LUKE CURSED softly and violently.

She must have seen the show. But how could she have? She’d been at school. Had someone who’d seen them together watched the show? Had she stumbled on it on the internet? That must be it. He was deep in it now, and he had a feeling a few roses weren’t going to smooth his way.

His erection drooped, tacitly acknowledging it wasn’t going to be seeing much action tonight.

Luke wiped a prickle of sweat from his forehead, fighting down panic.

She was mad. Fair enough. She deserved to be. He should have told her he’d written the damn book, and he hadn’t. But he bet whatever busybody had got on the hotline to tell her that her loverboy was on television promoting his book had neglected to tell Shari that he’d announced his love for her to all of America. Didn’t that count for something?

Determined to set her straight, he knocked softly on the door.

Nothing.

He knocked louder.

Nothing.

He banged his fist until it was numb and he was getting pins and needles up his arm.

Still nothing.

Dread was turning to irritation. Couldn’t she at least hear him out?

He put his mouth to the door and yelled, “Shari!”

A door opened, all right, but it wasn’t hers. Down the hall, Mr. Forrester, nosy old busybody, poked his head out into the hallway. “What is all this racket? At this time of night?”

Luke glanced at his watch. It wasn’t even eight o’clock.

“Have you seen Shari?”

The old man’s eyes narrowed, but it wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen them together every day. “She’s probably in bed. Came home early with a cold.”

So that’s how she’d known.

Still, not all the cold medicines in the world would make her sleep this soundly.

He did his best to look like an anxious suitor. Hell, it wasn’t difficult. That’s what he was. “I only want to give her these.” He flashed the roses at the busybody. “And make her some tea.”

“Humph. Wish somebody wanted to make me tea,” said the old man, shutting the door with a snap.

“Shari!” he yelled again, as loud as he could, banging on the door once more. “Open up or I’ll—” What he’d planned to threaten if she didn’t open up remained a mystery, since the door did open. To the full three inches allowed by the security chain.

Shari was on the other side of the chain, and it might as well have been a thousand miles of uncrossable ice.

“Will you stop banging on my door,” she said in a furious voice, somewhat lacking in dramatic punch from the hoarse quality of her words, and the fact that she ended on a cough.

Immediately he forgot his own agenda. “You sound awful. Can I make you some tea? Or heat some soup or something?”

“There is one thing you can do for me.”

“What? Anything?”

“Drop dead.”

Fortunately, his reflexes were quick. He had his foot in the door before she could slam it.

“Please, listen to me.”

“What for? More lies?”

“No! Shari, I love you.” Okay, so it wasn’t said tenderly on bended knee, while tears of joy filled his beloved’s eyes. It was said while tears threatened to fill his own eyes—from the pain in his foot where she was pushing all her body weight and the door against it. If he’d had any idea he’d be in this situation, he’d have worn steel-toed boots instead of well-used sneakers.

“Will you please stop trying to break my foot?”

“Will you please go away?”

“I only want to talk to you. Just for a minute.”

She was a bright woman—he’d always liked that about her, and she must be able to work out for herself that he wasn’t going anywhere until she let him explain himself.

She undid the chain, let go of the door and turned back into her apartment so fast that he almost fell flat on his face when the tug-of-war ended.

The roses hadn’t retained any more dignity than he had from all the pushing and shoving. He stuck them in her general direction, anyway. “I brought you these.”

She crossed her arms across her chest and remained where she was, three feet away from the door, glaring at him.

Awkwardly, he placed the flowers in her umbrella stand, hoping she’d rescue them once he left. It seemed a shame for innocent roses to be sacrificed because she was angry.

“What do you want?”

“You!” It wasn’t suave, and it wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t even well thought out. But it was the raw, bare truth, and he needed her to believe it so much it hurt. “I need you.” He shoved a hand through his hair and tried to pull his thoughts together into some coherence, but like the curls he’d detested since he was a kid, they insisted on tossing themselves wherever they pleased.

From her unmoving stance it was clear she wasn’t buying his argument.

“I owe you an apology. I should have told you I wrote that book. But, at first, all I wanted to do was to find out whether it would work. I wrote it in the first place because it was good money, but I didn’t believe a book could teach a person how to be a better lover.”

“You made a fool of me.” She said it as though the words were ripped from her throat against her will.

“No.” He stared at her in complete disbelief. How could she believe that? “I would never do that to you.”

“‘How do you like to be touched, Shari? Do you like this? Does that work for you?’” She mimicked him cruelly, and only then did he see her pain. She really believed he’d been toying with her.

“Please. Please don’t believe that. Not of me, and certainly not of yourself. I thought you’d figured it out just the way I did. It wasn’t the book that taught us to be great together. We taught each other. We fell in love and that’s what made the sex special.”

