A Vow to Love

“Next time, don’t pick on somebody bigger than you are, short stuff,” he advised as he plucked her apartment key from her hand and headed unerringly for her door.

How the devil had he known which apartment was hers? she wondered. Had he been stalking her? She’d read about stuff like that. In Los Angeles it happened to celebrities all the time. Usually, though, the person being stalked was someone famous or at least had a passing acquaintance with the stalker. She’d never seen this idiot before in her life. She surely would have remembered anyone with a voice that reeked of smoky sensuality and unbridled amusement—a combination she found particularly irksome under the circumstances.

Of course, given her humiliating, upside-down position with all the blood rushing to her brain, it was a strain remembering her own name. She did manage to recall a prayer or two. Unfortunately, she had a hunch she was going to need more than prayers to get out of this. Even more unfortunately, every single thing she’d learned in that self-defense class had suddenly flown out of her head.

She was, however, thinking clearly enough to make one firm decision. She knew absolutely that she was not under any circumstances going into her apartment with this man, even if that meant she had to scream her head off to catch the attention of her brand-new neighbors. Which, now that she thought about it, was what she should have been doing long ago, instead of trying to convince herself that she was in no danger.

She opened her mouth and let out a bloodcurdling yell that would have done Tarzan proud. It was greeted by an equally vocal string of obscenities from her captor and the satisfying sound of doors opening up and down the corridor. She followed up with one more ear-shattering scream, just to prove that she meant business.

“You little twit,” the man muttered, jamming the key into her lock and flinging open the door.

To her astonishment, he turned around, faced down all the neighbors and said, “Just a little lovers’ quarrel. Don’t mind us.”

It didn’t take much to imagine his smile and that amused, patronizing tone charming the daylights out of all of them. “It is not—” she screeched emphatically, only to have the words cut off by the slamming of the door behind them.

It took a supreme effort, but she convinced herself that no one could possibly be fooled by his lame remark, that even now police cars were speeding to her rescue.

Hopefully, he wouldn’t kill her before they arrived, she thought just as she was dumped in a sprawling heap onto the sofa. She glanced up. Indeed, the expression in his eyes was filled with murderous intent. For the first time she stopped being mad and started to get just the teensiest bit nervous.

Maybe Brandon and everyone else had been right to worry about whether she knew what she was getting herself into by moving to Boston. She found the unfamiliar flash of self-doubt extremely irritating. No, dammit! A twenty-five-year-old woman had every right to follow her own dreams. If that meant burying herself in a stuffy laboratory at Harvard while she pursued a thesis for her Ph.D in English, she couldn’t imagine why it was anyone else’s concern.

Some women preferred to concentrate on intellectual pursuits that might one day make a difference in society. Some women just weren’t cut out for romance. Look at her Aunt Kate. Well, that was a bad example. Aunt Kate had been a strong, independent, powerful lawyer. Now she carried a diaper bag in addition to her briefcase. Talk about ruining an image! Tough talk and baby talk were incompatible, it seemed to Penny. But the way Aunt Kate used to be…now there was a role model. Why couldn’t her mother and especially her grandfather, Brandon Halloran, see that she wasn’t burying herself in a lab because she was afraid of life?

Someday, though, they’d be proud of her when she was off in Sweden or Switzerland or wherever it was that they handed out the Nobel prizes. She hadn’t quite decided yet if she wanted the award to be for curing cancer or for literature. It occurred to her that quite possibly that was why her entire family was in such an uproar.

She could just imagine their reaction when they heard about some damnable man invading her apartment during her very first week in town. That thought gave her the bravado to launch another attack on the unsuspecting man, who was staring out the window, probably to make sure that the police weren’t rolling in before he finished up whatever mayhem he intended.

Without hesitating to consider the consequences of riling him further, she bounded across the room. She leaped up, looped her legs around his waist and one arm around his neck in what she thought was a fairly effective choke hold. To her astonishment and regret, he shook her off as if she were no more than a pesky nuisance.

“Do that again and we’re going to have one serious problem on our hands,” he warned.

