Unwrapping the Playboy / The Playboy's Gift: Unwrapping the Playboy

But she had.

Lilli had just disappeared, leaving a note on his desk. The note had fallen on the floor between the wastepaper basket and his desk. He hadn’t found it until, lost in a frenzy of frustration and helpless anger, he’d kicked the wastepaper basket aside. Falling over, it had spilled its contents, but it was then that he’d seen the small white note card with two words in her handwriting. Two words that twisted a knife right into his chest.

“I’m sorry.” That was all she’d written. Just, “I’m sorry.” And that was supposed to explain her departure and compel him to go on living his life. A life that no longer contained her.

Sitting opposite Lilli now in his dining room, a room he rarely used except when he needed to spread out a massive collection of legal papers, it all came back to him with the force of a detonating bomb. Everything he’d felt, everything he’d gone through with her and then, without her. The good, the bad and, finally, the anger. He’d been a fool because he’d loved her and would have done anything for her. She hadn’t cared enough to explain things face-to-face.

But now, after all these years, he had his answer. He knew why she’d left.

Even so, he wanted to ask her why she’d tossed him aside like some kind of used tissue, without the courtesy of an explanation.

Without a chance to fight for her and prove he was the better man.

The words vibrated on his lips. But after all this time, he had his answer. It was cruelly obvious. Lilli had abandoned him for Erik Dalton, the only heir to an incredible fortune that he had done nothing to deserve. The rumor was that he had never been turned down, especially not by a woman. A morally bankrupt playboy who was the very poster child for the stereotypical rich kid with a heart of lead, Erik Dalton had gotten every woman he had ever set his sights on.

All he had to do was crook his finger and women fell from the sky, eager for his attention, eager to have some of his generosity touch their lives. He went through money as if it was of no consequence to him. There was always more.

Was that it? Kullen wondered now. Had Lilli been blinded and won over by the allure of materialistic goods? He’d always seen her as pure and unfazed by material wealth. It was obvious now that he’d been blinded, too. Blinded by his feelings.

Had there been a price tag on her affections after all?

The Lilli McCall he’d loved so fiercely had been an honorable woman. But then, the Lilli he’d loved would have never abruptly left him with a marriage proposal still warm on his lips.

“Why are you fighting this?” he asked her quietly, without preamble.

Polishing off her third slice of pizza and finally feeling full, Lilli looked up at him sharply. The question had come out of the blue and she didn’t know what he was referring to. The first thing that occurred to her by “this” was that the feelings were still there, carefully encased in Bubble Wrap and stored away. Feelings that belonged exclusively to him.

So Lilli waited for him to elaborate and prayed that she could answer him without raking over old scars.

“I could try to broker an arrangement between you and Elizabeth Dalton for joint custody. Lay down a few ground rules—”

Lilli continued staring at him, growing more stunned. Why was he saying this? Had that dreadful woman’s lawyers gotten to him, bought him off? She hadn’t thought that would be possible, but now she wasn’t so sure.

Wasn’t there anyplace left for her to turn to?

“No,” Lilli said firmly before he could continue, then repeated the word in a louder voice. “No!”

“Heard you the first time,” Kullen assured her matter-of-factly. And he grew serious, leaning over the table. Leaning closer to her. His eyes pinned her down. “Now, tell me why.”

Her eyes darted along his face, as if trying to fathom the secret behind Kullen’s words. Finally, she asked, “Why what?”

“Why you’re so against this when obviously, at one point, you must have been all for it. To hitch your star to the Dalton fortune.” She opened her mouth to speak but he talked louder and faster. The cynicism was impossible to miss. “I mean, the lure of all that money, the comfort it could bring—hard to imagine turning your back on all that. It had to be a whole different world for you. For anyone. The kind of money the Daltons have is the stuff that fairy tales are made of.”

Oh, God.

She pressed her hand against her abdomen, certain she was going to be sick. “They got to you, didn’t they?”

Kullen’s dark blue eyes were cold. Flat. And accusing. “Not to me.”

