Tall Cool One (26 page)

Anna sipped her fresh-squeezed juice before she replied. “Lloyd, how can I say this so it won’t hurt your feelings? I’d rather stay lost in the desert and subsist on roasted iguana for the rest of my life than play with you. Ever.”

Lloyd scratched the copious dark chest hair that bloomed from his open Hawaiian shirt. “Well. You don’t need to share any of that with your father, of course. Right?”

“I think this would be an excellent time to excuse yourself, Lloyd,” said a voice with an Australian accent.

“Hey, you work here.” Lloyd rose and pointed at Kai. “Meaning you work for me.”

“I’ll certainly keep that in mind,” Kai replied as he slipped onto the bar stool next to Anna. Anna hugged him. Lloyd took the hint and slunk away.

“Saved by the Aussie,” Anna thanked him gratefully.

“Welcome back. Whatever happened to you two, I hope it was a wild ride.”

“Wild doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

Kai put a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry you’re leaving.”

“I bet you say that to every girl you share a hot tub with,” Anna quipped.

“Actually, no,” Kai admitted.

She studied his handsome face a moment. “Tell me honestly, Kai. Do you think you’ll even remember that we met?”

“If I passed you on the street in New York, say?”

“Right.”

“Of course I would.”

Anna was surprised. “What happened to ‘fun is fleeting’?”

“Even the paradise clause has an out in it,” he said wistfully. Then he lifted her coffee cup in a toast. “Here’s to meeting up again, Anna. Next time, we’ll surf. And anything else you want to do.”

She clinked her crystal juice glass against the coffee cup. So. Even Kai wasn’t completely satisfied with living only in the moment. Well, maybe she needed to do more of it and he needed to do less. In any event, she didn’t regret her decision to forgo a fling with him. Danny might be right: Lust between near strangers wasn’t necessarily wrong.

But for right now, at least, it was wrong for her.

With All Her Heart

W
hile Sam spent most of the flight catching up with her friends, Anna was lost in thought. Yes, she’d had an amazing adventure. But now that she thought about it, things were not terribly different than when she’d left Los Angeles a few days before. She was no clearer on how she felt about Ben or her sister Susan’s disappearance. And if what she’d wanted at Las Casitas had been a do-it-and-forget-it with a gorgeous guy, well, she’d underachieved in that area, too.

The flight from Mexico to the Van Nuys airport was just over an hour. She was the first person down the steps from the plane, and the first person she saw was her father, who stood at the edge of the tarmac. This was no surprise; she’d called him from Las Casitas and he’d promised to meet her at Van Nuys. But how he appeared, standing alone in jeans and a wool sweater just outside the utilitarian concrete building that served as the airport’s terminal, was a little shocking. There was a day’s growth of stubble on his chin; there were bags under his eyes. He looked exhausted.

“Anna.” He hugged her hard. “You scared the hell out of us.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, it just . . . happened.” She peered around. “And just where is the other half of ‘us’?”

Jonathan rubbed his chin. “Long story. Your mother—”

“Just a sec.” Anna saw Jackson, Sam, and the others come out of the plane and waved to them. “Excuse me, Dad. You never actually met Sam’s father. Let me introduce you. You remember Sam, right?”

“Of course.”

Sam called to her. “See you at the Polo Lounge?”

“Definitely,” Anna agreed. Sam had called Jackson’s Kiki and had her arrange a homecoming luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s flagship restaurant for that afternoon.

“Great, see you there. I’ll take Cammie and Dee to my dad’s limo. Kiki brought it over.”

Anna nodded. She didn’t bother with Cammie and Dee, who were already on their way into the terminal. But she did bring her father over to Jackson. The two handsome men shook hands, taking each other’s measure.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Jonathan told Jackson.

“All’s well that ends well, huh?” Jackson replied. “I was crazy at that age myself.”

“Oh yeah,” Jonathan agreed, and they shared a chuckle at their misbegotten youth. “Listen, I want to thank you for going down there right away. I tried, but . . . anyway, thanks.”

“No problem,” Jackson replied, smoothing over Jonathan’s discomfort. “Glad to help. You’ve got a ride back over the hill?”

Jonathan nodded.

“Great. You know, my daughter really thinks a lot of your daughter. Now that I’ve spent some time with her, I can see why.” With one more quick handshake, Jackson departed into the building.