He muttered something more under his breath. Penny’d always been taught that whispering in the presence of others was downright rude, but she was relatively certain that she should be glad in this instance that she hadn’t heard what he’d said. If the furious sparks in his eyes were anything to go by, she had a feeling he hadn’t been welcoming her to Boston.

Sam Roberts stared pensively out the window and tried to get a grip on his temper. He had grown up tough, always lashing out furiously and without thought. It had kept him in hot water most of his adolescence. Raised by his sister, he’d rebelled against everything. It sometimes astonished him that Dana had put up with all his garbage—defending him, bailing him out of trouble, loving him. For her sake, he’d finally learned to control the temper that was currently being put to an extreme test.

He struggled to stay calm as he considered the promise that had gotten him into this fix, a promise made to Brandon Halloran, the man who’d really turned his life around. Granddad Brandon had treated him with the kind of respect that a man felt compelled to earn. He owed the old man. So when Brandon had called a few days earlier and asked just one thing of him—that he look out for Penny Hayden—Sam had no choice but to agree, even though his last experience with the kid hadn’t ended so well.

The role of undercover cop-turned-babysitter didn’t appeal to him, but a debt was a debt. He was beginning to see why Brandon had thought the brat needed someone to watch out for her. Apparently she thought she was invincible. She’d scrapped with him as if she considered it an even match. She didn’t need a babysitter. She needed an armed guard.

Not that Sam entirely trusted Brandon’s motives. The old man had a habit of meddling in the lives of everyone he cared about. He’d even been making noises about it being about time that Sam found himself a woman to smooth out his remaining rough edges. What twenty-eight-year-old Sam had told him was succinct and hopefully threatening enough to snuff out any matchmaking ideas the old man might have had.

But this thing with Penny had surfaced a little too conveniently for his liking. He would do it, though, because he’d learned one important lesson from the Hallorans: families always stuck together—and the Hallorans had made him one of their own from the instant Jason Halloran had married his sister. Today was the first time in a long while that he’d regretted the family ties.

Unfortunately, at the moment he had an even bigger regret. He hadn’t noticed the precise instance when Penny’s supreme self-confidence had slipped away. He’d never meant to scare her to death. In fact, he had actually thought she’d recognized him. That smile of hers had certainly been friendly enough. Not until she’d attacked him had he gotten the message that she’d panicked, thinking that a stranger was about to harm her.

Dammit all, as a cop who dealt with crime victims all the time he should have had better sense. He could have calmed her with a word or two, just by the mention of his name, in fact. Although, given the way their last encounter so many years ago had turned out, she might have attacked him, anyway. Instead, though, he’d reacted as he would have in the old days, instinctively fighting back rather than being ruled by his head. His lack of sensitivity grated. Apparently he was doomed to getting it wrong whenever Penny was involved.

Just as he figured that the day had gotten just about as bad as it could get, he heard the sound of sirens and realized it was about to get worse. The guys at the station weren’t going to let him live this down anytime soon.

Muttering another oath under his breath as they pounded up the steps, he strode over to let them in. He wished belatedly that he’d taken the time to clear up this misunderstanding before their arrival. Unfortunately he’d been afraid to open his mouth, fearful of what would come out.

He had to admit, though, that he took a sort of grim satisfaction in the prospect of watching Penny Hayden stumble all over herself to explain why she’d called the cops on her own relative, albeit one only distantly related by marriage,

The first cop up the stairs, taking them two at a time, gun drawn, was Ryan O’Casey. He was followed by his burly, African-American partner, Jefferson Kennedy Washington, who was called that only by someone who had a death wish. He was J.K. or Jake to his colleagues on the force.

Both men froze at the sight of Sam. “You just get here?” Ryan asked. “What’s happening inside?”

“What’s happening inside is that this cretin manhandled me, broke into my apartment and probably intended to kill me,” an indignant voice said quite calmly from a point slightly above Sam’s elbow.

Sam had forgotten exactly how tiny Penny Hayden was, or maybe it was his own belated spurt of growth and years of weight training that made her suddenly seem small. The way she’d taken him on in that hallway told him size wasn’t something she worried about. He swore again and tried to ignore the amusement that immediately crowded the worry straight off both men’s faces.

