Her Red-Carpet Romance (15 page)

Everything.

No doubt sensing the lull in what they'd just shared, Yohanna raised herself up just enough to lean her arm against his chest and look into Lukkas's eyes.

“So are we still going back to the studio?” she asked, pretending to act as if they hadn't just blown out all the stops and made torrid love together. “Because if the answer's yes, I'm going to need five minutes to pack. Make that ten,” she amended, reconsidering, “because I have to put some clothes on first. I don't think your pilot would appreciate my boarding his plane naked.”

“I can't see him complaining about that,” Lukkas said, playing along. And then he laughed at the absurdity of the conversation. Stroking her hair, which was splayed against his chest, he apologized. “I'm sorry about before.”

“Which before?” Yohanna asked cautiously. “Because part of that ‘before' was really terrific.”

Lukkas was focused on making amends. “I shouldn't have snapped at you like that.”

He felt a slight flutter across his skin and realized that she was smiling against his chest. Why that would suddenly make his heart feel full, he had no idea.

“I've endured worse,” she told him. “Besides, I'd say that you kind of made up for it.” Raising her head again, her eyes met his. Hers twinkled with humor—and maybe a little something more. Whatever it was, it seemed to reel him in.

“I meant what I said the other day, you know,” Yohanna told him.

“You said a lot of things on a lot of days,” he pointed out, patiently waiting for her to clarify her words.

“You have a point,” she conceded. “When I told you that you could talk to me if something were bothering you, I meant it. I really am a good listener and I promise you that whatever you say to me won't go any further than my own ears.”

Even though she was trying to have a serious conversation with him, he could feel himself responding to her again. Responding not just to her physically, but to her kindness, her understanding. She was the whole package. Beauty, brains and compassion. And that was rare.

Raising his head a little, he lightly skimmed the tip of his tongue along the outline of her ear. “This ear?” he asked, his warm breath caressing her skin.

She surprised him by maneuvering her body and flipping him onto his back.

“And this ear,” she said, turning her head just enough to make her other ear accessible to him.

This time when he mimicked his previous movement, she could feel her whole body responding with a warm shiver that ran the length of it.

She didn't remember all that much immediately after that, except that it was spectacular.

 

Chapter Fifteen

“S
o this is the way I find out? When were you going to tell me? Or did you just decide that I didn't need to know?”

Her mother's voice vacillated between sounding indignant and really hurt. Long ago Yohanna had learned that when it came to wielding guilt, her mother was in a class all by herself.

And Elizabeth Andrzejewski had not mellowed with age.

Yohanna frowned. She and Lukkas had returned to Southern California late yesterday. He'd dropped her off at her house while he had gone on to his because he needed to take care of several things.

The blinking light on the answering machine part of her landline had caught her eye the moment she'd entered her house, but for the sake of her own peace of mind, Yohanna had deliberately put off listening to the messages until morning.

Well, now it was morning and here she was listening to her mother lay on the guilt with expert precision. Her mother hadn't been able to reach her while she'd been on location because she'd consciously left her cell phone off. Because unforeseen things had a way of happening, she had left a message on her mother's machine that she was going out of town and couldn't be reached. However, if some kind of
real
emergency came up, her mother could call Lukkas's office at the studio and leave a message. That message would then be forwarded to her as quickly as possible.

Yohanna made sure that her mother would be out having lunch with her friends—something she did every Thursday—before calling. That way she was assured of getting the answering machine. Her reason for this roundabout approach was to avoid fielding the thousand-and-one questions she knew her mother was capable of asking.

The questions that apparently were coming her way now.

“Tell you what, Mom?” Yohanna murmured to her answering machine as it went on playing her mother's far from brief message.

Even though she'd voiced the question out loud, it was purely a rhetorical one. She had a sinking feeling she knew exactly what her mother was referring to and had no doubts that she would be listening to recriminations regarding her “oversight” at length for weeks—possibly months—to come.

The next moment she was proved right. Yohanna took no joy in that.

“You went to a real Hollywood movie premiere with that man, your boss,” her mother all but squealed. “Best-looking man you've ever gone out with and did you even
think
to give me a call to let me know? Of course not. I had to find out my daughter was dating a celebrity by watching
Today's Hollywood
,” her mother complained bitterly.

“I wasn't ‘dating' him, Mother,” Yohanna retorted to the answering machine. “I was shielding him.”