“Nice guy,” Jonathan commented, making no move to leave.

“Can we go, Dad?” Anna asked, wondering why they were still standing on the tarmac. “I’m a little tired.”

“Actually, we’ve got to chill,” Jonathan said. “I sent Django to deliver some papers to a client in Studio City since we were in the neighborhood. He should be back soon—he’ll pick us up in front.” He shook his head. “Can’t deal with the terminal. This airport is so damn ugly, it’s depressing.”

Anna longed for a hot bath and a long nap before Sam’s party, but it wouldn’t kill her to hang out for a while. “Fine. Where do you want to wait?”

“In front,” her dad decided. He took her luggage, and they walked through the ramshackle terminal and through the front doors.

Her father had it right—the place could use a renovation. Anna donned her tortoiseshell Kate Spade sunglasses before they took seats on the single stone bench by the passenger drop-off circle.

“So, what happened down there?” Jonathan asked in a serious tone, crossing one leg over the other.

Anna sighed. She really was tired, definitely not in a mood to give him a blow-by-blow. “Sam and I went shopping. We took a walk. We got lost in the desert. That’s all.”

“Hey, don’t make light of this,” her father chided. “You put a whole lot of people out.”

“I didn’t mean to, and I wasn’t making light of it,” Anna protested.

Jonathan shook his head. “It doesn’t add up. You are the most responsible person I know.”

“Well, this time it didn’t work out,” Anna said flatly, her voice colder than she’d intended. It had to be because she was so exhausted.

Jonathan regarded this carefully. “You’re pissed at me,” he surmised.

“No.”

“Yeah, you are,” he insisted. “But I’m not the one who screwed up here. . . . Anna, would you take off the glasses so that I can see who I’m talking to?”

Anna pushed the glasses into her hair. As she did, she realized that her father had never answered her original question. And she realized something else, too.

“I was just thinking,” she began. “When we went to meet Susan’s plane, you made such a big thing about all three of us being at the airport. Now here I am. But where’s Mom?”

Her father gazed at his suede Calvin Klein driving mocs, unable to meet Anna’s eyes. “Milan, probably,” he finally muttered. “Who the hell knows with her?”

Anna shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Three days into our trip down memory lane, we both remembered why we can’t stand each other.” He looked up at her again. “She had me drop her at the Santa Barbara airport.”

A private jet roared down the runway and into the sky. Jonathan gazed upward, following its flight into the wild blue yonder, then smiled sadly. “Ever wish you could just fly away, Anna? Oh, wait, you just did.”

He looked so wistful. One part of Anna felt sorry for him—he’d obviously been hurt by his ex-wife’s abrupt departure. But another part of her couldn’t believe his naiveté.

“Did you really think that some quick romance with Mom would make it all better?” she asked him softly.

“I don’t know what I thought.” He rubbed his face wearily. “Anyway, after she was gone, I just . . . I needed some time alone, to think.” He ran a hand through his already mussed hair. “There’s just so damn much pressure now. Your mother only added to it.”

It’s always someone else’s fault with them both, Anna thought. She had no doubt that her mother—wherever she was—was complaining about the pressure and blaming the whole mess on her father.

“Ah, it’s so much clearer now,” Anna commented, her tone even chillier than before.

Jonathan pointed at her. “You sound just like Jane.” Then a thought flitted across his face. “Did anything bad happen in Mexico? With Lloyd, maybe? He’s a quirky guy. Brilliant, but quirky.”

“Quirky” didn’t begin to cover it. For one brief moment, Anna was tempted to give her father the complete rundown on Lloyd’s dubious achievements in Mexico. But no. Except for one weak moment when Ben Birnbaum had broken her heart, she wasn’t in the habit of sharing with her father.

“Lloyd is just fine. He thinks you should buy the resort and the place is spectacular. End of report.”

“I know exactly what Lloyd thinks; he e-mails me twice a day. But I don’t care about that. What I care about is that you’re okay.”

Anna folded her arms. Her father’s solicitousness was getting tiresome. “Yes, well, we’ve covered that ground already.”

“No, we haven’t. You’ve come back with this major attitude. I don’t get it.”