“You picking on the little people again, Sam?” Jake demanded, looking Penny up and down approvingly. “You know Ryan hates it when you do that.”

“Very funny,” Sam retorted, scowling at the whole lot of them.

Penny glanced from one policeman to the other and apparently didn’t like what she saw. “Aren’t you going to arrest him? Put some handcuffs on him?”

“I doubt that’ll be necessary, miss,” Ryan said politely. He glanced pointedly at the gathering of neighbors in the hall. Every single door had been flung open. “Maybe we should take this inside, see if we can’t straighten it out.”

“Good idea,” Jake said.

“I do not want this man in my apartment,” Penny informed them, trying to block the way. “I want him locked up in a cell so that he can’t harm other innocent citizens.”

“Oh, give it a rest,” Sam snapped as he lifted her aside, then marched over to the unopened bottle of whiskey he’d spotted on the kitchen counter and poured himself a stiff drink. He held up the bottle. “Anybody else want one?”

“We’re on duty,” Jake reminded him. His gaze narrowed. “Thought you were, too.”

“Nope. I’m taking the rest of the day off. I consider it a hazardous-duty benefit.”

Penny was regarding them all suspiciously. “What’s going on here?”

“Well, ma’am, that’s what we’d like you to tell us,” Ryan said.

He said it in his most courteous tone, Sam noted. He and Jake made a good team. Ryan soothed, while Jake tended to make suspects quake in their boots without ever opening his mouth. He just loomed over them.

“Sam here is a police officer,” Ryan explained softly. “I’m guessing he must have been here on a stakeout. Is that right, Sam?”

“Something like that,” he agreed.

Penny’s mouth gaped. “A policeman? Sam?” Something that might have been comprehension flickered in her eyes. An interesting shade of red crept up her neck and into her cheeks.

“Sam Roberts?” she said weakly, sinking onto the sofa.

He lifted the glass in her direction. “Nice to see you again.”

“Oh, hell,” she murmured.

He took considerable satisfaction in seeing her day disintegrate right before his eyes. He figured that made them just about even. Granddad Brandon, on the other hand, still had to pay up big-time.

Chapter 2

Penny surveyed the man standing in her minuscule kitchen from head to toe. Now that he was in the light and fear wasn’t clouding her vision, she could see it was Sam Roberts all right. Taller, broader through the shoulders and sexier, if that was possible.

Now she knew why her pulse had skipped at the sound of his voice. She’d heard it often enough in her dreams. That’s what came of adolescent fantasies. On rare occasions, they stretched clear into reality to zap common sense.

One thing for sure, his outrageous behavior hadn’t changed a bit. He was living up to everything Penny remembered about him from their brief but memorable encounter at the christening of his niece, Elizabeth Lacey Halloran, firstborn in the fourth generation of Hallorans. For an entire weekend he had blatantly regarded Penny as a pesky adolescent, hardly worthy of his attention.

Back then she had chafed at being so summarily dismissed, especially by the first true love of her entire life. The one kiss they shared still burned in her memory. The whole thing had been humiliating and ridiculous. Forever after, she had told anyone who asked that she couldn’t stand the smart-mouthed jerk. She’d finally started to believe it herself in the past couple of years. There were times when she couldn’t even remember what he looked like.

Well, that much was obviously true, she thought, thinking of the terrible mistake she’d made in that hallway.

Of course, she had also told herself that Sam Roberts’s being in Boston had nothing to do with her decision to come to Harvard after years of self-imposed exile from the East. Judging from the way her heart was thudding at the moment, she’d been lying through her teeth about that, too. Apparently some things never changed.

Today, despite his obvious and acute embarrassment in front of his colleagues, he’d managed to maintain that same insolent, arrogant attitude. His entire demeanor suggested that she was totally at fault for the mix-up. Even now he was lounging against the kitchen counter, a drink in hand, while she stumbled all over herself trying to explain how she’d confused one of Boston’s finest cops with a common criminal.

