The Care and Feeding of Unmarried Men (18 page)

“Mmmm. Don't you?”

“I…” He ran his hand over his hair.

As if monster-tamer Nash could ever feel less than the vital, larger-than-life man that he was!

“I think I could,” he finally said, his gaze never leaving Eve's face. “I think maybe I could.”

Jemima stared as the truth of what she was seeing dawned upon her. What Nash had just communicated, not in so many words, but in that strange huskiness in his voice, in that odd stillness of his body, in the way he was looking at Eve, was that size and vitality were no guarantee. He was vulnerable.

Her big, brash, overbearing brother was at risk. His heart could be broken. He could be made insignificant if the right person didn't offer her heart back.
He's on the verge of falling in love and he doesn't even know it.

She watched him reach over and take Eve's hand. All those Farrahs, whom he'd grumbled about for leaving him, Jemima thought. The truth was that he'd never cared enough to hold onto a single one of them.

But now, she could tell, he never wanted to let Eve go.

A certainty started in the soles of her feet and moved up her legs, straightening her knees so she had to rise from her chair.

So this was what love looked like. She hadn't recognized it, because though she'd played dozens of roles, she'd never played someone in love. But now she knew its appearance. And she already knew what it felt like.

She'd been right from the first. She was in love with the SOB next door.

But Charlie—pardon, Mack Chandler—talented actor that he was, had just been acting when he'd seduced her heart.

Jemima drew in a deep, calming breath. She couldn't let him trample her to desert dust by not loving her back! She still had to work with him, and she was going to work with him. She
was
.

But how could she even the obscenely tipped scales?

Only one thought came to mind: By taking revenge.

A
s they passed through the gate leading to the Kona Kai's residential area after their return to the spa, Nash watched Jemima pick up speed, leaving him and Eve in the dust. “She's worrying me,” he said out loud.

“And that's news?”

“I'm counting down the hours until she goes onto the set.”

“So you can get back to your life.”

He nodded. “Back to business.” His hand found hers, squeezed. “That's why I left your room so early this morning. I had to make a call to my team, and I didn't want to disturb you.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “So considerate.”

He grinned. “I thought so, until you looked ready to
bite my head off and then spit it into your latte this morning.”

“I didn't look anything of the kind!”

“Remember, I know you have this thing about me and sex. Admit it, when you woke up you were itching for round two and got mad because I wasn't there to satisfy it.”

She tried to sneer. “I don't need a man, even a big strong one like you, Nash. I can satisfy myself any time I feel like it.”

“Not when I stole the batteries out of your vibrator.”

Her jaw dropped. “You did not.”

“Little blue gadget? Works underwater? But guess what, darlin'?” He leaned close to her outraged face and lowered his voice. “So do I.”

She wrenched her hand from his to stab her finger at his chest. “I don't believe you went into my drawer, and if you did,
your
gadget is going to be blue.”

“I was just lookin' for a mint. For you. You've got yourself some mean morning breath, Party Girl.”

Slamming her luscious lips together, she made that little foot-stamp sound again. God, it delighted him to push her buttons. And confronting an outraged Eve was far easier than confronting what he'd felt out at that desert house.

What he'd seen. Eve, so damn vulnerable.

He didn't think she'd even realized that she'd said “I feel insignificant,” and he knew she hadn't realized what it had done to him.

He didn't want any more weak women in his life.

Except Eve wasn't weak. Good Lord, she wasn't weak. But there were tender places inside of her. The fact that she didn't know about them, didn't see them or even acknowledge them, made her only that much
more compelling. Trouble was, uncovering those hidden tender spots inside of her opened up hidden spots inside of him. Made him feel things in a way he hadn't felt in a long while, things which he didn't want to feel now. Those kinds of feelings could be dangerous.

They were closing in on her front door, and he slid an arm around her waist. He could keep what was bubbling between them on a superficial level, though. He knew he could. “I'm at your service for round two now.”

She slid a look at him from her ice-blue eyes. “Is that right?”

“Uh-hmm.” He pictured that Brazilian bikini wax in his mind. “Hard and aching.”

“That's such a shame.” She held up one hand and wiggled her fingers. “I have a nail appointment in ten minutes.”

“I'm sorry the manicurist is going to lose out on the appointment, but something tells me you're not much of a tipper.”

