The Care and Feeding of Unmarried Men (7 page)

“You'll take good care of him?” she whispered, unable to help herself. When their father had disappeared, Cosimo had stepped in, as much as he'd been able, to take care of his granddaughters. Even though he'd been preoccupied with regaining the mob boss's powers that he'd given over to his missing son. Even though Bianca had wanted little to do with her husband's family. “Promise me.”

Nino hesitated. “If there was anyone I'd make a promise to, Eve…” There was an expression in his eyes that made him almost seem human. “But not that promise. I can't guarantee it. Not even for you.”

She looked away.

“Cosimo has a promise he wants you to make, though,” Nino continued.

Her gaze jerked back. “Me?”

Nino nodded. “Do what you can on the social circuit, he says. Make it clear that all is under control and all is well.”

“What? Outside of family occasions, I don't generally party with the Mafia.” And she wasn't planning on partying at all.

“You party with all kinds of people who have all kinds of friends,” Nino returned. “And word gets around. The word Cosimo wants you to spread at
every lunch, dinner, and fancy dance you attend is that there will be a smooth transition of command within the California Mafia. That power plays are out…or else.”

She stared at him. “But…but…” Her plan to live like a recluse, like a nun behind the safe walls of the Kona Kai, was disintegrating before her very eyes. She might be able to ignore what the SEC wanted, but she couldn't ignore Cosimo. “I can't go traipsing around Palm Springs delivering threats.”

“Then figure out a more charming method in which to get the point across.” Nino was already rising from his chair, as if that was all there was to it.

“Good-bye, Giuseppina,” he said. Then he leaned down to Eve. His mouth brushed her cheek. His whisper slithered into her ear. “And I'll be watching—you
and
Nash Cargill.”

Nash. An image of him burst in her mind again. Big, strong, his arms reassuring, his voice a laidback rumble, his mouth so hot and hard on hers. So right. But oh, so wrong.

The only good thing about her grandfather's request was that stepping outside the Kona Kai's “convent” walls meant she'd have less opportunity to run into him.

Her hand moved to that sensitive spot on her neck again. One of the many bad things about her grandfather's request was how much the idea of not seeing Nash seemed to matter so much.

J
emima Cargill threw herself onto the second cushioned lounger in the shade of the poolside, private cabana. Her purple-casted wrist clunked against the aluminum arm, and the sound caused the occupant of the other lounger to shift his head toward her.

“Good God, you're going to hurt yourself with all that pent-up energy,” he said in his Aussie-accented voice.

It wasn't energy but pure nerves, Jemima thought, slanting a glance at the man she knew simply as “Charlie.” As usual, his long body was covered by a white spa robe. He wore a wide-brimmed khaki-colored bush hat, wraparound Ray-Bans, and a thin white silk scarf covering him from nose to throat.

“If I didn't see your big bony hands and feet, you could make me believe you're the Invisible Man.”

“1933 movie with Claude Rains, 1940 with Vincent Price, the TV show in the late fifties or the SciFi Channel version in the late 1990s?”

It was this kind of remark that made Jemima close to certain that her newfound friend was a veteran of the TV and movie biz like she was. “Or else you're a hopeless geek,” she said out loud, “and that could be true as well.”

“What are you talking about?”

She shook her head, not wanting to let on that she'd been thinking about his past or his profession—though it was becoming something of an obsession of hers. She only knew his first name and that he'd had some major facial surgery approximately four weeks before. Thanks to their side-by-side bungalows and shared suffering of insomnia, they'd struck up a friendship during the three weeks she'd been staying at the Kona Kai. But that didn't mean she could comfortably pry for anything beyond what he offered. Her agent, Larry Michaels, had recommended this spa precisely because the privacy of the guests was held sacrosanct.

“What exactly is
sacrosanct
?” she mused aloud again.

Charlie settled his wide shoulders against the cushion. “Sacred, you ignorant teenage Yank.”

“Hey, maybe we could take a meeting and pitch that as a sitcom idea, you know? There was Sabrina the Teenage Witch, ours could be Jemima the Teenage Yank.”

“You left out the ignorant part. And what would you do episode after episode? Instant Messenger your posse? Crib term papers off the Internet? Have sex with your boyfriend in the backseat of his parents' Hummer?”

She frowned at him. “You've either been watching
reruns of
The OC
again or you missed a dose of your meds.”

