Ladies' Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

headed?”
    “Hopefully to dinner with you.”
    Ellen looked into Sam’s Paul Newman–blue eyes and made herself face the awful truth. Now that she knew he wasn’t T. S. Harrison, and now that she knew he was a police detective and not some weirdo who hung around airport newsstands, she had to admit that she truly liked him. He was funny and smart and incredibly attractive. She
wanted
to have dinner with him. She
wanted
to spend an evening with the dazzle of that charisma focused on her. She wanted to be just a little bit wild. She wanted to take this lighthearted flirtation one teeny little baby-step further.
    Nothing heavy. Nothing too intense. Just dinner.
    She wanted to.
    And she was going to.
    So what if he was too young. Age was a state of mind, anyway, wasn’t it? Look at Alma. Eighty-nine and going strong.
    Still looking into Sam’s eyes, Ellen raised her voice enough to be picked up by the speakerphone. “Head for the West Side, please, Ron,” she said. “We’d like to stop at the Carnegie Deli and pick something up for dinner. And then, if it’s all right with you, we’d like the dollar tour of the city.”
    “It would be my pleasure,” Ron said and signed off.
    Sam smiled, a sweet, crooked, utterly charming smile. “Thank you.”
    Ellen felt herself blush as she let herself be thoroughly charmed. “Well, we both do have to eat and…”
    Sam was looking around the limo as if seeing the luxurious interior for the first time. “Nice car. I don’t suppose the TV has cable?”
    Ellen picked up the telephone. “Hello, Ron? Sam just made the old ‘Does the limo get cable’ joke. How many does that make it? Seven thousand, six hundred and fifty-two times in the past three years that you’ve had this job? Shall we push him out of the car now, or wait until we’re going through the tunnel?”
    “Very funny.” Sam took the phone out of her hand, listened to make sure Ron wasn’t really on the other end, and hung it up. Then he just sat there smiling at her.
    Now what?
    Ellen nervously searched for something,
any
thing to talk about. “So…how did you meet T. S. Harrison?”
    “I refused to steal his 1969 Mets World Series autographed baseball.”
    “You
what?
”
    He grinned. “We were both in fifth grade. Angelo Giglione and Marty Keller—they were seventh graders, and everyone was scared to death of them—they told me that they were going to beat the crap out of me unless I finagled an invitation to Toby Harrison’s house and stole this baseball he had that all the Mets on the ’69 team had signed.”
    “
Toby
Harrison?”
    “Tobias Shavar Harrison. He decided in ninth grade to do the initial thing—it was around the time he grew a foot and a half taller and made the basketball team. But back in fifth grade he was fat Toby H., the weird science nerd.”
    Ellen tried not to laugh. “I love the way you talk about your best friend.”
    “It’s the truth. T.S. would be the first to admit it.”
    “So, what happened?”
    “So, Marty and Angelo knew Toby was my science partner, and that he’d have to invite me over to his house to get the project done. I think we were building a volcano. Toby was in charge of making diagrams of tectonic plates, and I was in charge of making the volcano—which was easy, since I’d made a model volcano in the fourth grade and it was still out in my garage. We were both in charge of creating the goo that was supposed to ooze down the sides.”
    Ellen found herself hanging on to Sam’s every word, like some teenager struck with puppy love. She tried to convince herself that she was interested in the story he was telling rather than the slightly rough texture of his voice and the way his graceful mouth moved when he spoke. It didn’t take much imagination to picture that mouth moving against her lips, her neck, her…
    She forced herself to look away from him, forced herself to pay attention to his story.
    “So he invited me over,” Sam continued,