And now? What are you doing with him now?
she asked herself. She honestly didn't have an answer to that, other than the obvious one: that what she was doing with him was having a good time.

“The reporter said that it looked as though Lukkas Spader had finally stopped grieving over his dead wife and was moving on
with his new assistant.
That
is
you, right?” her mother asked with annoyance. “I didn't see anyone else with him in that segment. Just you. My former daughter.

“The woman doing the segment went on to say that you two are an item. An
item.
And you didn't even pick up the phone to tell me, your own
mother
. I raised you better than that. At least I thought I did. Well, let me tell you that is
no way
to treat your long-suffering mother, Yohanna.”

Yohanna rolled her eyes. Leaning over the answering machine, she said, “Yes, it is, because I just
knew
you'd be making a big deal out of it. And that's what you're doing,” she said, waving a hand at the answering machine. “You're making a big deal out of it.”

She sighed, shaking her head. When the time came to actually
talk
to her mother, she knew she wasn't going to say any of what she'd just said, wasn't going to tell her mother to butt out of her affairs—oh, God, her mother would leap on that word, she thought in absolute dismay. No, there would be no indignant comebacks, no angry retorts forthcoming from her.

Instead, she would just sit there, listening to her mother politely, because she would tell herself that, at bottom, her mother meant well and all she
really
wanted for her was just the best.

Meanwhile, her mother thought nothing of making her utterly crazy in the process.

However, her mother and the drama Elizabeth Andrzejewski always created were of secondary importance in the scheme of things. Right now she was far more concerned with what this so-called “breaking news” broadcast her mother had referred to, which she herself as of yet hadn't glimpsed on the air, would do to Lukkas if he happened across it—especially if someone brought it to his attention.

Would the threat of having this labeled a relationship cause him to step back from whatever was building between them? Would he tell her that people would get the wrong idea so to keep things the way they were—professional—he was going to back off?

The very idea of not seeing Lukkas privately anymore felt like a knife to her insides.

But there wasn't anything she could do about that. She was just going to have to be holding her breath until Lukkas found out about the media's current speculation about his life.

Part of her fervently hoped he never would find out because she had a feeling that
that
could very well signal the beginning of the end of their time together. And until just this moment, she hadn't realized that she didn't want it to end. At least not yet.

Not for a while.

A
long
while, she amended.

In all honesty, she had never had a relationship that had actually worked before. There had been a few halfhearted
associations
—for lack of a better word—but they had all simply petered out after a short amount of time.

Maybe it was because, as her mother maintained, she was too picky. But whatever the reason, she had never felt that lighter-than-air feeling she experienced whenever she was with Lukkas. Before she had gone to work for Lukkas, she'd begun to think something was wrong with her. And then she'd met Lukkas and suddenly everything was right with the world.

Her response to Lukkas wasn't just physical—although heaven knew the man, with his well-defined chest, his tight butt and his sleek hips was a feast for the eyes—but he spoke to her on a completely different level.

Spoke to her soul.

Until just recently she had never believed in such things as kindred spirits, never believed in the existence of so-called soul mates. She'd thought it was a term people made up to make themselves feel as if what they had was special and that it would last until the end of time. Usually, it didn't last anywhere nearly as long, and relationship extraction was always rather painful.

But in this case, in
her
case, she felt as if that was exactly what was happening to her. She and Lukkas were quietly building toward something solid. And she wasn't about to have all that work destroyed by some hot-shot reporter or blogger calling unwanted attention to Lukkas and her, to their association.

She wasn't about to allow Lukkas to be driven away from her by a few thoughtless words.

When her doorbell rang, she assumed that her mother had decided to do her “severely wounded mother” act in person rather than leave another message on the phone. Since her car was safely put away in the garage, Yohanna debated pretending she wasn't home.

But her mother was nothing if not persistent. The doorbell rang a second time. And then a third. This could go on indefinitely. She might as well get it over with.

Psyching herself up for a confrontation, Yohanna strode over to the door and yanked it open even as she started talking quickly. “I didn't tell you anything, Mother, because there's nothing to tell! Understand?”

“Sure thing.”

Her jaw all but dropped when she saw that Lukkas was standing in her doorway, not her mother.

“Nothing to tell about what, Hanna?” he asked her, coming in.

She waved away both what she'd said and his question regarding it. “Doesn't matter.” She knew she had to offer him some sort of an explanation in order not to come off as being too strange. “I came home to half a dozen messages from my mother. The usual thing,” she told him, brushing the matter aside and hoping he wasn't going to ask her anything specific about what her mother had said in those messages.

