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“Thanks for reminding me.”
“Why don’t you at least find out if Satan’s idea about Martin’s whereabouts matches up with your little lingerie clue?”
Her clue was hardly little, but Fiona did have a point.
“Okay, fine. I’ll talk to him, but if it’s a disaster, I’m giving you fifty percent of the blame.”
“Does Satan have a human name?”
“Nico Valletti, if you can believe it. He should be a soap opera star instead of a stalker.”
“Maybe Nico’s still lurking outside waiting for you.”
Skye tried to ignore the butterflies whirring in her belly as she stood, dropped the bra in her purse and put her shoes back on. “He drives a Ferrari,” she said, not sure what that suggested about his disaster potential.
“And he lives in Malibu. You could do worse.”
“Fiona, I’m going to talk to him about Martin, not scope him out as a possible rebound guy.”
“Every guy that rich and gorgeous has the potential for something.”
“I thought you had more integrity than me.”
Fiona grabbed the remote and switched off CNN, leaving just the jungle sounds to punctuate their conversation. From the distant tropics, a monkey screeched.
“I’m turning thirty next month,” she said. “The starving artist thing is getting old, and I don’t think it would be so bad to be with a guy who doesn’t have to go Dutch on every date.”
Skye blinked. She’d never thought she’d hear Fiona sounding so…pragmatic.
“What happened to, ‘Thirty is the year when we finally become real women’?”
“It is, and as a real woman, I think I’d like to have some financial stability in my life.”
“What are you saying?” Skye’s head was starting to do the same bongo-drum thing it did when she drank too many margaritas. Or maybe that was part of the jungle-sounds CD.
“This probably isn’t a good time to spring this on you,” Fiona said as she began to rearrange the found objects on the coffee table. “But I’ve decided to leave Club Sunset and take that pharmaceutical sales job my dad found for me.”
Skye sat on the ottoman, her beleaguered brain ready to call it quits for the day. She’d thought she’d always have Fiona to be her fellow starving artist. And all through the years, even though she was five years older than Skye, Fiona was the one who’d never seemed to mind being a waitress and earning petty cash here and there on her collages. She’d seemed to relish her carefree lifestyle.
“You? In sales?”
She shrugged. “Just until I set the art world on fire.”
“But—”
“Please don’t look so disappointed. I’ve given this a lot of thought.”
Skye produced a shaky smile. “Sorry, I’m just a little shocked. But you’re right, you’d be a fool to pass up the money.”
“At least we know there’ll be an opening at Club Sunset,” Fiona said, and that was the final straw.
“Excuse me,” Skye said.
She stood up and hurried into the bathroom to wash her face, returned and grabbed her bag, then hurried toward the door before she could burst into tears again.
“Skye? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, I just need some fresh air,” she said, flashing a shaky smile at Fiona before she disappeared.
Outside, Nico was nowhere to be seen, and it was all for the best. She couldn’t have faced him now anyway without revealing herself as the basket case she actually was.
Skye drove on autopilot, her thoughts bouncing from one disastrous event to the next, tears prickling her eyes again as she navigated the road without thinking about it.
God, she’d turned into a caricature of a twenty-something. Job problems, guy problems, roommate problems…
She wasn’t sure where she was going, but she knew she didn’t want to go anywhere she’d already been. A half hour later, she was miles down the freeway, taking the Malibu exit to Martin’s house.
Well, actually, to Nico’s house. Who knew if he was home, but it was her turn to stalk him, regardless.
NICO DIDN’T KNOW whether to be relieved or frustrated that now he had no excuse not to put Skye out of his thoughts. But of course, if it was as easy as all that, he’d have forgotten about her weeks ago.
He closed his front door, kicked off his shoes, and walked through the house to the living room, which mocked him with its emptiness. Why the hell had he come home, anyway?
Because the thought of going out to dinner alone, or picking up carry-out alone, or sitting in a bar alone, might have meant crossing the thin line between sane and crazy. He’d always relished his single status, until the accident. Since his recovery, he’d continued to date, but the women who’d once amused him simply by being hot and willing were now not so satisfying.
Getting a glimpse of his own mortality could do that to a guy.
That hadn’t stopped him from seeking the company of women, but lately, all the company had been strictly sexual. And none of them seemed to care one way or the other.
The light on his answering machine was flashing, and the LCD said he had three messages, so he hit the play button and listened.
“Hey, Nico, busy tonight?” a woman’s voice said. He didn’t recognize her right away. “It’s Lisa. Call me if you’d like some company.”
Lisa. Lisa who? He felt a little pang of disgust at himself for not knowing. Company was the word he did know though—it was the universal booty-call code word.
A second message began to play. “Nico, hi. It’s me, Dawn. Just wondering if you’d like some company tonight.”
There it was again. That word.
A third message. “Hi, Nico. It’s Misha—”
He stopped the recording before he had to hear it again.
And for the first time, he realized what was bothering him so much. He’d become one of those guys. A guy women didn’t want anything serious with—a guy they didn’t even want to talk to or go out to dinner with. A guy they just wanted to screw.
How the hell had that happened?
Sure, he’d expected retirement from racing to bring with it a fading of the limelight, but he hadn’t expected women to stop regarding him as an interesting human being outside of the bedroom.