Penny drew in a deep breath and tried to reclaim some sense of dignity. “It was dark. Besides, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, over nine years in fact. He was dressed in a suit and tie at the time and looked considerably more respectable than he does at the moment,” she said.

Now she allowed her gaze to linger on his disreputable attire to emphasize the point. There was the very last time she’d seen him, of course, when he’d been dressed more casually, but he hadn’t looked as muscular back then. It was amazing what a little weight training could do to an already sexy body. She blinked and looked away. It wouldn’t do to spend too much time thinking about that.

“On top of that,” she said finally, “he never called me by name, never introduced himself. What the hell was I supposed to think when this jerk tosses me over his shoulder and hauls me into my apartment? It’s not a technique used by any welcoming committee I’ve ever heard of.”

Jake and Ryan listened sympathetically. All the while their eyes sparkled with merriment. They were clutching their sides, probably to keep from laughing out loud. No doubt it was Sam’s sour expression alone that kept them from howling.

“Look, I’m not the one who ought to be on trial here. Cop or not, he broke in,” she accused irritably.

“Do you want to file charges?” Jake inquired.

Judging from the expression of expectancy on his face, he really wanted her to do it just for the fun of it. Penny could just imagine how Sam, much less the rest of the family, would react. Still, she had to admit to being tempted. She could get even for a lot just by saying yes.

“I suppose not,” Penny finally said with some reluctance.

“Thanks, brat,” Sam said with that increasingly familiar edge of sarcasm. “Don’t do me any favors.”

“Actually, I believe I owe you one,” she said with syrupy sweetness.

He started to reply, but bit off whatever he’d been about to say.

It was just as well. Penny would have hated to pick up the threads of an ancient squabble in front of the two fascinated policemen. She found their obvious respect for Sam, which all the teasing couldn’t hide, something of a mystery. She couldn’t even figure out how he’d managed to get on the force.

Stories of Sam Roberts’s narrow escapes from the law were the stuff of family legend. Her grandfather had tried to regale her with several of them once again just before she’d left L.A., but she’d cut him off. At sixteen, when his sister had married into the Halloran family, Sammy had appeared destined for the life of a con artist at best. Naturally, her grandfather took full credit for his redemption.

But Penny had never gotten the sense that his salvation had been complete enough to land him on the Boston police force. She wondered what the whole story was behind that. She also wondered why no one in California had happened to mention it, then admitted that quite possibly it was because she tended to exit the room whenever his name came up.

Penny glanced over, noted the tension in Sam’s stance and the irritation in his expression and wondered if she’d ever get the chance to find out. She told herself it didn’t really matter. Sam Roberts clearly wasn’t the kind of man who’d be interested in being a pal to some distant relation. He’d made that more than clear years ago. In fact, he looked like the sort of man who viewed women as having one single purpose in life and it sure as heck wasn’t friendship.

Of course, that raised the question of why he’d bothered to show up here tonight in the first place. She figured she had her grandfather to thank for that. She wondered what he’d held over Sam’s head to get him to agree this time.

Sam’s temper had finally cooled sufficiently enough that he could look at Penny Hayden without wanting to murder her. He’d pretty well trampled any little flare-ups of guilt, as well, and was beginning to enjoy watching her trying to extricate herself from any share of the blame for the false alarm.

If she weren’t such an obvious pain in the neck, she might be attractive, he thought, idly studying her smooth-as-silk complexion and the dusting of freckles on her turned-up nose.

The kid had gone and grown up on him. She was wearing jeans that fit like a second skin, a denim shirt she’d tied in a knot at her tiny waist and those cowboy boots that she’d used somewhat effectively as weapons. She’d scooped her hair into a ponytail, though most of it had fallen free during their tussle. Sam had the oddest desire to free the rest of it and let it tumble through his fingers. He nixed that notion right away. He had no difficulty whatsoever recognizing trouble and until today he’d gotten fairly adept at sidestepping it. It was a skill he liked to think had come with maturity.

He deliberately forced his glance away and caught Ryan studying him speculatively. “What’s your problem?” he growled.

