Buch lesen: «A Father's Desperate Rescue»

Chapter 1

She was the most exotically beautiful woman Dirk DeWinter had ever seen. Which was saying a lot, since he worked in the movie industry, where beautiful women were a dime a dozen. Not to mention he’d starred for ten years opposite the incomparable Juliana Richardson, acknowledged as Hollywood’s reigning queen long before she became a queen in real life by marrying the king of Zakhar. Even Sabrina’s all-American blond beauty had paled in comparison—though he’d loved Bree more for the beauty of her soul than for her looks.

But it wasn’t just this woman’s perfect Eurasian features, flawless skin, and gently curving figure in a red dress designed to tease and tantalize that had caught his attention. It was what she wasn’t doing. Unlike every other woman in the room, she wasn’t trying to catch his eye.

He knew she’d seen him when he walked into the exclusive jazz club near Causeway Bay in Hong Kong, a club that was a favorite with British and American expats as well as Chinese jazz aficionados. And he’d known by the slight widening of her eyes she recognized him as internationally famous movie star Dirk DeWinter, just as everyone else in the club had. But after that first moment she’d kept her attention riveted on the older man she was with and the jazz pianist on the stage. And Dirk had been intrigued.

The strong tug of sexual attraction was there, and that surprised him. For the first time in forever he was attracted to a woman enough to want to do something about it. But he wasn’t a wolf—never had been. The object of his interest was with another man, and that made her off-limits.

But looking never hurt anyone. Neither did a question. He took a long swallow of his Tsingtao beer—he always drank local brews wherever he went—and turned to the bartender who’d been hovering nearby ever since he’d realized whom he was serving.

“Do you know who she is? The woman in the red dress.” He didn’t have to be more specific. Even in a sea of red dresses, hers would stand out for its seeming modesty that only hinted at what was beneath.

The Chinese bartender put down the glass he was polishing needlessly and said, “The class act at the table front and center? That’s Mei-li. I don’t know her last name. She comes in here from time to time. Always with the same guy, a Brit. He drinks single malt scotch straight up. She drinks club soda with a twist of lime.”

Dirk liked that she wasn’t a drinker. He wasn’t much of one himself and didn’t really care to be around those who were. He could only see the back of the silver-haired man she was with, but couldn’t help thinking he was too old for her. Dirk didn’t voice that thought, however. He wasn’t naive. She wouldn’t be the first beautiful young woman to ally herself with a rich older man. But the thought didn’t sit well with him. Somehow she didn’t seem the type, especially since she’d ignored him after that first moment of startled recognition.

He watched her through the set, enjoying both the smooth jazz music and the sight of a woman who reminded him that he was still alive, even though his heart was in the grave. A woman who reminded him that he was a man who more than once had been voted the sexiest man alive by magazines that should have known better. A woman who set his blood racing as it hadn’t since Bree’s death.

Not even the reminder of his late wife dampened his desire for the woman in the red dress—another surprise. Bree had been gone for a long time, but until now he’d never been attracted to a woman enough to want to act on it, despite the lures thrown his way almost from the moment he’d buried his wife. In all that time he’d still been Bree’s husband in thought and deed. He’d been steadfastly faithful to her all the years they’d been married, too, easily resisting the temptations that came his way because of who and what he was—“until death do us part” wasn’t a vow he’d taken lightly.

Tonight was different. Tonight he’d walked into the club and had seen her. And he’d wanted. Craved. And if she’d been alone, he’d have done his damnedest to see if her skin was really as satiny smooth as it looked, if she was that same pale gold tone everywhere.

But she wasn’t alone. And he wasn’t the kind to poach.

* * *

He was watching you, Mei-li Moore thought to herself as her breath caught in her throat and her body responded in ways it hadn’t since...since Sean, her brain insisted. Just the expression in his eyes had made her nipples tighten beneath the red silk she wore. Had made her pulse race.

She recognized him—of course she did. Dirk DeWinter probably couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized. She was tempted to turn around and see if he was still watching her, but then she told herself not to be silly. She was long past the age of crushing on movie stars...even if he had been watching her with that certain something in his eyes.

She kept her gaze steadfastly on the stage, forcing herself to concentrate on the jazz music she loved. That’s the reason you’re here, she reminded herself firmly. But her racing pulse made the blood thrum in her ears so she could barely hear the music for the beat of her heart.

* * *

The set ended with enthusiastic applause from the crowd—the club was packed and the jazz pianist was more than good. The woman in red turned toward the bar for the first time since their eyes had initially met, and Dirk could tell by her expression she was surprised to find him still standing there, still watching her.

He smiled slightly, then raised his beer bottle in a silent toast. Even in the dim light he could see her reaction. I’ll be damned, he thought. As beautiful as she is, she’s honestly flustered by my attention. And that intrigued him even more.

