Starstruck by Anne McAllister Read Free Book Online Page B

moved the laundry onto the floor and sank into the heavy armchair opposite and sipped her tea as she watched him. It was strangely companionable and relaxing, just sitting there with Joe Harrington asleep across the room. Liv smiled, wondering what Frances would think. Surely she wouldn’t suspect the gentleness and vulnerability that Liv could see now in him. It wasn’t a side he showed to his adoring public. But if millions of women swooned over him wide-awake, she mused with a tiny smile, just think how many would be drooling if they could see him now.
    She didn’t know how long she sat watching him, but finally she caught herself yawning too. She supposed she ought to call a taxi and bundle him into it and send him back to his hotel.
    Oh yes, sure, Liv thought. And how would her reputation look then? “Local reporter sends Romeo home in midnight taxi ride.’ ? She could see the headlines now. Well, Marv probably would have mercy, but there were other less scrupulous newspapers around. And it didn’t bear thinking about, anyway. Joe didn’t look as though he was going to move for the rest of the night. It might be wisest just to let sleeping tigers lie.
    She sighed and got up, going to her room for a lightweight blanket, which she dropped on the coffee table. She bent over and unlaced his shoes, slipping them off his feet and easing the tie off his neck.
    There were advantages to being five times a mother, she thought wryly, not the least of which was being able to undress children for bed without waking them. But Joe Harrington was not a child, she warned herself. What he would think if he woke now to find her in the process of unbuttoning his shirt did not bear thinking about.
    Joe groaned and slid sideways onto the sofa and she eased his shirt off, dropping it beside the blanket. There, that was as far as she dared go. Leaving him in his undershirt, dress pants and socks, she draped the blanket over him, and he rolled toward the back of the sofa, clutching the blanket.
    “Mmmmm,” he breathed, a half-smile on his face. Liv sighed and brushed a lock of dark hair off his forehead, her hand lingering just for a moment.
    “Good night,” she whispered and put out the light.
    Well, she thought, that’s that. Another distinction to add to her uniqueness—a dubious one at that— I am , she thought as she slipped into her double bed alone, the only woman in the world to make Joe Harrington fall asleep.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter Three
     
     
    I n the morning he was gone.
    Liv’s alarm went off at six and she sprang out of bed, throwing on the first suitable skirt and blouse that came to hand and brushing her shoulder length hair back and anchoring it with a headband because she didn’t want to take the time to pin it up. Not, she told herself, because she looked prettier with her hair down.
    It didn’t matter whether she did or not, for when she crept out into the living room, expecting to see his l ean muscular body curled up on her sofa, she found instead only a folded up blanket and no sign at all of Joe. The whole previous evening might have been nothing more than the very detailed hallucination of a demented, middle-aged mother but for the freshly perked coffee she found in the kitchen and a note scratched on the back of a shopping list that said simply, “Thanks. Joe.”
    For what? she wondered. Certainly not for what he usually got from the women he spent the night with But then, he hadn’t actually spent the night with her, not really. He had only slept on her couch. She wondered if Frances would believe that if she told her. Not that she was going to tell her. Not after all the carrying-on she had done yesterday about having to do this interview. There was no point in looking a complete fool if she didn’t have to. She poured herself a cup of his coffee and contemplated the note, her eyes drifting from it to the unoccupied couch. It was really better that he was gone, she told herself firmly. She