Not For Sale by Sandra Marton Page A

back to the store. This time, at least, he knew the correct aisle but the wait to pay was just as long.
    He’d been tempted to ask Caroline if the cat would like to make a stop at Zabar’s for smoked salmon, but he had the uneasy feeling she might have said yes.
    Now, a handful of hours later, he stood at the wall of glass in his living room, watching the lights come on in Central Park and wondering how he, a man who had set out to confront a woman who had lied to him, could have ended up in this situation.
    His orderly, well-planned life was in total disarray. How else to describe it?
    There was a cat peeing, or worse, in his bathroom. A dead plant sucking up oxygen in his guest suite. The second litter pan was also there, which explained why Caroline had ordered him to purchase two.
    I’d confine Oliver to my rooms with me, she’d said, but he’s accustomed to the streets. He might not take well to confinement behind a closed door.
    Evidently not.
    There was also a pair of Mikasa stoneware soup bowls on the Italian tile kitchen floor, one filled with the contents of a can of Daintee Deelites—which, it turned out, looked like tuna and smelled like nothing Lucas ever wanted to smell again—and the other filled with water.
    “Soup bowls?” Lucas had said, and Caroline had given him a look he was coming to know and said yes, soup bowls, because he had neglected to buy dishes for Oliver.
    He’d opened his mouth to tell her she had neglected to request them, but what was the point? Then she’d stroked her hand slowly, slowly down the cat’s back but the cat had ignored her in favor of burying its face in the bowl of Daintee Deelites, and Lucas had thought what a damned fool the animal was, choosing food over the soft touch of Caroline’s hand.
    That was when she’d asked him where she was to stay.
    He’d looked at the cat, looked at her and come within a heartbeat of saying,
Where do you think you’re going to stay? In my bed, damnit, and get yourself there right now
.
    But he hadn’t. Why would he? The last place he’d ever want her again was in his bed.
    She was a liar and a cheat. She was more than that, and just because she lived on the edge of poverty, just because she’d taken in a dying plant and a starving cat when dozens, maybe hundreds of New Yorkers had walked by and probably never even noticed the animal, didn’t change a thing.
    It couldn’t.
    She was what she was, who she was, and he could never accept that. Not that he had to, any more than he had to like the fact that she was here, plant, cat and all, messing up his life.
    Lucas turned from the window, walked mindlessly through the living room, turning on lamps and chandeliers until the huge space seemed to blaze with man-made fire. Then he stood still, tilted back his head and stared at the ceiling.
    “Hell,” he muttered, and he went into his study, closed the door and sank into a leather armchair.
    In the dark.
    The truth was—and truth mattered, if he was going to be such a damned stickler about honesty—the truth was that he was the only one to blame for this mess.
    Caroline was in his life because he’d hired her to play a part. She was in his home because he’d insisted on it. What kind of man would leave a woman, any woman, in a place with doors that you couldn’t lock and an intruder who might decide to pay another visit?
    Sure, he’d gone to her apartment to confront her but could he have done that after she’d flown into his arms, trembling, saying his name as if it were all that could keep her safe?
    Lucas rose to his feet, tucked his hands into his trouser pockets and paced the room.
    He had done the right thing. The only thing. But he had his feet on the ground. He wasn’t going to get drawn in any deeper. He knew exactly how to handle things when life threatened to turn you inside out. Take a logical approach. Determine the problem, find the solution.
    He was good at that.
    Better than good.
    It was why he had come so