Charlie shook his head. “Never mind.”

Jemima swiveled on the chair so that she could face him, sitting tailor-style. Her gaze brushed across his long fingered hands, linked over his flat belly. When the recovery pain got to him he'd massage them to distract himself. “I'm too old, anyway,” she said absently. “Almost twenty-one.”

“Don't talk to me about too old,” Charlie muttered. His right thumb stroked along his left forefinger. “You're a baby.”

And that remark was just another reason she suspected Charlie was a player in the entertainment industry. Not necessarily an actor, because she thought she'd recognize the accented voice—if he was an A- or B-lister anyway—and she couldn't place his. But even producers and directors and agents liked to keep up a youthful appearance. Men included.

His right thumb went to work on his index finger, and with a sigh, Jemima reached over and grabbed his left hand between hers.

“Hey!” He tried to jerk away from her grasp.

“Relax. I give the best hand massage in Hollywood.” The truth was, she had a thing for Charlie's hands. They'd begun their acquaintance by playing gin rummy, and her admiration for his card-handling abilities—he could do an in-air riffle shuffle and another that he called the Mulholland Bridge—had morphed into an undeniable fascination for his long, mobile fingers and wide palms.

She placed the back of his knuckles against her knee and began kneading the tips of his thumb and his
pinkie. His skin was warm and rougher than hers. Masculine.

Male.

From beneath her lashes, she glanced over at Charlie, but she couldn't tell a thing he was thinking with those dark glasses covering half his face. “What color are your eyes?”

“At the moment? Somewhere between purple, green, and yellow.”

“Not your bruises, your irises.” She moved to his forefinger and ringman, massaging them with the same kneading action from tip to palm.

“Blue.” He crossed one ankle over the other, and she verified that the curling hair she could see on them was a dark gold. Charlie was blonde, then. Blue-eyed. Old enough to warrant plastic surgery. Though, come to think of it, that could be to rectify some horrible facial defect or accidental injury.

Finished with his index finger, she began to work his palm with both of her thumbs, her cast only a minor hindrance. “What was that Mel Gibson film where he played the strange recluse with all the scars?”

“
The Man Without a Face
. Oversentimental story line, but Mel gets points for choosing something so challenging for his directorial debut.”

Definitely face-lift for Charlie then, Jemima decided. He wouldn't be so matter-of-fact if the movie's premise mirrored his own situation. Not to mention that casual “Mel.” It definitely sounded as if Charlie knew him.

And she wanted to know Charlie. More and more as the days—and nights—went on. “Have you ever been married?”

He tried pulling his hand away again, but she held fast. “What's this all about?” he asked.

“Just curious about your love life,” she said lightly. “You tell me about yours, and I'll tell you about mine.”

“You're too young to have had a love life. A love event maybe. Possibly a love weekend. No life.”

She thought his skin had grown warmer. “You're starting to sound like my brother, Nash. I'm not your typical twenty-year-old, you know.”

“I know,” he muttered, tugging at his hand again.

She let him have it back, only to pull the other into her lap. “When I was eleven I played a runaway-turned-prostitute. I was a college student with a gambling addiction at sixteen and the opportunistic mistress of a drug lord last year. Not to mention the mental ward patient, the daughter of an international terrorist, and the teenage environmentalist who went head-to-head with a sleazy senator and the EPA.”

Charlie's fingers closed over her hands, startling her. “Playing roles isn't living them, sweetheart. Acting out experiences isn't actually having them.”

Her heart seized. “You've seen me on the screen, then. You think I'm lousy.” She didn't want that to matter so much.

He released her hands and drew his own back. “I don't think you're lousy. Didn't you tell me you're making a movie with Mack Chandler next month?”

That was one reason why she wanted Charlie to think she was good. She'd settle for halfway decent. The idea of making a movie with American icon Mack Chandler had her shaking in her rubber-wedged sandals. Her apprehension had caused her agent to suggest this Palm Springs getaway. “Take some time to relax,”
he'd said. “Get your head ready for the next project. You won't miss the L.A. scene that much.”

She didn't miss the L.A. scene at all. She'd been hanging around that scene as long as she could remember. Once you'd been let through a velvet rope by a bouncer who recognized your face only to have your feet barfed on by the “famous” contestant of the latest reality television show, you realized there had to be dimmer lights and better odors elsewhere.

