Hired Wife. Karen Van Der Zee
she wondered if Sam had been lonely. Lonely for family and companionship.
And she wondered if he was lonely now, living like a global nomad.
Except for the widowed uncle who ran the company in New York, and one married Greek cousin, all his extended family lived in Jordan and Greece. Although he’d been thoroughly Americanized during his high school and college years, in his younger years he had lived and been educated in Jordan, but spending much time in Greece as well with his mother’s family.
“I don’t have a very strong sense of really belonging anyplace,” he’d said over dinner, and his dark eyes had suddenly been full of shadows. She’d wondered what had been hidden in those shadows. Loneliness? It was an odd thought to have about Sam, who had always seemed so self-reliant, so…together. Yet who could tell what dwelled in the deepest part of people’s souls?
Kim gave a little shiver. How awful it must be to not feel you belonged somewhere, to feel so rootless, to not even have a place to really call your own.
And now he wanted a house that was his, with everything in it belonging to him. A home.
And she was going to help him get it.
They met the next evening at Sam’s office to discuss the job in more detail, then headed home to Kim’s loft so she could show him what she’d done with her own place.
A clown in full circus costume was sitting on the doorstep when Kim and Sam arrived at her building. A sad clown, mouth curved downward, big fat tears painted on his face. He held a bouquet of huge rainbow-colored balloons. Several children had congregated and were laughing and teasing him.
It didn’t take long to figure out what he was doing there and it wasn’t a gig at a children’s birthday party. I Adore You, Kim! one of the balloons read. Please Be Mine, was on another.
“Kim!” he called out as she emerged from the limousine. “Oh, please, Kim, listen to me, my heart is breaking!”
Hers was sinking, like a ton of cement. She was aware of Sam next to her, tall, silent, observing the spectacle. She didn’t need this. A clown was not part of the plan.
“Tony,” she said coldly. “This is enough, d’you hear? It’s not funny anymore. Will you please just stop it?”
He began to sob, big, noisy, wet clown sobs. The children cheered.
“She doesn’t love me!” he wailed between convulsions of grief. “I’m going to die of a broken heart!” The children laughed harder.
Kim took her key and pushed it into the lock, saying no more. She felt Sam behind her, knew he was wondering who Tony was. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” she said casually, loud enough for Tony to hear. “He’s my stalker.”
“Your stalker?”
They got into the elevator. “It’s the newest craze, haven’t you heard?” she asked breezily.
Sam frowned. “Who is this guy? What does he want?”
“I met him at a party three weeks ago, and he sort of trapped me in the corner of a room and bored me with endless self-involved stories about how he is misunderstood as an artist and an actor and how the world owes him respect and admiration. I found it a little hard to take, but I was trying to be nice and I tried to listen, and I think he thought I was…eh—”
“Charming?”
She made a face. “Something like that. I didn’t want to charm him at all. What I really wanted to do was to get away from him.”
“You’re not having a lot of success,” Sam said dryly. “So what else does he do besides play the clown?”
She shrugged carelessly. “Oh, harmless stuff. He sends me things—flowers, paintings, poems, love boat tickets. He leaves sappy messages on my answering machine, nothing dangerous. He’s basically a frustrated, out-of-work, aspiring actor in need of a cause.”
“And he sends you cruise tickets?”
“He has a rich daddy.”
The clanging elevator struggled its way to the top floor. She wondered what Sam was thinking of the rattling old contraption, what he would think of her rather unusual living quarters.
She’d spent the morning housecleaning, shopping for food and getting ready for Sam’s visit. Her plan was to cook something simple yet delicious, not wanting to overdo things by offering him something extravagantly expensive and ostentatious. Simple, yet elegant was the key. She’d made a cold sauce of olive oil, Gorgonzola, prosciutto, sun-dried tomatoes and garlic, to be tossed with hot pasta and lots of parsley and chopped walnuts. It was ready apart from cooking the fettuccini and assembling the salad. The washed greens were in the crisper, the lemon-ginger dressing was made.
She opened the door to the loft, looking forward to a nice evening, and stopped dead in her tracks. A man lay sprawled on her sofa, asleep—or dead, or in a coma, you couldn’t tell by the way he lay there—lifeless, motionless, his mouth slack, one arm dangling off the side.
CHAPTER THREE
IN STUNNED silence, Kim took in the man’s appearance, all thoughts of a nice dinner with Sam fading into the distance. He looked like something that had crawled out of a swamp with his long, unkempt hair, his wild, woolly black beard, his old, ragged jeans. His shoes were off, muddy hiking boots the size of ocean liners. A bulky backpack, worn and faded, lay on the floor with half of its filthy contents spilling out onto her lovely Navajo rug.
She did not know this man.
Sam stood beside her in the door, calmly surveying the scene. For some reason she couldn’t make herself speak. This was the moment for comic relief, to say something witty, something clever, something…anything.
“And who is this one?” asked Sam casually, as if he were already resigned to the fact that her life was littered with weird men, and that here was yet another specimen.
She swallowed hard. “I don’t know,” she answered, tonelessly.
A short, significant silence. “You don’t know?” he inquired, as if he found it hard to believe.
“No.” She didn’t dare meet his eyes. She kept staring at the huge man on her sofa. His chest was moving up and down, so he wasn’t dead. She supposed she should be grateful for small mercies.
So, what do I do now? she asked herself. What do you normally do when you come home and find a derelict passed out on your sofa? Call the police?
“How did he get in?” Sam asked practically.
She ventured a look at him. He looked very clean, very respectable, very…sexually appealing. Everything the comatose stranger was not. “I don’t know,” she said again.
“I think there’s someone else here, too.” Sam gestured casually toward the bathroom, where she now heard the noise of running water. A moment later the door opened and Jason emerged, naked apart from a blue towel wrapped around his hips. Water drops glistened on his manly shoulders. Apparently he’d just had one of his many showers to set him up for a night of serious brain work.
Jason was the only person she couldn’t blame for making an appearance while Sam was around—after all, he lived here. However, did he have to show up in all his half-naked glory?
Her hopes of making a dignified impression on Sam had been duly crushed. Why had she even thought she could pull it off, she who had such undignified friends, led such an undignified life? How could she possibly expect him to take her seriously now? She’d asked him to her apartment for a civilized visit and instead he’d found an idiot clown on her doorstep, a swamp creature passed out on her sofa and a naked Adonis in her bathroom. All she really wanted was the chance to go back to the Far East for a while. Was that too much to ask? Why were the gods playing games with her, first dangling the opportunity in front of her, then yanking it out of reach? It just wasn’t fair.