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Brett shot a glance Elisa’s way as she edged back toward her seat. The panic was gone, but she wasn’t making grateful Bambi eyes at him, either. She looked pissed. He guessed he shouldn’t be surprised. She was probably as bewildered by his intrusion into her boot camp weekend as he was to find that his old friend was a third wheel on his Caribbean getaway.
“Hey.” He touched her arm, trying to soften her. “I meant what I said. Why don’t you and Celine take the two seats in first class? I’ll take yours. I’m sure you guys have some talking to do.”
“There weren’t two in first class when I tried to book.”
“Last-minute cancellation. Or Celine’s persuasive power.” He shrugged. “Take the seats, okay?”
Elisa gave a tight nod. Man, she was pretty. He’d forgotten. Or made himself forget. She had hair the exact color of gingerbread and hazel eyes and the smoothest skin, like a porcelain doll. He still remembered the feel of that skin pressed against his cheek, under his lips. He craved it, nights when he was tired and weak. That and the weight of her breast in his hand, her nipple hard against his fingertips, her needy noises tracing a straight line to his cock.
He was getting hard thinking about it, and that meant less blood to the brain, which couldn’t be good in a screwed-up situation like this one. Concentrate, man, he commanded himself.
“Let me get my stuff,” Elisa said. “Celine, you head up front. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Celine went obediently, and Elisa practically shoved the guy in the hoodie out of her way. She bent down to retrieve something from her seat. Yeah, that was a good view of her, too.
“What the hell, man?”
For the briefest of instants, he thought it was the voice inside his head chiding him for ogling her ass, but then he realized it was the paparazzo snarling at him. Brett shrugged. “I’m sure you’ve got extras.”
“I’m trying to do my job! You might not like it, but it’s what I do, and those were my photos you smashed.”
Brett could see the guy was one heartbeat from planting a hand in the middle of Brett’s chest and shoving. Let him try. Brett had enough aimless anger at the moment to flatten him into next week.
“Gentlemen, I need you to return to your seats,” repeated the male flight attendant. “Unless you need a personal escort?” He nodded toward the sky marshal.
The paparazzo harrumphed like an angsty teenager and slunk away. The flight attendant and sky marshal eased against the seats to let him pass.
Brett headed toward the back of the plane. He met Elisa in the aisle, where she’d just finished hoisting out her carry-on. The top few buttons of her ruffled white blouse were undone revealing the delicate thrust of her collarbone and, below that, the swell of her phenomenal breasts. A wicked taunt—the ones that got away. Over the past two years, he’d managed to mostly block the memories of kissing her and touching her. Mostly, that is, except in his dreams. He dreamed about Elisa confoundingly often—languid, dirty, wet dreams. But this was real, because she wasn’t slowly peeling off her clothes and looking at him with heat in her eyes, and she wasn’t taking slow steps toward him, which was what always happened in the dreams.
“Sit for a minute.” Elisa’s words penetrated through his fog. He was lucky she couldn’t read minds.
Her seat and the one beside it were empty—the other occupant must have been in the restroom. She slid in, and he sat beside her, hyperaware of the thinness of her blouse. He could see the hint of her skin beneath the translucent fabric.
“So, what?” she demanded. “You picked her up somewhere? And—”
“The drugstore,” he admitted, before he could stop himself.
“You picked her up at a drugstore?”
She said it like he was dirt. She’d always been like this, judgmental about his conquests.
“She had one of those red baskets, and it was full of sample bottles. I said, ‘Going on a trip?’ and she looked up at me, smiled and said, ‘Yeah. Wanna come?’”
And all right, he’d panicked. He’d looked at her pretty round face and her soft blond hair and her big breasts and he’d thought, In two weeks, it’s all over for me. No more women, no more conquests. He’d promised the network where he’d just been hired on to be a news anchor that he’d be squeaky clean. Network anchors didn’t chase tail. He’d barely beaten out his competition for this job, and his new boss had informed him that the other guy’s advantage had lain squarely in the fact that he was older, more distinguished and well established as a husband, father and grandfather. The kind of guy you wanted to believe when he told you the news.
Brett, on the other hand—
Well, Elisa’s unspoken assessment of him had probably been accurate. Women were his drug of choice and his downfall.
The truth was, standing in the drugstore, contemplating the vaguely familiar goddess in front of him, he wasn’t sure he could do it. He wasn’t sure he could be Mr. Squeaky-Clean Guy. Mr. Face of the News. Mr. Trust Me.
Pretty boy. Big man. Handsome, groomed, in control. That was who he’d been among his brothers—Zach had been the smart one, Pete the athletic one, and Brett was the good-looking one. It was what he’d traded on, with women, in his work, his whole life. Now he was here, on the brink of the anchor job, and if he couldn’t do it...