She made a gagging noise when he got to the love part. And that started a coughing attack, which had her hunting in his robe pocket for a tissue. His robe, which filled him with hope. She had a perfectly good housecoat of her own, but she’d chosen to bundle herself up in his robe when she wasn’t feeling well. That had to be good.

He glanced from the robe to her flushed face, heavy, sad eyes and red nose. She needed looking after, not emotional trauma.

But he couldn’t let her go if she was thinking those awful things about him. He leaned his back against her front door and tried to explain how he’d ended up in this mess.

“Remember the day you brought me that envelope and the book fell out?”

“Vividly.” He wished her hoarse voice didn’t sound so sexy. It was turning him on something awful. Which was the last distraction he needed when he was practically fighting for his life here.

“That was the first time I’d seen the book in print. I was horrified that you thought I’d sent for it, and almost told you then that I’d written the damned thing.”

“And you didn’t because?” she asked with false sweetness.

“I didn’t because I was embarrassed, frankly. I’d written it basically for the money. I mean, I still did the best job I could, but that’s what it was. A job.” He shifted his weight and dropped his suit bag at his feet so he didn’t feel so weighted down. “I didn’t believe a book could teach a person how to be a good lover. I pretty much figured the only way to learn was to get out there and have lots of practice. Like sports.”

Her lips narrowed alarmingly, and it occurred to him that a sports analogy probably wasn’t going to win him brownie points with a woman who had just accused him of playing with her emotions.

“In my arrogance—” he grinned at his own conceit and found his companion didn’t share his amusement, so he stashed the grin “—I thought no one would believe I needed a book like that. So it was a bit of a shock when it was pretty obvious you did believe it.

“And that’s when it hit me. The best way to prove to myself whether the book was worth the paper it was printed on was to give it a trial run.”

She made a noise like a scalded cat.

“I didn’t really know you,” he added hastily. “You were just a sexy woman I’d been fantasizing about while I wrote the last few chapters of the book. I’d planned to ask you out, but I had a pile of deadlines that had built up while the book took up all my time. I was just getting clear of them when you came down and the book fell out.” He winced in retrospect. “You have no idea what that did for my ego, seeing you believe I needed that book.”

“Just as you can have no idea what it felt like for me watching you tell all of America about your little experiment.”

Damn, had he said that? He didn’t entirely remember everything he’d said on Ginger’s show. What with the hot lights, the noisy studio audience, his nerves at finally being outed as Lance Flagstaff…the whole thing was a bit of a blur. One thing he did remember clearly, however.

“I also told all America that I love you.”

“That was nothing but phony P.R.”

He understood her feelings, sympathized with them even, but this was too much. Anger speared through his groveling. “What the hell are you talking about? I love you. I told every viewer on that show and now I’m telling you, if you hadn’t already figured it out. I love you and I want to marry you.”

Maybe other proposals had been made at the top of the lungs in extreme frustration, he didn’t know. He only knew that his first effort at asking a woman to be his wife had been made so loud they’d be hearing him in Oregon. And for all his bellowing, Shari didn’t look inclined to say yes.

She shook her head. “Yesterday, those words would have meant everything in the world to me.”

“What about today?”

“Have you ever heard the expression, ‘A day late and a dollar short’? Go home, Luke. I’m tired and sick.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

She sighed heavily. “I’m sorry, too. I thought you were the man I’d been looking for all my life.”

“I am that man,” he said frantically. He’d spent most of his life working to make sure no woman ever looked at him as the man she’d been waiting for all her life. Now he knew that if Shari stopped thinking he was that man, his life would lack any meaning at all.

“I am so angry with you.” She clenched both fists as she said it and he actually felt the heat of her rage.

“I told you I love you. I want to marry you. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

She shot him a contemptuous glance. “It means you don’t know any more about love than your father does. News flash! When you love someone you don’t lie to them, you don’t use them as an experiment to…to prove your stupid book works.”

He threw up his hands and yelled right back at her. “All right. You don’t believe me. I give up!”

He yanked the door open, picked up his suit bag and left.

He’d barely gone a step when he heard the door open again behind him. With the wild hope that she’d decided to give him another chance surging in his belly, he turned back, only to watch his roses come flying out the door behind him, end over end like a dozen red-costumed circus acrobats flipping in perfect synchronization.

As they flopped to the industrial beige carpet in the apartment hallway, he thought about just leaving them there to die, but somehow he couldn’t do that, not when they’d started the evening with him in such high hopes.

He knelt to retrieve the roses and walked to nosy Mr. Forrester’s door and knocked.

When it opened, he said, “Here. Give these to your wife.”