unpleasant memories."

Eve heard the genuine remorse in her friend’s voice. Leanne meant what she said. She would let her off the hook if Eve said she didn't want to go on with this charade.

"It's not your fault," Eve said. "I guess the photo shoot brought a lot of it back. I thought I'd put it all behind me."

The crap with the teenage boy and the magazine hadn’t helped. Because she’d had those kinds of run-ins in the old days, especially when she’d been recognized for the provocative blue-jeans ads she’d done as a teenager. What Brooke Shields had been to the eighties, Eve had been to the late nineties. No, she’d never looked at the camera and said nothing came between her and her Calvins, but the ad campaign had basically sent the same message: hot jailbait in tight jeans.

She heard Leanne groan softly. "I can't believe how insensitive we were to ask you to do this. Eve, it just didn't occur to me. I thought it would be a perfect set up since you've modeled before. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Famous last words
.

Eve didn't reply. She heard the remorse in her friend's voice but couldn't quickly gloss it over and tell Leanne everything was okay. Because, she suspected, everything was not okay.

It shouldn't have been any big deal, and actually, the photography session hadn't been. She'd liked being back in the spotlight. Eve's father, who had also been her agent, financial manager, and a convicted con man, had once told her she had a face the camera loved. A lot of companies whose products she'd sponsored had obviously felt the same way. And she'd learned as a child that, for the camera, she could be absolutely anyone.

Unfortunately, her father had used the same line of flattery to bilk money out of the hundreds of clients who'd come to him, wanting him to make their babies super child-models the way he had his own daughter. He assured them he could do it, if they just kept paying. Of course, he never followed through on his promises. Not to his clients, not to his wife who'd left when Eve was five. And not to his daughter, who'd come to view herself as his cash cow by the time she was fourteen.

It still sickened her to think she hadn't figured it out sooner. She'd never suspected her father used
her
career to bilk other people out of their money. She'd been his poster child, his success story, his big sales pitch.

She hadn't found out until the day they arrested him.

"Eve, if you want to back out of this, we will understand," Leanne said finally, breaking the silence on the telephone line. "It's a silly idea anyway. Just because the guy wrote a lousy book doesn't mean he's responsible for how people react to it."

Eve thought about it. Part of her wanted to call it quits right now, just ditch the whole idea and scurry on back to her real life. But another part of her, she acknowledged, probably the part that had inherited the love for a thrill from her no-good father, wouldn't let her walk away.

 The main thing stopping her from giving it up was the crazy mix of memories of every moment she’d spent with Sam Kenneman. From the cute guy who’d flirted back a little in the green room, to the determined one who’d turned her down, to the one who’d accepted his boss’s order’s to take her out, to the smarmy jerk who’d made the obnoxious comment in the parking garage, Sam was a study in contradictions.

She hadn’t quite figured out who he was. And for some reason, she wanted to. Whether to pay him back for Leanne and all the other women his book had screwed-over, or perhaps to vindicate him as a guy playing a massive joke on society, or just because her insides tingled and her pulse raced when he was nearby, she couldn’t back down now.

What had started out as a reluctant dare had at some point become a personal mission. Eve just couldn't walk away without one more shot at understanding the man. 

"Don't worry, I'm not backing out. I'm going out with him tomorrow night.”

And once I’ve figured out which Sam Kenneman is the real one, I’m either going to walk away laughing, ready to admit he’s just a nice guy with a smart mouth, or I’m going to find out he is the sexist jerk the world thinks he is, make him want me so bad he can’t see straight…and leave him flat.

Sam always spent his weekend afternoons working on his new book. It was the only time of the week when he didn't have stories to do for the magazine, appearances to make, or interviews to sit through, and he took full advantage of the time. The book was ticking right along, nearly writing itself. He didn't question the hot streak. He'd sweated bullets to get
101 Ways to Avoid Commitment
completed by his deadline and hoped never to go through so much trouble again. One hundred and one was a catchy number, and had seemed easy when the publisher approached him about the book. Actually coming up with the correct number of insulting, sexist ideas—and the accompanying brief essays to accompany them—had been grueling.

Pausing in front of his computer terminal, he picked up his microcassette, pushed rewind, and listened to his last comment. "Women say slow and sweet...but they often want fast and hot."

He hadn't been too surprised by that one. Sam had interviewed dozens of women over the past several months, sending out questionnaires, going back over surveys and studies found in
His World
and elsewhere. His readers weren't picking up his books for any deep psychological information, he didn't pretend to be any kind of expert. He wrote to entertain, and his work was generally billed as "one regular guy's opinion." But he still liked to get his facts straight.

As he typed, Sam thought about some of the questions on his survey, and wondered how Eve would answer them. "There's that whole reading question again," he muttered sourly as he shut down his computer to begin getting ready for their date. The vain, brainless twit she’d seemed to be at first probably stuck to cereal boxes and the instructions on a shampoo bottle.

The sharp-tongued one he’d glimpsed a few times? Well, her he didn’t know about.

And her I want to know about.

He wanted that a lot.