Red brightened her cheeks, and he had to hold back another laugh. She really had no experience getting razzed by a guy. Before she could slap him or stomp off, he grabbed her hand and kissed her knuckles. “Come on, Party Girl, let's celebrate the day.”

Walking backward, he tugged her toward her door.

“I'm going to celebrate getting rid of you,” she said, dragging her feet. “Last night was it, Nash. You took off before I could make that clear.”

“So that's what all that snoring was supposed to mean.” Her feet stopped altogether, and the horrified expression crossing her face made him take it all back. “Okay, okay, you don't
really
snore. Just heavy breathing punctuated by the occasional snort.”

But she still appeared horrified, and he realized she wasn't gazing at him but over his shoulder. He turned his head.

On the mat in front of her doorstep lay a limp, dirty pile of something furry. Something lifeless.

He swung his body around, but Eve caught his elbow before he could move toward the door. “What is it?” she cried. Her fingers dug into his skin. “Is it Adam?”

Her personality-challenged cat? The orangeish color was right. “I'll see.” In four strides he was bent over the mat, then he relaxed and plucked the thing between two fingers and held it up.

Rearing back, Eve gasped.

“It's a stuffed animal,” he reassured her. A dirty and neglected-looking stuffed animal, though yes, a cat, and with one missing ear. “Some kid must have dropped it.” Stuffing dribbled out of a tear across its neck.

“Sure,” she said, edging closer. “A stuffed animal. Some kid must have dropped it.”

She didn't seem convinced, though, so he shook it, more stuffing drifting through the air like snow. “It's not your cat, Eve.”

But her strained expression and brittle posture were giving him the willies. He tossed the drooping toy away and pulled her into his arms. Her body shivered.

“What's the matter, darlin'?”

She burrowed her cold nose against the warm skin at the side of his throat, and now he shivered. “Darlin'?”

“Hold me, Nash.”

His arms tightened. “I am holding you. Can't you feel me?”

“Not yet,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

He managed to get her inside, and she managed a
little smile once the door was locked behind them. “Would you think I'm crazy if I changed my mind?”

“If this is about that nail appointment, I'll think you're crazy if you don't.”

She rubbed her fingertips over his mouth, and he caught one, nipped. Her body trembled against his, yet still she shook her head. “Arrogant man.”

“One of my best qualities.” He backstepped her toward the bedroom, unwilling to let her out of his embrace.

“You remember the rules?”

He rolled his eyes.

“And you're going away.”

It wasn't a rebuke, he knew, or a wish for more. It was reassurance she was looking for.

Isn't that special?
he thought. A woman he was about to bed wanted to be certain he would be moving along. A bubble of primitive, violent heat rose inside him, and he drew his hands into fists to fight the feeling off.

Hell, he should be glad about that, though. Eve Caruso, party girl, superbeauty, was too much trouble, was too many contradictions for a man who needed to take the emotional low road for everyone's sake.

“I'm only here for Jem,” he reassured them both. “As soon as she's settled, I'll be saddling up my horse and heading straight out of town.”

Leaving Eve behind and nothing, he vowed, else.

C
harlie shuffled the cards and laid out yet another hand of solitaire. A single-person game. Perfect for a solitary man.

Not that he was feeling sorry for himself or anything.

It wouldn't be so bad if he weren't stuck here in Palm Springs. A few more days and he would have his last follow-up with the plastic surgeon. By then the scars would be faded enough for him to leave the seclusion of the Kona Kai. But God, what wouldn't he give to be back in Hollywood right now, on Tuesday, midnight basketball night.

They'd been keeping it secret for years, a minor miracle in Tinseltown, but testament to how much the men in the league enjoyed—no, needed—the activity. The youngest son of the president of one of the biggest talent agencies in town ran a community gym, and for
a hefty annual donation, once a week he made the basketball courts accessible to the movie industry's upper echelon—from actors to agents, producers to screenwriters.

They'd talked about building some courts for their exclusive use somewhere, but they'd decided it wouldn't be the same. Midnight basketball league needed a gym that was still warm from other bodies. Real basketball needed layers of both old and fresh sweat and walls that never seemed to stop echoing high fives and curses and referee whistles.

Next week he'd be back though, ready to kick Larry Michaels's ass as thanks for coming up with the idiotic idea of meeting Jemima under false pretenses.