There was an allegation in his voice, and it didn’t take much for her to get his drift. She began to protest. “But I don’t—”

He cut her short, not wanting her to lie. “Oh, come on, Lilli. I’m your lawyer. If I’m going to be of any use to you, you have to level with me,” he insisted sharply. Angrily. “Tell me everything.” His mouth curved cynically. “Why aren’t you still part of the Dalton’s happy little family?”

How could he say that to her? Did he think she was some kind of gold digger? The one person, aside from her mother, who she thought knew her, accused her of being this awful person. It hurt more than she thought possible.

Lilli pushed her chair away from the table and stood up. She had to get out of here. “I’m sorry, coming to you was a mistake.” She picked up her manila envelope. He wouldn’t be needing them anymore. “This has been a waste of time for both of us—”

Kullen told himself that he should just let her walk out. It was in his best interest. Another man would have sat back and watched this little drama unfold, feeling a sense of vindication. Payback, as the old saying went, was a bitch. And she had earned her payback.

But he wasn’t another man. For better or for worse, he was who and what he was: The man who had once loved Lilli McCall with his entire heart and soul. Even now, he couldn’t avenge himself by leaving her to twist in the wind. She had come to him looking for help.

Kullen was on his feet, rounding the table and blocking her exit from the room. “I need the truth from you, Lilli. I need to know why someone like you would have gotten mixed up with someone like Erik Dalton in the first place. He had a reputation as the biggest womanizer around. I thought you were different—”

“I was,” she insisted. Which was why she was so haunted by what had happened. Why it had been so hard for her to get past it in the first place.

His eyes narrowed as he looked right into her. Aware that he was still holding her in place, Kullen dropped his hands from her shoulders. “Convince me.”

For a long moment, she said nothing and he thought she would walk out after all. But then she sighed as she pressed her lips together. He wanted to shake her, to shout at her and demand to know why she’d slept with a man like Erik Dalton when he’d had to work so hard to get her to trust him. To get her not to freeze up when he touched her.

That look in her eyes was back. That look that echoed an unfathomable sadness.

Kullen wanted to hold her more than anything in the world.

But he didn’t.

His hands remained at his sides. He waited for the explanation he felt he had coming to him.

There was a slight tremor in her voice as she said, “I suppose I have this coming.”

“We’ll talk about that later. Answer my question, Lilli.”

Every word ached. “I didn’t leave because I wanted to, Kullen.”

“Leave who?” he demanded. Was she talking about the father of her baby? Had he pushed her away when she told him she was pregnant? And why did that thought hold not the slightest bit of satisfaction for him? She’d left him and Erik had left her. That was supposed to be poetic justice. So why wasn’t it? “Leave Erik?”

She stared at him. “No, leave you.”

“Then why did you?”

“Because I had to.” Her voice throbbed with anguish. “I didn’t want to see your anger or your pity.” She pressed her lips together again, trying not to cry. “I couldn’t deal with that.”

“You’re going to have to be a little clearer than that, Lilli.” She looked as if she wanted to flee, he thought. He knew he couldn’t hold her against her will, but nonetheless, the idea was tempting. More than anything, he wanted her to make him understand why things had turned out the way they had.

Every word cost her. She didn’t want to look back into the past, into the abyss of mistakes that had been made. “I didn’t leave you because I was going to Erik. I left you because of Erik.”

“Clearer,” he instructed again, stone-faced.

The breath Lilli let out was shaky. “I was pregnant.”

Kullen’s expression hardened. Every time he thought of Lilli with that worthless bastard … when their own relationship hadn’t gone beyond heated kisses, at her request, a request he’d respected ….

“We’ve already established that,” he said.

She didn’t know how to tell him. She’d blocked all thoughts, all memory of events for so long. “The day you asked me to marry you was the best and the worst day of my life.”

The word worst jumped up at him, lit in glaring neon lights. “Nice to know I’ve still got it,” he said sarcastically.

She pushed on, knowing that she had to make him understand. She was afraid that he would stand by his word and not help her if she didn’t tell him everything. But, oh, it was so hard.