After showering and digging his old tuxedo out of the back of his closet, Sam quickly dressed. The tux was still in pristine condition and fit him perfectly. He'd only worn the thing once or twice since moving out of his family's mansion five years before. He hadn't even intended to bring it when he left, but figured his butler just couldn't stand to see Sam's luggage leave without at least one formal black tux. A half dozen others just like it probably still hung on wooden hangers in his old closet at the estate.

Glancing at himself in the mirror, Sam realized it was entirely possible this was the same tux he'd worn to his now-infamous twenty-sixth birthday party. That was his last night in his father's home—the night his well-ordered, conservative world had been shot all to hell with the discovery that his father, Jacob Kenneman, was a colossal liar.

He hadn't thought about the party in a long time. When he looked back, Sam sometimes felt that night, and the years leading up to it, belonged in someone else's life story. That Sam Kenneman had grown up in the lap of luxury, had been chauffeured to kindergarten in a limousine, who’d gone to ivy league schools on academic scholarships rather than his father’s fortune, who’d been a ruthless businessman who was supposed to step into his father's role as the head of Kenneman Corporation.

This Sam Kenneman ate take-out burgers three nights a week, rarely wore anything other than jeans or khakis and felt lucky if he could find a clean pair of socks in the morning. On days when he wasn't so lucky, he just turned the previous days' pair inside out and wore them anyway.

He wouldn't go back for anything.

His father had tried over the years to guilt-trip him into returning to the family fold, particularly after Sam's mother filed for divorce. But the old man hadn't been able to use the trump card he'd held over him during his college years, when Sam had wanted to go into anything else but the family business. At twenty-two, being told it was his duty to carry on the tradition as the oldest child, and the only son, had felt like a ton of bricks on his back. Sam had caved, doing as his father demanded, focusing all of his energy on Kenneman Corporation.

But after the infamous party, the old argument didn't work anymore. Because on his twenty-sixth birthday, Sam discovered he
wasn't
the oldest child. He wasn't even his father's only son. His father had a secret life that no one had been aware of until that night. And his father's decades old secret came strolling right into the middle of Sam's country club party and blew the Kenneman's wealthy, secure, prestigious world to smithereens.

The repercussions had been wide and long-lasting. Sam had walked out of the house and had not exchanged one word with his father for months. Sam's mother, who said she'd always suspected her husband had never truly loved her, had taken this as proof positive and walked out. Their divorce was quick and simple. She took him for as much as she could, and he didn't fight back; for once, shamed into giving in easily. Sam's younger sister Lyssa hadn't spoken with their father for four years, only recently coming around since she was pregnant with her first child.

Sam, meanwhile, had felt completely free to live his own life. Finally. And he'd succeeded, at least to his own definition of success, if not to his father’s. That ticked his father off to no end, he was quite sure. The thought brought a smile to his lips.

Shrugging off the memories, Sam swiped a comb through his damp hair, grabbed his keys and walked out of his apartment. He was no longer used to pampering, and had declined Friday afternoon when Diana had offered them a limo ride to tonight's cocktail party. He didn't delude himself that she was offering for his sake. All the men being featured in the special Men of the New Millennium piece were being given star treatment at tonight's event, and Sam knew photographers would be busy snapping candids for use in the two-part feature article.

Twenty minutes before he was to pick Eve up, Sam got into his small red sports car, the one luxury he'd allowed himself to buy with his advance from his latest book. He chuckled when he remembered how he'd dickered with the salesman for two hours, liking the fact it was his own money he was bargaining with. After all, Sam had driven a much more expensive car as a teenager. The keys to it had been literally given to him on a silver platter by his parents on his eighteenth birthday. An even more expensive one followed on his twenty-fifth. Not that he'd appreciated it. It was amazing how earning something through hard work made it so much more valuable

"Bet it's still parked in the old man's garage," he muttered as he drove through Philadelphia to pick up his date for the evening. His father would never have sold Sam's car, because that would be acknowledging Sam was not going to come crawling back home to the family, a complete failure, as the old man had predicted five years earlier.

Arriving at an exclusive, private condominium building, Sam gave his name to the guard and drove through the gates. He parked, then rode up the elevator to the penthouse floor, wondering how much the magazine had invested in Eve if they were giving her the use of such a ritzy residence.

She didn't answer right away when he knocked. Sam brushed his palm across his jacket, smoothing the fine fabric, and wishing he'd never agreed to the evening. He had a vision of how it might progress. 

Eve would be dressed to the nines in a little black cocktail dress which would look like the same one worn by every other woman at the party. She'd cling to his arm long enough to assess the crowd, then work her way through all the men there, not satisfied until she'd gotten the attention and admiration to which she was accustomed. She wouldn’t be satisfied until every man wanted her and every woman hated her. Sam had known so many women like her. Hell, he'd dated several of them!

If he ended up being the one to bring her home, she'd invite him in. Then she'd invite him to stay. And he might even be tempted to agree. He didn't feel any emotion as he acknowledged that fact about himself. The woman was lovely and he'd already imagined how tightly she'd be able to wrap those long legs around his hips during sex. He wondered if the vamp act would extend to the bedroom, if she'd be sultry and seductive, or if she was all show. She wouldn't be the first woman he'd known who gained pleasure exclusively in being chased, and never in being caught.

Yeah, that scenario was the one he most expected and the woman most likely to appear.