The younger cop grinned. “I’m not the one who came within a hairbreadth of being hauled in for breaking and entering and assault.”

“Oh, go catch some criminals.”

“Thought we had,” Jake reminded him. “Might even write up a lengthy report on it.”

“You do and you’ll be hoofing it around the lousiest beat in town come the first blizzard of winter,” Sam warned.

“Come on, Jake,” Ryan urged, still grinning. “You know what Sam’s like when he gets testy. Can’t take a joke.”

Sam briefly considered pounding their heads together, then decided the subsequent aggravation of explaining why to the heirarchy at headquarters wouldn’t be worth it. Fortunately, they seemed ready to beat a hasty retreat.

“Now don’t you two go squabbling the minute our backs are turned,” Ryan warned cheerfully as he closed the door.

Sam glared after them. As soon as their footsteps faded, Penny whirled on him.

“How could you humiliate me like that?” she demanded.

He regarded her incredulously, remembering with absolute clarity exactly how irritating she could be…and how turned on that tended to make him. Dammit, she could still do it.

“Excuse me?” he said. “If there was any humiliating done around here tonight, it was watching two men I work with come after me with their weapons drawn.”

“Served you right. You had no business standing in that hall and scaring me half to death.”

He shook his head, refusing to acknowledge the truth in the accusation. “You really are obnoxious.”

“Now that’s a mature response,” she countered. “How can you call me that? It’s been years since you even set eyes on me.”

“Not nearly long enough,” he shot back.

Their gazes clashed, hers every bit as fiery as he knew his must be. He’d stared down hardened criminals more easily. She never even flinched. A little frisson of admiration cut through his irritation. He sighed and let the last of his anger fade away.

“So, Penny Hayden, welcome to Boston.”

She didn’t seem to be quite so willing to let bygones be bygones. “If you’re the kind of welcoming committee this town sends out, I’m surprised anyone ever moves here.”

“They usually reserve me for the people they expect might be troublesome. I’d say we’re right on track this time.”

She rolled her eyes in obvious disgust. “Why are you here, really?”

“At the risk of stirring up a hornet’s nest, I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth.”

“A pleasant change,” she noted.

Sam shook his head. The woman was constantly spoiling for a fight. At least that was something they had in common. He held on to his patience by a thread. “Granddad Brandon called, said you were just settling in. He wanted me to stop by and see if there was anything I could do to help.”

“Was this your idea of help?” she asked. “Couldn’t you have called first, warned me you were on your way?”

He shrugged. “Hey, you attacked me in that hallway. If you hadn’t, I’d have introduced myself politely, just in case you’d forgotten what I looked like, then offered to do anything I could to show you around Boston.”

Eyes that were clear and guileless studied him intently. “But you wouldn’t have meant it, would you?” she said finally. “Just like last time.”

Sam tried to ignore the guilt that cut through him. “Why wouldn’t I be happy to show you around?”

“It’s a good thing you’re on the side of the law,” she informed him drily. “You’re a genuinely crummy liar. Remember, I was there the night you dutifully dragged me to a movie. And I know how Granddad can be. It’s easier to give in than it is to try to wriggle off his hook. Well, consider your duty done, Sam. I can look out for myself.”

To emphasize that she meant what she said, Penny opened the door and waited for him to walk through it. Sam saw no reason not to comply, until he was on the other side, his foot on the top step. Then he realized that he recognized the expression he’d read in her eyes. Not so many years ago, before the Hallorans had come into his life, he’d seen loneliness—and the stubborn determination not to let it show—just by looking in the mirror.

Knowing he was going to regret it, he turned back. “Look, as long as I’m here, why don’t we go grab something to eat?”

It wasn’t the most gracious invitation he’d ever uttered, but he was offended by the distrust written all over her face. Forcing the words through gritted teeth, he added, “Look, we’ve gotten off to a bad start here.”

“Again,” she pointed out, not giving an inch.

He bit off a retaliatory comment and said simply, “I’m sorry.”

Her gaze locked on his and his heart took an unexpected leap. He got the distinct feeling he was in over his head and sinking fast.