Okay, fine, he probably could have called a halt to it himself, on the first or second night of their acquaintance. And certainly by the third or fourth, when he was sure there was more chemistry between them than could be blamed on the painkillers. But he hadn't been that smart.

It was the kind of chemistry that would play well on the big screen between two actors, but in real life it could wreak havoc in the lives of two people who were twenty years apart.

One fresh and beautiful. The second tired and aging and old enough to know that what starts out as fun and games could lead to aches and pain.

From the other side of the partition, he heard the screen to Jemima's sliding glass door open with a long
scri-i-itch.

And to this tired and aging dude, who by rights should have been contemplating a second career in commercials for Metamucil and arthritis medication, it sounded exactly like the opening of a zipper.

Holding his breath, Charlie strained to hear what Jemima was doing next door. With luck, she wanted a mere taste of the fresh air or a quick turn on her patio. Then she'd go back inside and do whatever she'd been doing for the past few days since he'd revealed his Mack Chandler alter ego. He hadn't caught a single glimpse of her after that, though he'd been assured by the maid who came in every day that Jemima was still living next door.

Living next door, still untouched by her stalker—and probably still hating his guts for his deception.

Her footsteps rang clearly in the night air, then he heard her scrape the legs of her lounge chair against the pavement. She was dragging it closer to the partition!

He considered jumping up and running back inside, but he was a mature man, wasn't he? Wasn't that the goddamn problem, after all? So instead he'd sit right where he was and pretend not to be here.

He was supposed to be good at that pretending stuff. He had two Oscars to prove it.

Jemima settled onto the cushions of her lounge chair. He heard the rustle of clothes, the crinkle of paper—she must be reading a book? a magazine?—her little sigh, like Goldilocks finding just the right bed.

Oh, Christ, why was he thinking of beds?

Then he heard the rustle of clothes again. A dress, one of those flimsy, vintage-y things Jemima sometimes wore. In his mind's eye he could see it, could see the hemline of the flowered fabric being drawn up her creamy leg, over her knee, toward her thigh.

Charlie bit the inside of his cheek to wake his stupid self up. He couldn't hear all that! He could hear clothes, granted, but not what they looked like, and certainly not the flesh they might or might not be revealing.

There was that crinkle of paper again.

Another little sigh.

The tiny creak of the lounge chair as she settled deeper into its cushions.

There couldn't be more than four feet and a two-by-four separating them, so that
was
a sweet, feminine little moan.

“Peter,” she whispered. “Oh, Peter.”

Charlie's mouth went dry.

“I can't go on like this.”

She was unbuttoning the buttons of her dress, one of dozens of buttons that marched down its center. “I want you, Peter.”

Her fingers brushed the tops of a pristine white bra, the same bra Peter had watched her fold in the laundry room. Her slim fingers had moved over it with practical intent, but he'd been fascinated by the way she'd maneuvered it into a small dome by turning the cups one into the other, inside out.

Turning him inside out.

You can't want me.

And as if she heard the words in his head, she responded aloud. “Don't you want to touch me, too? Feel my warmth?”

I can get that from a hundred women.

“I don't mean that kind of warmth.” With a twist of her fingers, she unlatched that white bra that looked so new, so clean, that would smell of every good thing Peter had forgotten about America and women and soldiering while he'd been fighting for his life in that mercy-forsaken country. “This kind.”

Pushing aside the bra, she placed her palm over her heart. He pretended to stare at her hand, pledging allegiance to—what? Not to him. Not to what could
be—but it was really her breasts that he was looking at, their slight rise and tight, puckered nipples. Girlish breasts too sweet and too innocent for a man like him, who'd touched so much dirt and death.

His breath and his pulse sounded loud in his head, louder than when he'd stepped into that dark hut in the mountains and faced the feral gleam in the eyes of other frightened men who, by a stroke of birth and fate, fought for the opposite side.

Just frightened men like himself, that's all he saw, even as he tried to remember the towers, and young girls, and the scent and feel of clean clothes that were the reasons he was about to pull the trigger. Because to do that, he needed something more than the vague notion that he should want to stay alive for some vague place he barely remembered as home.

“You deserve me, Peter. I deserve you.”