Maybe it was a delayed reaction to her scary encounter with the over-armed Mexican rent-a-cops. Maybe it had something to do with whatever had been in the homemade mescal she’d downed in La Trinidad with Sam. But just when she thought she had everything under control, something inside Anna cracked like an overstressed fault line.

Attitude?
He thought she had an attitude? Everyone in her damn family did whatever they wanted whenever they wanted to do it. She was the only one who ever felt any responsibility to anyone else!

“How worried could you have been, Dad?” The words poured out of her. “Sam’s father dropped everything and flew to Mexico. But not you. You were too busy in San Simeon dealing with the pressure.”

“I couldn’t get there—”

“Because you didn’t
want
to. Not enough. I guess it doesn’t really matter where I live. My parents are bi-coastal no-shows.”

Hot tears rolled down her cheeks. Embarrassed at losing control, Anna fisted them away. Her father dug the monogrammed handkerchief he always carried out of the pocket of his jeans and offered it to her, but she wouldn’t take it.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured as he pushed the handkerchief back into his pocket. “Shit, Anna. What do you want me to say? I know I’ve sucked as a father in the past. I want to change all that.”

She opened her purse to rummage for a tissue of her own. “Those are just words, Dad.”

He looked defeated, arms dangling. “Yeah. I guess so.”

Anna found a Kleenex, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose. She struggled for composure. “The thing is, Dad, I’ve figured out how things work in your world.”

“Great. Explain it to me.”

“Everyone is expendable. Mom. Margaret. Susan.” She swallowed back a lump in her throat. “And me.”

Her father leaned forward and touched her arm. “Never you, Anna. I swear.”

The lump in her throat welled back up. “Then why . . . why didn’t you come for me?”

“I’m so sorry, Anna. I’m so damn sorry.”

He held out her arms to her; she let him comfort her. And she told herself that he was there right now, even if he hadn’t come to Mexico.

But the image of Jackson Sharpe striding toward Sam to save the day was forever etched in Anna’s mind. With all her heart, she wished that it been her father jumping down from that helicopter to rescue her. But like so many of her wishes when it came to her family, she knew this one was never going to come true.

Balance

A
few hours later, Anna sat at a round table in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel with all of Sam’s closest friends, plus assorted wannabes and hangers-on. There were Cammie and Dee. Adam, who had an arm draped around Cammie. Parker Pinelli, who sat to the left of his latest girlfriend, Krishna, while Krishna’s ex, a guy named Bennett, sat to her right. Anna was almost certain that he had his hand on her thigh under the table. There was a girl named Skye, recovering from her second nose job to fix her cocaine-habit-induced deviated septum. A guy named Blue and a handful of others.

Anna had come because she’d promised Sam that she would. But she really had no more use for this crowd—with some notable exceptions—than she’d ever had. Cammie was a viper waiting to strike. And Dee was a jacket short of a Chanel suit. Adam, however, was one of the truly good guys. And Sam . . . Well, other than Cyn back in New York, Sam was as close to a best friend as Anna had. Tripping in the desert and facing down M-16s had been a bonding experience, to say the least.

Anna’s eyes slid to Adam, who was looking at Cammie with something approaching adoration. Cammie gazed at him the same way. Which was
way
stranger than fiction. Maybe they really did care for each other. Anna could stake no claim on Adam; that she knew. She’d treated him badly. He’d moved on. But she still hoped, cliché as it might sound, that one day they’d be friends again.

As for the others, maybe she could learn something from her experience in the desert: to be less judgmental and just
be—
to live and let live. Besides, everyone at this little gathering had been perfectly decent to her, hugging her and gushing about how glad they were that she was back. Not one bitchy word had passed anyone’s lips, not even Cammie’s. In fact, they were all rapt as Sam finished recounting the story of their odyssey.

“Wow, a psychedelic experience in the desert,” Bennett gushed. “That could be life-changing.”

“It was almost life-ending,” Sam joked.

Skye sipped her Evian. “But wait. You’re telling me that after all that, you and this Eduardo guy never hooked up?”

Sam shrugged. “Whatever.”

Anna could tell that Sam was feigning nonchalance. Eduardo had seemed so terrific. She was sincerely sorry that Sam hadn’t gotten the happy ending she deserved.

“Did you buy any cute clothes while you were there?” Krishna asked, apropos of nothing.

“Tons of them. From all of the top Mexican designers.” Cammie tilted her head back and laughed.