“It was the best day because I found someone good, someone who could make me forget. Someone I loved.” He looked at her sharply. She pushed on. “And the worst day because I found out I was pregnant.”

As her words pierced his heart, he came to the only conclusion he could. “You mean you were seeing Erik Dalton while we—”

“No,” she retorted. “Erik happened before I met you and there was no ‘seeing’ involved, no dating, if that’s what you mean.”

Lilli stopped, momentarily too emotional to continue because she was reliving the horrible incident that had all but destroyed her life and turned her entire world upside down.

She looked as if she was going to bolt.

Not until you finish telling me. Kullen gently put his hands on her shoulders. He could literally feel her anguish, could sense her being torn between telling him and keeping silent.

“Tell me,” he urged quietly.

The war within her was reflected in her eyes. And then, she squared her shoulders, as if she were about to go into battle.

When she finally spoke, her voice was firm, quiet. Almost oddly removed.

“My first year in law school, I forced myself to accept an invitation to a frat party. I was so terribly shy and I knew I had to make an effort to get out of my shell.” A sad smile played along her lips. “I mean, who wants a painfully shy lawyer, right? There were a lot of people at the party….” Her voice trailed off.

“Including Erik?” he prodded.

She nodded. “Erik was there. He seemed nice, attentive.” Every word took effort to say. “Almost sweet.” A rueful sound accompanied the description. “Somewhere in the middle of the evening, he suggested that we go somewhere more private, get a ‘real’ drink.” She stopped.

“And you went with him?” He’d always pictured her being innocent, but never naive.

Lilli raised her chin defiantly. “No, I didn’t. I told him I had to get back home because I had a paper I needed to finish for Monday. He told me he could get a paper on any topic under the sun, and that shouldn’t interrupt the good time we were having.”

She shrugged helplessly, wishing she could change the rest of the narrative. Wishing that it had never happened. But that would mean she’d have to wish away Jonathan and she could never do that.

“I told him I wouldn’t feel right about that. That I needed to earn my grade. He laughed and said I was a rare person. I left the party and went home. None of the other girls I lived with were there.” She paused for a moment, taking a shaky breath. “He followed me. When the doorbell rang, I thought one of my roommates had forgotten her key. But it was Erik. He pushed his way in….” Her voice broke.

The horror of the situation suddenly hit Kullen with the force of an anvil dropping on his head. He called himself seven kinds of a jackass. Here he’d been feeling sorry for himself for loving her, and all along she’d been a victim.

“He raped you?” Kullen asked, struggling to contain his outrage.

She drew her lips together in a thin line, then nodded.

He stared at her, stunned. “Why didn’t you report him to the police?”

“Because I was ashamed.” It was so hard not to cry. Talking had sharpened all the edges of the incident. She could feel them all pricking her flesh again. “It would have been just my word against his. People saw him at the party talking to me. Walking me out to my car. They’d think that the sex was consensual and that I cried rape after the fact because he wouldn’t allow himself to be blackmailed.”

It seemed too fantastic for words, but Kullen was acutely aware of the dead man’s reputation. “Is that what he said?”

She nodded, avoiding his eyes. “He told me it was my fault. That I’d asked for it and that I couldn’t expect a guy to shut down after I ‘got his engine going.’” She drew in another shaky breath. “All I wanted to do was forget that it ever happened.” She smiled at Kullen and it all but broke his heart. “You almost made me forget. And then I found out I was pregnant—”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He would have taken care of her—after he’d beaten that scum to a pulp.

“Because I didn’t want you to look at me with disgust, or pity—”

“So letting me think that something was wrong, that you’d rather run away and disappear than marry me, was better?” he demanded. She made no answer. “Didn’t you know me any better than that?”

She wasn’t going to cry. Please, God, don’t let me cry. “At that point, I didn’t know anything except that what I had once hoped for was now completely out of reach. I had a child on the way. A child I didn’t want.”

“There were options,” he told her quietly. Not options that he would have chosen for her, but they were hers to reject, not his.

