Hero in Disguise (Reed Sisters: Holding out for a Hero 1)

Derek chuckled and followed her, placing a warm palm on her back as they left her apartment. Summer tried very hard to ignore it. She failed completely.

3

DEREK TOOK HER to a restaurant in a nearby luxury hotel—a far cry from the quick Egg McMuffin that she sometimes picked up on the way to work, if she ate breakfast at all. He allowed her to make a good start on her generous meal before asking about his sister. “Why did she leave for Los Angeles at such an odd hour? And what is she doing there?”

“It was an impulsive trip,” Summer explained. “Do you remember seeing Cody Pierce at the party last night? Curly red hair, plaid sport coat?”

He frowned, remembering. “Yes.”

“He has aspirations of becoming a stand-up comic. Actually he’s a systems analyst, but he’s been performing at some local improv clubs, which led to a chance to perform at The Comedy Store in L.A. tonight. He mentioned last night that he was really nervous, and he asked Connie to go along for moral support. She accepted, threw some things in an overnight bag, and they left at midnight. For luck.”

“For luck?” Derek repeated, looking confused.

“That’s what they said,” Summer answered cheerfully, reaching for her coffee. “Don’t you ever do anything impulsive, Derek? Just for the fun of it?”

“Not very often,” he answered flatly.

She nodded as if in perfect understanding. “I suppose it would be too dangerous in your former line of work.”

His brows drew sharply downward. “What?”

Her eyes wide and guileless, she replied, “Why, the spy business, of course. You weren’t just teasing me about that, were you, Derek?”

“Oh, that.” He drained his coffee cup. “What do you think?” he asked smoothly, setting his cup back on the table and eyeing her enigmatically. “Was I teasing you?”

She smiled. “I don’t think you quite know how to tease, Derek.” He did, of course. He’d teased her delightfully about having been a spy. Was that when she’d started to like him so much? Or had it been from the moment she’d set eyes on him?

“Maybe you should teach me,” he suggested smoothly. “You seem to be an expert at it.”

She only shrugged and smiled weakly, still wrestling with her own mental questions.

A waitress approached quietly to refill Derek’s cup. Derek waited until the woman had left before asking, “Is Connie dating this Pierce guy?”

“She’s been out with him a couple of times. She’s not dating anyone seriously.”

Derek looked grim as he pushed away his well-cleaned breakfast plate. “One of our cousins told me that Connie’s been sleeping with anything in pants since her divorce. Is that true?”

Summer dropped her fork. “What a tacky thing to ask me! As if I’d tell you the intimate details of my best friend’s love life. It must have been Barbara who made that catty remark to you. Connie’s told me her cousin Barbara is a self-righteous snob.”

Derek looked pained. “Barbara is a very respectable woman who has raised two exceptionally well-behaved daughters. She has been genuinely concerned about Connie and was hoping I could exert my influence over my sister.”

“Connie doesn’t need your influence, Derek,” Summer informed him flatly. “She’s doing just fine. When you showed up this morning to take her to breakfast, I thought you were finally going to try to be her friend. But if you were only going to start lecturing her again, I’m glad she’s out of town.”

“I wasn’t going to lecture her,” he snapped irritably. “I was going to tell her I was sorry about the way we parted last night. Still, she needs someone to make her see that she’s wasting her life: a dead-end job, endless parties, kooky friends and a dump of an apartment furnished with junk the Salvation Army would probably reject. What kind of life is that for an attractive young woman with Connie’s intelligence?”

“I’m trying very hard not to take your incredibly arrogant and condescending remarks as a personal insult,” Summer said, holding on to her temper with an effort. Strange, she fumed, she didn’t usually have a problem with her temper. She usually found a reason to laugh when others got angry. But she could find very little humor in Derek Anderson’s reference to Connie’s “wasted life.” Instead, she felt vaguely hurt and disappointed, as if he’d been talking about her rather than Connie. Had she been so foolish as to begin to hope that her attraction to Derek might lead to something more? If so, his words had shown her how silly that expectation had been. Summer had lived with disapproval for most of her life; she had no intention of getting involved with any man who could not accept her—or her friends—just as they were.

“If you’ll remember, I work at the same dead-end job, I go to the same endless parties, I have the same kooky friends and I live in the same dump of an apartment furnished with the same Salvation Army rejects. And I’m perfectly content, thank you—even though I don’t have an older, wiser brother to exert his influence on me. Thank God.”

“I wasn’t trying to criticize you, Summer,” he said hastily, visibly uncomfortable. “What you do is your business. I just hate to see Connie, well—”

“You’re only going to make it worse, Derek, so I think you’d better drop it,” Summer told him, trying to sound cross though her irrepressible sense of humor was already diluting her unaccustomed anger, as it had so many times in the past. She rested her elbows on the polished tabletop and tapped her fingertips against her cheek, drawing on that comfortable humor. “Unless you want me to retaliate by telling you what I think of your life?”

“You don’t know anything about the way I live,” he informed her. “You’ve done nothing but poke fun at me and look down your up-tilted little nose at me since we met last night, simply because I wear conservative clothes and think there should be more to life than parties and games.”

“And Connie and I think that life is short, so we should make every effort to enjoy it,” Summer retorted, thinking of how easily her own life could have ended in that accident five years ago. How a shattered knee and equally shattered dreams could have led to a life of bitterness had she not resolved then to hang on to her humor and her sense of fun, no matter what else might befall her.

“Are you telling me that you enjoy the job you’re in now?” Derek asked skeptically.