She said something to the man she was sitting with—Dirk couldn’t hear what, and her lips moved too quickly for him to read—then the man turned around for the first time, spotted Dirk and broke out in a huge grin.

Dirk received another shock. He knew the man professionally—famed English producer/director Sir Joshua Moore was the main reason Dirk was here in Hong Kong, shooting the action-adventure flick he was currently working on. Dirk had jumped at the chance to work with Josh, even though it had meant packing up his household, including his toddler twin daughters, and moving to Hong Kong for three months. He’d always wanted to do a project with Josh, but the opportunity had never arisen before.

Isn’t Josh married? he asked himself, remembering what little he knew of the other man’s private life. Dirk tried not to judge, but a pang went through him as he momentarily pondered the unfairness of life. He’d give anything to have his wife alive, would gladly have sacrificed even his stardom to have her back. And here was a man who cheated on the wife he did have.

Josh was enthusiastically signaling for Dirk to come over to their table, but he hesitated. Not only did he not want to intrude—especially after the thoughts he’d been having about Josh’s date for the evening—but he really didn’t want to know any more about their illicit relationship. Professionally he admired Josh tremendously—his body of work was impressive. Dirk didn’t want that admiration tarnished by knowledge of the man’s personal shortcomings.

Eventually, though, Dirk picked his beer bottle up off the bar and made his way through the crowd. The closer he got, the more his body reacted to the woman in red, despite firmly telling it to stand down. No poaching, he reminded himself. Especially not on the preserves of a man he had to work with over the next few months. His body refused to listen. Which meant he was hard and aching by the time he arrived at the table, and he was glad for the dim lights in the club that would make his arousal less obvious.

“Dirk!” Josh said with enthusiasm, rising to his feet and shaking his hand. “I didn’t know you were a jazz lover, or I’d have told you about this place myself. How’d you hear about it?”

“I asked my limo driver,” Dirk explained. “The one you arranged for me, remember? Patrick Chan? He brought me here.” He’d politely kept his attention on the older man during the exchange, but despite himself his gaze soon wandered back to the woman still seated at the small table, watching the interchange between the two men with interest.

“Mei-li,” Josh said, his clipped British accent very obvious, “let me introduce you to one of the best screen actors in the business today—and a true professional—Dirk DeWinter. Dirk, this is my daughter, Mei-li.”

Dirk had already extended his hand, but he shot a sharp glance at Josh at his last words. “Your daughter?” The question slipped out before Dirk could prevent it, and Josh laughed as if this wasn’t the first time someone had misconstrued his relationship with her.

Before Josh could say anything, Mei-li shook Dirk’s hand and said, “Some women might take umbrage at your erroneous assumption, Mr. DeWinter.” Her voice was rich, cultured and bore the same British accent as her father. “I’ll just say if you ever meet my mother you’ll understand why I’m merely amused.” Her dark eyes didn’t hold amusement, however. He wasn’t sure what expression was reflected there. Disdain came swiftly to mind, as if she’d judged him and found him wanting—the same way he’d mistakenly judged her. “My mother is the most beautiful woman in the world in my father’s estimation...and in mine.”

Dirk resisted the urge to raise Mei-li’s hand to his lips. Instead he said, “Then you must take after your mother, Miss Moore.” The compliment rolled glibly off his tongue, but she didn’t react as most women would have.

“M’goy,” she murmured in Cantonese as she withdrew her hand—one of the few Cantonese phrases Dirk knew, which meant “thank you”—but he knew she was only saying it to be polite. She really didn’t appreciate the compliment, and he sensed her inner withdrawal.

Once again Dirk was intrigued. She’s not impressed with her own beauty, and she doesn’t care for men who are, either, he thought. But asking a man not to notice a beautiful and sexy woman was asking the impossible, especially when it came in a classy package. But that didn’t mean a man had to act on it. Circumstances and Bree had turned him into a gentleman, and Dirk wasn’t about to forget those hard-learned lessons. But Mei-li didn’t know it. Didn’t know him.

Despite the signals she was sending out that clearly indicated she wasn’t interested in him and was only being polite to an acquaintance of her father’s, he wanted to know more about her. “Are you in the movie industry, too, Miss Moore?”

She shook her head with vehemence. “One in the business is enough, don’t you think? And who could compete with a talent like his?” she added with a flash of a smile in her father’s direction that indicated nothing but daughterly pride. “No, I’m a pr—”

What she’d been about to say was cut off by a gaggle of young and not-so-young women who came up to their table. “May I have your autograph, Mr. DeWinter?” the first woman gushed, thrusting a pen and a piece of paper at Dirk.