She shook her head. “Not for me.”

“Then adoption,” he suggested.

Lilli shook her head. “My mistake, my burden,” she said firmly.

Her reasoning frustrated him. His anger against the dead man bubbled up within him and he had nowhere to vent it. His temper flared and it was a struggle to keep it under wraps. “He raped you, you didn’t rape him. How the hell was any of this your mistake?” he asked.

She’d told him what he needed to know. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

She waved away his question. “That’s all in the past. And in one of those ironic twists of fate, Jonathan is the best thing that ever happened to me.” Pausing, she looked at him, then softly amended, “Well, one of the best.”

She could sense that he wanted to ask more questions. Lilli looked down at her hands. She’d just stripped herself naked and felt utterly vulnerable.

“Satisfied?” she asked in a whisper.

Chapter Seven

Sympathy, guilt and anger suddenly warred within Kullen.

The sympathy was self-explanatory. The guilt was because he’d had to force her to relive the ordeal, and the anger was directed against the narcissistic bastard who’d assaulted Lilli. And ultimately robbed them of a life they could have had together.

“No, I’m not,” he told her. “I won’t be satisfied until I can beat Erik Dalton within an inch of his life.”

“But he’s dead.”

“Hence, my dilemma,” Kullen acknowledged with a straight face.

It took her a second to realize he was kidding. Lilli laughed softly. “You always did know how to make me smile.”

“We do what we can,” he quipped with affection.

He kept it light. What he really wanted to say was that she should have come to him with this the moment she knew she was pregnant. It pained him to think of her facing something so huge on her own. He would have been there for her every step of the way if only he’d known. If only she’d trusted him to stand by her and not judge her.

But for now he kept the question to himself. He could see that Lilli just wanted to table the subject. He had no choice but to abide by her obvious wishes.

In his mind, Kullen promised himself that they would come back to this discussion in the near future. Lilli needed to fully purge herself of this incident. She’d taken the first important steps. The rest would come.

“Do you think she can do it?” Lilli asked, trying her best to disguise the tremor in her voice. “Do you think that Mrs. Dalton will be able to take Jonathan away from me?”

He chose his words carefully, his eyes never leaving hers. “I think Elizabeth Dalton’s going to do her damnedest to try,” he told her, “but no, I don’t think she’s going to take your son away from you.”

Her hand covered his, creating the bond that she so desperately needed. “Promise?”

Logically, Kullen knew he couldn’t guarantee anything. It was no secret that judges were a whimsical breed. If he and Lilli drew the wrong judge for the case, one who was either impressed by Elizabeth Dalton or whose appointment had somehow been facilitated by her pull or covert financial backing, then they were in for a hard fight—and the daunting possibility of an initial ruling against them.

But he knew that Lilli wasn’t asking him for a logical answer, or the truth when it came down to that. She was asking him for an answer that she could hang on to with both hands. An answer that told her everything would be all right. What she needed most of all was hope.

After all she’d been through, he figured it was the least he could do. So he smiled at her and said the one word she wanted to hear. “Promise.”

The sigh that escaped her lips was one of relief and she mirrored his smile. But her expression told him she knew what he was doing and why. She appeared grateful that, for her sake, he was playing the game. There was time enough to deal with reality and all its hoary ramifications later.

“Thank you,” she told him with feeling. “And now, I’d better get back and tell my mother she’s free to go home if she wants to. Although half the time I suspect she likes sticking around Jonathan and me. Now that my dad’s gone, we’re all the family she has.”

It occurred to him that he hadn’t given her condolences where they were due. “I’m sorry to hear about your dad.”

“Yeah, me, too.” Her father had died shortly after Jonathan was born. Because she’d been in the midst of dealing with her own issues, she hadn’t known of his sudden illness until a week before he passed away. She blamed herself for that, too, and still grieved that her father never got to see his grandson.

Wanting to change the subject, Kullen nodded toward the pizza box. There was still a little less than half left.