Where did that leave him? If he couldn’t be “the face of NYCN News”...
Screw that. Failure wasn’t an option. He’d been prepping for an opportunity like this one his whole life, and he wasn’t going to let anything get in his way.
Standing there in the drugstore, he had told himself that he’d accept this one invitation. Have a last hurrah, a crazy weekend with this very willing blonde bombshell. Then, he knew—he knew—he could do what the network needed him to do. He’d be ready to take on the world.
Elisa hadn’t expected to hear that Celine had been the pickup artist. She shook her head. “And you said yes?”
“I said, ‘I know you, don’t I?’”
“Smooth.”
He couldn’t tell if she was admiring or mocking, but good sense dictated the latter. “It wasn’t a pickup line. I didn’t need a pickup line. She’d already invited me to the Caribbean. Although I didn’t know yet that it was the Caribbean.”
“God!” she burst out. “You’re—”
But whatever she’d been about to say about him, she stopped.
He swallowed the urge to defend himself. He owed her nothing. He’d accepted a pretty woman’s invitation to fly on the spur of the moment to the Caribbean for a good time. It wasn’t his fault that the woman had neglected to mention she was in the middle of a dating workshop.
He’d had it all backward in the drugstore, of course. The window for a last fling, for getting women out of his system, had long since passed. He was already in the hot seat, already under scrutiny. Celine hadn’t been an opportunity; she’d been a test. He’d had the chance to start his new life as Mr. Trust Me, and he’d screwed it up.
But maybe it wasn’t too late. He’d made a mistake, but he could still right the ship and chart a new course. “Look. I’m outta here. I’ll take the next flight back.”
Elisa scowled. “You can’t do that.”
God, she was as bossy as ever. “I sure can.”
She glanced around, lowered her voice. “Who saw you together?”
“What?”
“Who saw you guys together? In the airport. I’ve had a videographer following her around, but were there also paparazzi there? Are there photos?”
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“So you know what that means, right? Every entertainment magazine and show in the city’ll have a piece on Celine and her new man—”
He couldn’t help himself. He winced.
“Yes, that’s you.” She quirked her fingertips into quotation marks. “Celine Carr’s ‘New Man.’ That’s what you get for messing around with a celebrity. Finally found a woman you couldn’t just slip into and out of unnoticed, huh?”
“Hey.”
“Truth hurts?”
She was vicious. And he liked it. He liked her, eyes flashing, his old friend. He’d rather have her bitching at him than not talking to him any day. He’d missed her.
A thought came to him, unbidden. She’d be amazing in bed. The type who’d bite his shoulder and rake his back and yell when she came.
Not that it was an option. With that look on her face, it would be a cold day in hell before she’d have a civil conversation with him, let alone tangle with him in the naughty, uncensored way he envisioned.
And, really, could he blame her? He’d screwed things up royally back when he’d had his chance at her. He’d signed away his rights for all eternity.
Not to mention that, less than five minutes ago, he’d sworn off serial seduction. Hell, he’d sworn off women.
“If you leave now, they’ll have a field day. They’ll make mincemeat out of you, and Celine will come across as pathetic. You don’t want that.”
“So what’s your point? I should stick around?”
“I’m saying that, if I were you, I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to run off. There are more decorous ways to do it.”
Decorous. Such an Elisa word.
“Let us get there, take some footage and photos of Celine doing her thing, make it clear that she’s shopping around, not committed to you—then you split. Much less humiliating for both of you.”
He could detect the hope and desperation behind her attempt at convincing him. She meant, Much less humiliating for me.
Her seatmate had returned from the bathroom and hovered expectantly over them. Time to go.
Well, okay, then. He could make this less humiliating for her. It would be a kind of penance, a chance to get back in her good graces. Not, he chastised his cock and all the other body parts clamoring for a piece of the situation, those good graces. But—
There was a chance, a small chance, he could make this better for her. Or at least less worse. And if he did, maybe they could be friends again. Because seeing her had reminded him of how much fun it had been to be friends with her in college and for the three years afterwards when they’d buddied around New York. How sometimes it had felt like the two of them against the world. Blowing off studying to eat pizza on the roof of the library, verbally dismembering their common enemies behind closed doors, stealing the Buddha statue from the religion department and installing it as guardian over the condom jar in the health center. She’d been funny, sharp, energetic, but kind, too, jollying him out of bad moods and dragging him on hikes in the New England mountains as an antidote to sophomore slumps and senior stress.
She was not the kind of friend who came along every day. There were eight million other people living in New York City, but no one played Scrabble with the focus or intensity that Elisa applied to the game. And of the other 7,999,999 New Yorkers, he had yet to find one who liked to deliberately pick bad DVDs and do her own Mystery Science Theater 3000, dissecting and mocking the films with glee. And no one had ever laughed at him with the utter abandon that Elisa had employed the day she’d taught him to Rollerblade, hoisting him up off the ground and then falling down beside him, breathless with hysteria.