Peter. Peter.
Peter.
Charlie shook his head, shaking himself out of the skin of the character that Jemima's reading of the script had draped over him. She'd been reading the part of Deborah, who put everything on the line to pull war veteran Peter out of the ugly abyss where he'd been wallowing since his tour in Afghanistan.

For weeks Peter watched his neighbor Deborah go through the motions of life—washing windows, doing laundry, pleasing herself with sex—and through that relearned how to live himself. How to find a reason to go on. Joy.

“I feel like a fraud,” Charlie said out loud. “I'm going to be making a movie about a man scarred from battle when the closest I've come to that is confronting a scalpel on a Palm Springs hospital bed.”

He walked around the partition to face Jemima.
She was stretched out on the lounge chair, wearing cropped jeans and a sweatshirt, the script tossed on the ground beside her. “Don't feel bad,” she said. “I've never washed any windows.”

His gaze flicked from her face to the ruffled papers, then back to her face. “What was that reading of yours all about?”

She shrugged. “My way of doing a Deborah on you.”

“You wanted to provoke a reaction.”

“I wanted to see if you were like self-indulgent Peter, who merely pretends he doesn't want Deborah.”

“That's for her. Peter pretends he doesn't want Deborah because he's thinking—”

“Only of himself. And despite that, the script calls for Deborah to be ever-understanding, ever-loving, no matter how little he gives back to her.”

“He believes he's doing her a favor. He knows she could get so much more from someone else. Someone younger.” Charlie touched the small suture-bumps behind his ear. “Not so scarred.”

“Well, FYI.” Jemima crossed her arms over her waist and tapped the fingers of one hand against her cast. “Deborah would love to be interested in someone else, but that's not in the cards. Or in this case, the script.”

Charlie smiled a little. “You're going to bring some feistiness to her?”

“Face it, Charlie, right now Deborah's a doormat.”

“Young.”

“Doormat.” She sang it out.

Charlie smiled again. “So what would she really say to Peter?”

In one graceful move, Jemima stood, her bare feet balancing on the cushions of her chair. She threw her arms wide. “That I'm young and juicy and if you knew
what was good for you, you'd stop all your boring self-sacrifice and give me what I want!”

Was that Deborah talking to Peter, or Jemima talking to him? “Jem. Really. You can't—”

“I can. I do. You, Charlie. I'm giving you one last chance. I want you.”

He stepped back. “Jem…”

“I had this plan. I was going to accept your disinterest in my heart but make you want my body anyway and then leave you flat in revenge, but that's not what adults do.”

He tried laughing. “You're no adult.”

“Turned twenty-one yesterday.”

He frowned. “I missed your birthday.”

“You're going to miss a lot.”

With a sigh, he dragged over a chair and sat down. Both knees crunched, reminding him of all the life he'd lived in the twenty years that was between them. How could he explain this to her?

Movies,
he thought. They always talked about movies.

“Look, you want this out adult-to-adult? Then, fine. The truth is, I'm not disinterested in one thing about you, but…it's better this way, okay? It's like…” He ran his hand through his hair. “Remember? Bill never touched Scarlett.”

Jemima plopped down on the cushions again, her expression curious. “Is that what he told you?”

Charlie shook his head. “I'm talking about the
film,
about
Lost in Translation.
Everyone loved that movie because the hero had sex with the singer and not with the starlet.”

“I think she was a philosophy student. And I don't
think the audience liked him having sex with the singer. I didn't.”

Frustration edged his voice. “You know what I mean.”

“I think everyone loved that movie because when the character of Bob whispered in the ear of the character Charlotte, they could make up their own ending.”

“Yeah? Well I'm guessing Bill murmured. ‘Admit it, Scarlett, sushi pizza blows.'”

“And
I
think Bob said, ‘Mack Chandler better not use me as a rationale for his own middle-aged fears.'”

“It's you who could really get hurt!” She was twenty-one years old. He was twice that, and twice smarter when it came to sidestepping potential disaster.

Which meant he had no reason to stop Jemima from rolling off the lounger and padding toward her sliding door. She glanced back at him, the light from the outdoor fixture washing down, washing any sign of age from her face. Except her eyes looked old, dark, and too cold. Too distant already.

“Then I guess, Charlie,” she said, and her voice creaked like his knees, “all we'll ever have is Palm Springs.”