He sank onto the couch, propped his feet on the coffee table, and grabbed the remote. With the press of a button, a sixty-inch plasma TV screen emerged from a console cabinet on the other side of the room, and with another press of a button, the sports channel was on, displaying scores from yesterday’s games.
He needed to order a pizza, do something for dinner, but the thought of eating alone… Best not to think about it again. Instead, he watched the sports news and tried really hard to give a damn about any of it. Tried to ignore his annoyance that he wasn’t making news anymore.
Thoughts of Skye invaded—a welcome distraction from the news. He closed his eyes and summoned an image of her at her desk at work. He’d never been big on office fantasies, but he could have thought of a few ways to liven up that cubicle of hers. He could have shown up after hours…found her working alone… propped her up on that desk…pressed himself between her legs. He imagined the silky feel of her, the way her thighs would clench around his hips, the way the flesh of her breasts would mold to his hands, the way her breath would feel tickling his neck as he pounded against her—
Then the doorbell rang and jarred him back to reality. He got up from the couch, adjusted his pants, and went to the door slowly, as if he didn’t care about having a visitor, not sure whether to be happy or disgusted that it was probably some unannounced booty call dropping by.
And when he saw Skye outside the foyer window standing on his front steps, it was the most welcome sight he’d beheld in a long time. An unexpected burst of joy surged in his chest. Again, Skye evoked in him emotions that he’d been afraid might be gone for good.
She was glaring at the door, not exactly looking happy to be there. Which was too bad. If she’d been on his doorstep looking for sex and nothing more, she was the one woman he’d be more than happy to oblige.
But more likely, his lure had worked. She wanted to know if he really knew where Martin was. He didn’t know, but he had a damn good idea.
He opened the door and smiled.
“You bastard, your showing up at my office set off the chain of events that got me fired, and you expect me to help you?”
“You got yourself fired. And hello to you, too.”
“I didn’t come here to chitchat. Are you going to let me in, or should I just stand out here until I blow away?”
Nico stepped aside, images of the first time he’d seen her struggling with her skirt filling his head, her tempting proximity causing his groin to stir again. “Downside of living on the ocean. The wind can be a bitch.”
She turned on him and shot him a screw-you glare. “How about you say something more like, ‘I’m sorry you’ve lost your only source of income. I’ll be thinking of you when you’re living on the street.’”
“By the looks of that place, I’d say I did you a favor. Sit in a cubicle like that long enough and you’ll go insane.”
Her expression transformed for a few seconds, as if she was shocked by his observation. But then she recovered.
“I don’t need your career advice.”
“You didn’t come here to scold me about your lost job, did you? Because I have a feeling that Dottie chick is the one you need to scold.”
“No, I came to beg your forgiveness for breathing.” She leveled a smart-ass gaze at him that made him want to kiss her senseless.
He had to start thinking with the right head. Fast. She was too damn sexy when she was pissed.
“Could it be you want to see if I really know where Martin is?”
She shrugged. “If you know where he is, then why haven’t the police beaten down his door?”
She was smarter than he’d hoped.
“I’ve told them everything I know, but I’d say Martin has left the state and is no longer high on their priority list.”
“What you mean is, you don’t have a clue where to find him.”
“The way I see it, you’re in a win-win situation. Either you help me out because you want to find Martin as much as I do, or you help me out because you need to keep me away from your scumbag boyfriend.”
“So what if I agree to help you? Then what?”
Nico had asked himself that question many times already. He might have been able to take whatever information he could get from Skye and find Martin on his own, but he wouldn’t have much chance of getting close to him once he found him. Skye, on the other hand, was quite possibly Martin’s Achilles’ heel.
And even if she wasn’t, she was the best bait he could hope to find to lure Martin out of hiding.
“Then we go on a little trip.”
“Go where?”
“I can’t reveal all my secrets up front.”
“You expect me to just take off with you? Some guy I don’t even know?”
“Don’t I look trustworthy?”
“No.”
“Can you even trust your own judgment after dating a con artist?”
One corner of her mouth curved up, and Nico knew he almost had her.
“I might be willing to help except I’m broke, and I need to be looking for a job right now since I’m newly unemployed.”
Okay, so he wasn’t a heartless ogre. Another stab of guilt struck him that she’d lost her job, and in spite of his suspicions about her, he felt as though he ought to help somehow. “So you’re a writer. Can’t you get a job doing that?”
“Yeah, me and the five zillion other people who want to be writers. I can just go down to the book factory and fill out an application. They’re always hiring.”
“You live in L.A. Why aren’t you writing for Hollywood like everyone else?”
She pinned him with a look. “For one, not everybody wants to write for Hollywood, and second, it’s not that simple.”
“Okay, okay. I know writing jobs don’t grow on palm trees, but still, if you’ve got any talent, you should be able to get work.”
“Screw you.”
Nico held up his hands in surrender. “Guess I had that coming. Listen, if it turns out you aren’t involved with Martin, I’ll get you some face time with my next-door neighbor. He’s the CEO of a couple of TV networks. He’s always complaining about how there’s no talent in Hollywood.”
He could see the spark of interest in her eyes that she was probably trying really hard not to show.
“Okay, whatever. That’s not going to pay my bills right now.”
“I’ll cover your expenses until you can pay me back.”
Her expression transformed to suspicious, but she made no further protest.
“So it’s a deal,” he said before she could change her mind. “You might want to pack for hot weather. We’ll have to take a little drive.”
“How little?”