Dirk had an unbreakable rule when it came to autographs. As long as he was standing—which he was now—he would sign. If he was seated at a table, either as someone’s guest or with guests of his own, he would politely decline, feeling it would be rude to the people he was with.

He glanced at Josh and Mei-li. “Excuse me for a moment,” he murmured, stepping a little away from them before scrawling his name on the seemingly endless supply of menus and scraps of paper offered for his autograph. But when one young woman with more gall than sense asked him to sign her bra and began tugging down the neckline of her dress, Dirk shook his head in refusal.

“Sorry,” he told her as gently as he could, even though he was disgusted that any woman would be so lacking in decency as to ask this of him in a public place. “That’s where I draw the line.”

It wasn’t the first time someone had requested something similar from him. Women had even asked him right in front of Bree, as if her feelings at having her husband accosted were unimportant, as if those women held his wife in contempt. As if their blatant sexual advances would be welcomed by a man in love with his wife.

And that reminder of his wife, more than anything else, was what made Dirk decide not to pursue this...whatever it was...with Mei-li any further. Because no matter how attracted he was to her, no matter how much his body wanted to make love to her, it could never be more than physical. It can never be what I shared with Bree, he told himself, believing it.

* * *

The streets of Kowloon, one of two mainland districts of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, or SAR, were nearly deserted when Dirk walked out of the soundstage two weeks later and approached the waiting black Rolls-Royce that would take him back to the Peninsula Hotel at the southern tip of the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood. The double-decker buses that ran constantly, day and night, and the people who normally swarmed the streets were nowhere to be seen on this first day of May. Everyone and everything seemed to be battened down in anticipation of Typhoon De-De.

“Thanks, Patrick,” he told his twenty-four-year-old Chinese driver, Shuài “Patrick” Chan, who held the door for him.

“Hotel, Mr. DeWinter?”

“Dirk,” he reminded his driver.

“Yes, sir,” Patrick said, closing the door firmly behind Dirk and climbing into the driver’s seat.

Dirk smiled to himself as he leaned back against the leather upholstery. He’d yet to break his driver of addressing him formally, and probably never would, any more than he’d been able to break his employees of that habit. His housekeeper, Hannah, insisted on calling him Mr. DeWinter, too, and the others in his household followed her lead. “And yes, the flags are out,” he said, “So I’d better hightail it back to the hotel.”

The flags were out. Not literally—actual flags to warn mariners hadn’t been hoisted in the Hong Kong SAR in years. But Signal Three had been issued early that morning—which meant schools were closed and the government was shut down, as well as the financial markets and a majority of the private sector. And the Hong Kong Observatory had issued a Signal Eight SE warning a half hour ago. That had caused the studio to reluctantly shut down filming for the day and send everyone home until further notice.

Typhoon De-De was bearing down on Hong Kong from the southeast—a month early for the normal typhoon season, which usually didn’t begin until June. All public transportation had ceased, especially the double-decker buses that were so susceptible to being blown over by strong winds. The ubiquitous red taxis were still running, as were a few green ones, but without the buses traffic was sparse, and the Rolls made good time as it headed down Kowloon Park Drive toward Salisbury Road.

A gust of wind out of nowhere slammed into the limo, causing it to swerve and throwing Dirk against the door. “Sorry, sir,” Patrick said, quickly bringing the Rolls back on course.

“Not a problem. Good thing we don’t have far to go.” He thought for a minute. “You live on the island, don’t you?” he asked, referring to Hong Kong Island itself.

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t think you’ll make it home safely today. Not now. You probably should just join me in the hotel—my suite is plenty big enough, and I’m sure Vanessa and the twins won’t mind.”

Vanessa Riordan was the woman who’d been his twin daughters’ nanny since the day they’d been released from the neonatal intensive care unit—or NICU—at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles. Dirk had tried calling Vanessa at the hotel earlier, but there had been no answer and he wondered absently about that now. He pulled out his smartphone and tried calling his suite again, then Vanessa’s cell phone, but still no luck.

Dirk’s eyes met Patrick’s in the rearview mirror, and he could tell his driver was of two minds about accepting the offer to take shelter from the typhoon with Dirk and his family. Patrick lived with his parents, and Dirk figured the young man was worried about them. “Call your parents,” he told Patrick. “I’m sure they’ll tell you the same thing. Better safe than sorry.”

Patrick Chan wasn’t a limo driver by trade—he was an engineering student at the University of Hong Kong, working on his master’s degree. The young man held down two jobs—teaching assistant at the university and driving the Rolls—to put himself through school and help out at home.

