It Had to Be You (Chicago Stars #1)(20)

It was Saturday evening, and affluent New Yorkers dressed for dinner and the theater were beginning to emerge from the fashionable brick and brownstone town houses that lined the narrow streets. She neared Madison Avenue and the gray granite building that held the co-op she was subleasing at bargain rates from a friend of Viktor’s.

Three days ago, when she’d returned to the city from Montauk, she’d found dozens of phone messages waiting for her. Most of them were from the Stars’ office, and she ignored them. None were from Molly saying she’d changed her mind about going directly from camp to boarding school. She frowned as she remembered their strained weekly phone calls. No matter what she said, she couldn’t seem to make a dent in her sister’s hostility.

“Evening, Miss Somerville. Hello, Pooh.”

“Hi, Tony.” She gave the doorman a dazzling smile as they walked into the apartment building.

He gulped, then quickly leaned down to pat Pooh’s pom-pom. “I let your guest in just like you said.”

“Thanks. You’re a prince.” She crossed the lobby, her heels tapping on the rose marble floor, and punched the elevator button.

“Can’t get over what a nice guy he is,” the doorman said from behind her. “Somebody like him.”

“Of course he’s a nice guy.”

“It makes me feel bad about the names I used to call him.”

Phoebe bristled as she followed Pooh into the elevator. She had always liked Tony, but this was something she couldn’t ignore. “You should feel bad. Just because a man is gay doesn’t mean he isn’t a human being who deserves respect like everyone else.”

Tony looked startled. “He’s gay?”

The doors slid shut.

She drummed the toe of her sandal on the floor as the elevator rose. Viktor kept telling her not to be such a crusader, but too many of the people she cared about were gay, and she couldn’t turn a blind eye to the discrimination so many of them faced.

She thought of Arturo and all he had done for her. Those years with him in Seville had gone a long way toward restoring her belief in the goodness of human beings. She remembered his short pudgy body straightening in front of his easel, a smear of paint streaking his bald pate as he absentmindedly rubbed his hand over the top of his head while he called out to her, “Phoebe, querida, come here and tell me what do you think?”

Arturo had been a man of grace and elegance, an aristocrat of the old school, whose innate sense of privacy rebelled at the idea of letting the world know about his homosexuality. Although they’d never discussed it, she knew it comforted him to pass her off to the public as his mistress, and she loved being able to repay him in some small way for everything he had given her.

The elevator doors slid open. She crossed the carpeted hall and unlocked her own door while Pooh tugged at the leash, yipping with excitement. Bending down, she unfastened the clip. “Brace yourself, Viktor. The Terminator is on the rampage.”

As Pooh shot off, she ran her hands through her blond hair to fluff it. She hadn’t blown it dry after her shower, deciding to let it curl naturally for the sexy windblown look Simone’s deliciously trampy dress demanded.

An unfamiliar male voice with a distinct Southern drawl boomed out from her living room. “Down, dawg! Down, dammit!”

She gasped, then dashed forward, the soles of her sandals slipping on the checkerboard black-and-white marble floor as she whipped around the corner. Hair flying, she lurched to a stop as she saw Dan Calebow standing in the middle of her living room. She recognized him immediately, even though she’d only had a brief conversation with him at her father’s funeral. Still, he wasn’t the sort of man one forgot easily, and over the past six weeks, his face had unaccountably popped into her memory more than once.

Blond, handsome, and bigger than life, he looked like a born troublemaker. Instead of a knit shirt and chinos, he should have been wearing a rumpled white suit and driving down some Southern dirt road in a big old Cadillac hooking beer cans over the roof. Or standing on the front lawn of an antebellum mansion with his head thrown back to bay at the moon while a young Elizabeth Taylor lay on a curly brass bed upstairs and waited for him to come home.

She felt the same uneasiness she’d experienced at their first meeting. Although he looked nothing at all like the football player who’d raped her all those years ago, she had a deep-seated fear of physically powerful men. At the funeral she’d managed to hide her disquiet behind flirtatiousness, a protective device she had developed into a fine art years ago. But at the funeral, they hadn’t been alone.

Pooh, who regarded rejection as a personal challenge, was circling him, tongue flopping, her pom-pom tail beating out a cadence of lovemelovemelovemeloveme.

He looked from the dog to Phoebe. “If she pees on me, I’m skinnin’ her.”

Phoebe rushed forward to snatch up her pet. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

He studied her face rather than her curves, which immediately set him apart from most men. “Your doorman’s a big Giants’ fan. Heck of a nice guy. He surely enjoyed those stories I told him about my encounters with L.T.”

Phoebe had no idea who L.T. was, but she remembered the flippant instructions she’d left with Tony when she’d gone to walk Pooh. “I’m expecting a gentleman caller,” she had said. “Let him in, will you?”