Read Lady Be Good for Free Online Page B

starving.” He grabbed up her bags to emphasize his determination.
    “Mr. Lazurn--Lazurnovich, please, it’s really very kind of you—”
    “Luke. Just Luke. It’s easy to say and only one syllable. I’m hungry , dammit! Can’t we go? I’m not asking you to take off your clothes. Just offering you a place to stay for the night.”
    “What about your family? Surely you have a wife and--”
    Either he didn’t hear her, or he was ignoring her feeble protests. “C’mon. Your virtue is safe, I promise. Come on.”
    He didn’t wait for her. He set off walking back the way they had come, leaving Grace standing by an escalator.
    She could have shouted him down. Called security. Demanded her luggage. It would have been easy to stop him and go on her way, alone. Grace wasn’t the type of woman to let herself be bulldozed into anything she didn’t want to do.
    But a tiny voice in the back of her head suggested something other than objecting. At last, was there a way to do something good for Nora? Did Luke Lazurnovich know something about Jake Kendall’s death? Something that might help Nora and her sisters?
    And another voice whispered even more quietly that Luke had a sexy walk and the kind of shoulders any woman in her right mind might really enjoy getting hold of.
    Grace took an uncertain step after him. Then another.
    At the door, he spun around. “Come on,” he insisted. “Haven’t you ever heard what starving football players are like? Move it, Princess.”
    He headed out the door, and Grace reached her decision. She made a skittering dash for the door and caught up just as he was stowing her bags in the back seat of the limo. He popped open the front passenger door and indicated she should jump in. She obeyed.
    When he closed the door, Grace closed her eyes said aloud, “I’m doing this for you, Nora.”
    Luke got almost the whole way around the hood of the car before the cop returned and asked for an autograph. Luke’s laugh rang above the sound of the icy wind. It was a warm, sexy kind of laugh.
    Grace snapped her seatbelt and said to herself. “Well, maybe not completely for Nora.”
    Grace Vanderbine was going to spend the night in the home of a strange man--a football player, no less.
    Mama would have a fit.

4.
    Luke finished exchanging jokes with the police officer and handed over his autograph scrawled on the back of a ticket torn from the officer’s pad. He climbed behind the wheel. “Cop says the Parkway’s closing. We’re just barely going to make it to my place.”
    Flipping up her coat collar and snuggling into it for warmth, Grace said, “Do you give autographs wherever you go?”
    “If somebody asks, I sign my name. What’s the big deal?”
    “Doesn’t it get tiresome?”
    Luke started the car. “If a piece of paper makes somebody happy, I can take ten seconds out of my day to sign it.”
    “That’s a generous attitude.”
    “You don’t sign autographs?”
    “Well, I signed a few book yesterday and today. But it’s not the same. You have been accosted four times since I’ve met you.”
    “Accosted? Maybe you keep score about who’s rude and who isn’t, but I can’t be bothered.”
    Did she keep score? His statement brought her up short. Was she getting so focused on the rules that she was missing the big picture?
    Luke drove the car out onto the highway again, with snow blasting the windshield and the tires grinding through snowdrifts. Grace was grateful that he drove sensibly. She could see how treacherous the road was, so she kept quiet to let him concentrate.
    To avoid paying attention to the white knuckle ride, she used her cell phone and her airline app to try getting a seat on a flight in the morning. The best she could find was stand-by on an early flight.
    Luke’s home was in a nearby suburb—a neighborhood of vast houses that ranged along curving hillsides, all with long driveways and complicated rooflines. Elaborate landscaping was covered in picturesque