You didn’t get second chances too many times in life.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. We’ll do it your way.”
3
ELISA COLLAPSED INTO the cushy first-class seat. “Okay. I think I talked Brett into not taking the next flight back.”
There was silence from beside her, and she turned to discover that Celine was not awed and grateful, but confused. “He wanted to take the next flight back?”
Oh, man. She’d blown that. Why hadn’t it occurred to her that Celine might still think a romance could develop between her and Brett? Brett always did manage to inspire unreasonable expectations in women. She of all people should know that. “He said the situation was too weird for him. You didn’t mean to mislead him. It’s just that he thought he was getting a special weekend with you.”
“But you said now he’s staying?” There was a sweet, hopeful note in Celine’s voice. No wonder this woman got her heart publicly broken a minimum of five times a year. She had no hard-candy shell, only the melty center.
“Well, no—not staying. Just, I—” There was no diplomatic way to say this. “I thought it would be embarrassing for you if he left now, whereas if he stayed, we could make it look like you sent him away on your own terms. You guys can put on a nice show of having a destination date, and then you can decide you’re not interested and move on. Everyone looks good.”
Celine narrowed her eyes. “Everyone, meaning you?”
Elisa kept her irritation under tight wraps. “Everyone meaning everyone. Me, you, Brett. A more graceful exit for all of us.”
“What if that’s not what I want? A graceful exit?” Celine’s voice rose.
“What do you want?”
“He said the situation was too weird, right? Because of the boot camp weekend?”
“Yeah.”
“So let’s do the boot camp weekend another time!” Celine was excited now. She pulled out her iPhone and tapped open her calendar. “I can’t do the next three weekends, because I’m filming straight through, but I could do—no—I’m sure we could figure something out, though, right?”
“Hon—no. We’ve got a videographer here, I did a huge push in the media, and I can’t get those people to take me seriously again if I bail now.” The thought made her cringe. There were no do overs in PR. No, for realz this time! Celine Carr’s dating boot camp weekend!
“Yeah. That would kinda suck. For you.”
Ouch. Elisa didn’t have to dig down far to read the subtext there. But I’m paying you for this weekend, and you can sit down and shut up, if that’s what I need you to do. And Celine’s unspoken chastisement was dead right. It wasn’t Celine’s job to win friends and followers for Rendezvous.
“You wouldn’t have to go home. You could stick around and just be on vacation.”
Elisa had to smile at Celine’s stab at generosity. “Sure. I could.”
“I’m just saying, Brett’s only upset because you’re still trying to match me up. He’d come around if you were out of the picture. And like I said, not totally out of the picture, just not so visible.”
“If that’s what you want,” said Elisa, with effort. “We’ll have to check in with Haven.”
“Can we call her as soon as we land?”
“Yes.”
Haven was supposed to be on this trip, too, but, at the last minute, her mother had been hospitalized with appendicitis. Haven had wanted to cancel the trip—“Keeping Celine Carr in line is a job for a paid PR professional”—but Elisa had promised that she could handle Celine. Elisa had assured Haven that she’d manage the media according to the publicist’s directions, carefully watch out for Celine’s well-being and call “the instant she sets a toenail out of line.”
Haven was going to have rabbits when she heard that Celine had showed up for her flight with Brett in tow.
Elisa would worry about that later. She had bigger fish to fry right now, like making sure that her client didn’t get her heart broken instead of having her self-confidence built up.
“Celine—” Oh, this was stupid and awkward. Whatever she said next would sound like sour grapes, but if she didn’t say it, she’d be a really crappy dating coach. So, screw it, she’d rather be sour grapes than drop the ball. “I know you probably don’t want to hear this right now, but Brett Jordan is—”
Well, who was or wasn’t Brett, exactly? And what gave her the right to make that call? She’d had her own share of miscalculations about the kind of man he was. She was hardly an expert.
“What’s the deal between you guys?” Celine’s voice was sharp.
“There’s no deal.” She could see that Celine didn’t believe her. Smart girl. “We were friends. There was a time, briefly, when I hoped—but there was never anything.”
God, she was full of shit. Never anything. Nothing except kisses that had made her limp and golden and floaty, nothing except for his hands on her in a way that had made her willing to beg for more. And what exactly did she mean by telling Celine she’d been hopeful “briefly”? Briefly, if briefly meant all through college and for years after that. Even now she wasn’t sure what she had wanted from him. Not anything he could give, that was for sure.
“So you were in love with him,” Celine said.
“Not in love with him, no, I wouldn’t— It was a long time ago. We were friends. He was—he dated a ton of women, just not me.”
“But you’re not objective.”