Dirk had done something similar, working three jobs to make ends meet—including movie stuntman—to support Bree and himself before he got his big break in the movies. He’d never been afraid of hard work. Neither had Bree. But Dirk had been too proud to ask her to marry him until he’d snagged his first starring role. Until he could support her in the style she deserved. Until his success meant Bree didn’t have to work at the menial jobs she’d taken in order to stay at his side through thick and thin as he chased his dream of movie stardom...and long before that.

Pain stabbed through him as it always did at the thought of Bree. He could never forget that, because God was punishing him for something that had happened aeons ago. Bree had died. And their daughters had nearly died, too. Only a miracle wrought by the doctors and nurses in the Cedars Sinai NICU had kept their premature twins alive.

Dirk’s phone sounded the tune he reserved for his closest friends, and when he swiped a finger over the touchpad and saw who the call was from, he smiled and answered. “To what do I owe the honor of this call, Your Majesty?”

The voice of Queen Juliana of Zakhar sounded in his ear, prefaced by a very unqueenly snort. “Cut that out,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m still Juliana to you?”

“Ahhh, but what would your husband, the king, say to that?” he teased gently.

They bantered back and forth for a couple of minutes, then Juliana said, “I hear there’s a typhoon expected to hit Hong Kong this evening, and I remembered you mentioned you were filming there. Are you and the girls in a safe place? And Vanessa and Hannah, too, of course,” she added, referring to the women who had habitually accompanied Dirk on location ever since the twins were born.

“Hannah couldn’t make the trip, after all,” he explained now. “She fell down the stairs and broke her leg three days before we were supposed to leave for Hong Kong.”

“Oh, no!” Dirk knew Juliana’s concern was genuine. Hannah had been his housekeeper for years, and Juliana had met her every time she’d visited the DeWinters during their years-long friendship in Hollywood. “Is she going to be okay?”

“Yeah. She’s recuperating in a nursing home. But Linden and Laurel ask about her several times a day. And we call her every night.” Hannah, a longtime widow with no children of her own, had taken on the role of surrogate grandmother for the twins in addition to her housekeeping duties, something for which Dirk was supremely grateful. His daughters adored Hannah—whom they called Nana—and she adored them.

“Email me the address and phone number of the nursing home, please,” Juliana asked. “I’ll send her flowers and a get-well card.”

“Will do. And don’t worry about us, Juliana. We’ll be fine. Thanks for calling, though.”

“Kiss your daughters for me.” That was something Juliana said every time they talked, another thing that was genuinely meant—Juliana had her own child now, but was the twins’ godmother and loved them deeply. This time, however, she hesitated, then added in a voice tinged with pain, “I adore the pictures of them you’ve sent me, but every day they look more and more like Bree.”

At first Dirk’s throat closed with emotion at the reminder of his wife, who’d been Juliana’s best friend before she died, but eventually he managed, “Yeah, they do.”

Dirk disconnected just as Patrick pulled in at the hotel entrance. He drove past the fountain that had already been turned off, and would have dropped Dirk at the front door, but Dirk refused. “Just find a place to park,” he told his driver. “Call your parents, but I know what they’ll say. Then we’ll go up together.”

It only took a minute for Patrick to receive his parents’ blessing to shelter at the Peninsula Hotel. More than a blessing, actually, Dirk thought with an inward smile as he heard Patrick’s side of the phone conversation. More like a parental command. But he didn’t say anything. He admired the old-fashioned deference the younger generation showed the older in Hong Kong. Once upon a time that had been common in the United States, too, but not anymore.

The two men crossed the lobby, heading for the elevators, and Dirk was distracted for a moment by the Peninsula Hotel’s typhoon preparations. The beautiful arched picture windows had already been boarded up, and sandbags were being stacked along one wall, merely as a precaution. The hotel wasn’t that far from Victoria Harbour, and a strong typhoon-induced surge could bring the ocean to the hotel’s front door.

“That reminds me,” Dirk told Patrick as he rang for the elevator, “we’d better find out what we need to do to make the suite’s windows safe from the typhoon, if the hotel staff hasn’t already done so. And we want to make sure we have plenty of food and drinking water in the suite—if we lose electricity, there’s no way I want to hike down all those floors and back up again.”

They rode up in the elevator to the palatial Peninsula Suite on the twenty-sixth floor, with connecting bedrooms for the twins and their nanny. Dirk would have been just as happy in something less grand, but the movie studio was footing the bill for the suite, and he’d never stayed here when Bree had been alive—an important factor in his decision to accept the accommodations. The private gym, cinematic screening room and baby grand piano had also been contributing factors, not to mention the isolation. Before he’d become a father himself, Dirk had wondered why parents couldn’t do a better job keeping their children from causing disturbances. Now he knew how nearly impossible that was, but he still didn’t want to impose his daughters’ totally to-be-expected behavior on the hotel’s other guests if he could help it.