“Why don’t you take some of this with you for Jonathan?” he suggested. He saw that she was about to demur—he could still read so much of her body language. Funny how some things never left you, he thought. “I don’t know of any seven-year-old boy alive who doesn’t like cold pizza.” With that, he went to the kitchen to get a container for her.

Lilli followed him. “Don’t you want it?”

“I’ve got more than enough,” he assured her. “Just in case you didn’t notice, you still eat like a bird on a diet.”

Kullen opened an overhead cupboard and she saw a collection of plastic containers of all sizes and shapes crowded together. She couldn’t help wondering if they would all wind up raining down if he attempted to take one out.

“New hobby of yours?” she asked, nodding toward the containers.

He laughed. “My mother thinks I’m going to starve to death. She makes it a habit of dropping off what she calls leftovers from her catering business about once every week or so. I keep meaning to give these back to her.”

Carefully extracting a rectangular container and its lid, he managed not to upset the rest of the pyramid. Apparently, Lilli mused, the man had added magic tricks to his skills since she’d last seen him. She followed him back to the dining room.

Opening the container, Kullen put two slices of pizza into it. He saw a quizzical look enter her eyes. “One for your mother, in case she’s built up an appetite running after your son.”

Her smile widened. “She doesn’t chase him around. Jonathan is extremely well behaved. Not an ounce of trouble, ever.” She was aware of the note of pride in her voice.

“Like his mother,” Kullen commented. Taking the container with him, he walked her to the door, then handed it to her just as he opened the door for her.

She turned in the doorway and looked up at him. “Thank you again,” she said with feeling. “For everything.”

He knew she meant for understanding and for not pushing the matter. What good would it have done to verbally pin her against the wall? Berating her would have made neither one of them feel any better.

Leaning over, he brushed his lips ever so lightly against her forehead. It was what a big brother might have done with a sister. Though he longed to really kiss her, he had a feeling that it would really spook her.

Just like old times, Kullen couldn’t help thinking. After all these years, this had the familiar feeling of square one. “It’s included in my fee,” he told her glibly.

The fee. She knew his services didn’t come cheaply and she was not about to impose on him because of their past friendship. He’d mentioned taking her on pro bono but that wasn’t what she wanted. She paid her own way, no matter how long it took.

“About that—”

He knew without asking that she didn’t have the kind of money this case would cost. He would have to figure something out. If push came to shove, he could cover the expenses out of his own pocket. Barring that, he could possibly do a little string pulling if need be to satisfy the senior partners. And there was always pro bono to fall back on as a last resort. He didn’t want her to have to worry about money on top of everything else.

“We’ll work it out,” he promised her, cavalierly dismissing the subject.

The look of gratitude in her eyes had no price tag. “You’re a godsend.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” he cracked. “A gift from God.”

Impulsively, she kissed him on the cheek and then hurried away to her car, parked at the curb right in front of his house. He stood in the doorway, watching her as she unlocked the door on the driver’s side. She waved at him just before she got in.

Waving back, Kullen followed her with his eyes until she’d driven down the block and turned the corner, disappearing out of sight.

He stood there a little while longer. Absently, his fingers traced the very real imprint of her lips against his cheek. The phrase about not being able to go home again echoed in his head.

Leaning against the doorjamb, Kullen took a deep breath and straightened up. He was going to regret this, he thought. No matter how altruistic his motives might be, he was opening himself up for a world of hurt and he knew it.

Turning on his heel, he went inside and closed the front door. Wishing he could close off everything else just as easily.

“So you were serious this afternoon? About taking on a case as a favor for an old flame?”

He’d stepped outside for a moment to throw what was now an empty pizza box into his recycle bin. When he came back inside, it was to the insistent sound of a ringing phone. Kullen managed to snatch up the receiver just as he heard his answering machine start to pick up. His intervention terminated the action.

Kate was on the other end of the line. She certainly didn’t waste any time, he thought.

Suddenly thirsty, he caught himself wishing for a beer. With the receiver nestled against his shoulder and his neck, he opened the refrigerator. He had a hunch that no matter how much he stared into the interior, a bottle or can of beer would not materialize.