Hope was short-lived.

“And the usual thing is?” Lukkas asked, attempting to coax an answer out of her.

Maybe she did need to begin at the beginning. Sort of. This definitely felt awkward. “One of those red-carpet reporters took a video of you at the premiere.”

“You mean of us,” Lukkas corrected. He had been quite aware of the clusters of paparazzi that would have been willing to literally kill one another just to get a clear shot of the two of them.

She nodded. “My mother seems to think that I'm keeping something from her.”

Pausing for a moment, he took the wildest guess he could. “You mean like a secret wedding?”

She could only stare at him in complete wonder. “What? No. She knows that no matter how crazy she makes me, I wouldn't exclude her from my wedding. That would be too cruel.”

Maybe she had said too much. She had a sinking feeling Lukkas was going to say something about nipping this “romance thing” in the bud and that they were going to have to keep everything aboveboard.

“I'm sorry,” she told him.

He furrowed his brow. “Did you do something to apologize for?” he asked her.

“No.” Technically, she hadn't, Yohanna thought. There was no way she could have foreseen this sort of a reaction from the voyeuristic press.

To her surprise, Lukkas didn't really need any convincing as to her culpability.

“That's right, you didn't. I knew it was a calculated risk, taking you to the premiere to ward off being ‘fixed up' by some of my well-meaning friends and their wives.” He moved a little closer to her, his eyes holding hers. “What I didn't calculate into this was my own reaction to you.”

For a split second her heart almost stopped beating.

“And that is?” Yohanna asked so softly that had he not been standing so close to her, Lukkas wouldn't have even heard the question.

“That you make me feel again. That very possibly you brought that dead part of me back to life. I'm not going to tell you that I'm ready to do cartwheels and break into song right this minute—I've still got issues to work out,” he confided. “But you have made me realize that there just might be a light—albeit a very distant light—at the end of this tunnel I'm traveling through.”

Her relief was practically immeasurable. “So you're not going to tell me that my services are no longer needed?”

Where had
that
come from?

“You're kidding, right?” he asked her, surprised she would even think something like that.

“No,” she admitted. “I was being very serious.”

He laughed. “After you made yourself indispensable to me, got the production running like a well-oiled machine—an
efficient
, well-oiled machine—do you actually think I'd stand dramatically in a doorway and point to the road, saying you needed to hit it and never show your face here again?”

It almost sounded melodramatically ludicrous when he said it that way. Still, she wasn't going to lie about her reaction. Maybe he could even say something to make her feel that she wasn't expendable at this time.

“Something like that,” she conceded.

“You're just humoring me. You're way too smart to actually think something like that,” he told her with finality.

“So what are you going to do about that story the network's running?” When he raised a brow, she understood that he had no idea which story she was referring to.
Nice going, Hanna.
“The one that has us wildly in love,” she clarified.

“What I'm going to do is what I've been doing ever since I first started on this pilgrimage to solidly build up my reputation in this otherwise make-believe world of tinsel, smoke and mirrors. I'm going to ignore the story, ignore the paparazzi—a difficult task, but still doable—and go on doing what I'm good at doing. Producing movies people want to see.

“And in order to do that, I intend to keep amassing a production company comprised of people who are damn good at what they do. And that, in case you have any doubts, most assuredly includes you.” And then he paused to look at Hanna. He had left out one important point. “Unless, of course, having those stories and the annoying paparazzi swarming around you like so many blood-sucking mosquitoes with cameras is intolerable to you.”

His analogy made her smile. “I think that mosquitoes with cameras are rather intriguing. Far be it from me to run for cover. Actually,” Yohanna told him proudly, “I've never run from anything in my life.”

“With the possible exception of your mother?” It wasn't a contradiction but an amused question on Lukkas's part.

Yohanna inclined her head, conceding the minor point. “I stand corrected. I have run from my mother. But in my defense, I've only run from her because no matter what I say, my mother only hears what she wants to hear—even if what I say isn't anything remotely close to what she wants to hear.”

“Well...” he said, thinking that perhaps he had a very simple solution to her problem. “Would you like me to talk to your mother in this case, straighten things out for you?”

Yohanna wasn't really clear on just exactly what he was offering to “straighten out.” Would he tell her mother that they're just sleeping together, thereby minimizing the importance of what they had? Or was he going to tell her mother that they were just friends?