With Jemima's mother now focused on her new husband, it was Jemima's first ever opportunity to run her career and her life on her own. Though she'd been itching for independence for years, now that it was actually upon her, she felt as unsteady as a California fault line.

She'd lived her life guided by others—a script telling her what to say, a director telling her how to move, her mother telling her what to do. Now, how did she know what she really felt?

“What do you think about him, Charlie? Mack Chandler, I mean?” Would he see right through to her insecurities?

Charlie sat straighter to reach for the tall glass of iced tea to his right. “Why would you ask my opinion?”

“You seem to know movies. And you don't pull any punches when giving your opinions about us Yanks.”

He set the glass back on the small table beside him. Jemima realized he couldn't have taken a drink from it without moving the scarf he wore and exposing some of his face to her. “I think it'll be a great movie. What did you say it's about?”

“Mack Chandler plays Peter, a tough, seen-it-all vet of the war on terrorism. I play his neighbor, Deborah, who reminds him what it's like to live and love again.”
Not only did the script call for on-screen kisses, easy work for a girl who'd exchanged spit with a narcotics kingpin in her last film, but this time she'd agreed to do more.

“There's a real love scene, Charlie,” she confessed, her face going hot. “Full nudity.”

He shrugged. Easy for him to be nonchalant.

“You'll wear a body stocking,” he said. “Or those little stick-on things.”

“You think that will make it any easier? The last time I was naked on film, I was eighteen months old and running through a living room in a diaper commercial.”

Charlie shrugged again. “Mack Chandler will make you comfortable.”

Would he? Could he? Suddenly, men were such an enigma to her. Just as was her reaction to them. For example, did it make sense that she was so attracted to a man whose business she didn't know and whose face she'd never seen? No. Yet Charlie made her laugh, and even in those long hours of the night when she couldn't sleep, he made her feel both rested and restless. They talked about nothing, but it seemed like everything.

What was she supposed to make of that?

This male-female weirdness didn't give her confidence about her first face-to-face with Mack Chandler. And if Eve was right, it could very well happen that night.

“There's a rumor MC's going to be at the party I'm invited to this evening,” she blurted out. Her nerves had been jittering about it all afternoon.

Charlie stilled. Then his head turned away. “You know better than to listen to rumors, unless it's true
you
are
the secret love child of Warren Beatty and Katie Couric.”

She laughed, then flopped back against the cushioned lounger, thrusting out her legs. “I
knew
you could make me feel better. I'm really, really hoping you're right and that he'll be a no-show. You see, I have this terrible premonition that I'm going to make a fool of myself in front of him.”

“Maybe MC should be worried about making a fool of himself in front of you.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. I don't think MC has ever crushed on me.” Now why had she said that? But it was out and…and she wouldn't miss Charlie's reaction for the world.

Charlie was directing those enigmatic dark glasses her way again. “When have you met Chandler?”

She flung out a hand. “I've never met him. I've just always had the hots for him, that's all.”

Charlie was silent a moment, then he cleared his throat. “You should have the hots for someone closer to your own age. One of those young up-and-comers on the cover of
Us
or
Entertainment Weekly
.”

“Nah. Guys like that, they're dazzled by stuff that doesn't interest me. I told you, I'm not your typical almost-twenty-one-year-old.” Jemima traced an aimless pattern on the hard surface of her cast. “I've been in this business for more than nineteen years. I've attended dozens of premieres and walked miles of red carpet. I've been to enough perfume launches to fill an ocean and to more than my share of bashes hosted by stoned runway models and their high, rock star husbands.”

“So world weary.”

There was wry amusement in his voice, and his
hand reached out as if to stroke her cheek. It stalled, though, then dropped to his lap.

Her stomach dipped, uncertain. Did she want him to touch her?

God,
yes,
she wanted him to touch her. But she couldn't be sure why. She'd played so many emotions over the years that she wasn't entirely certain she knew when she genuinely felt any of them.

To cover up her awkwardness, she shot Charlie a grin. “So, do you think I have a chance with Mack—outside of the movie script, that is?”

He shoved out of his chair, his movements abrupt. He stared down at her from his full height. “You're a little girl playing at things you don't know about.”

It was so close to what she'd been thinking herself that she had to swallow a sudden lump in her throat. “Wh-what?”

“How can you want a chance with a man you don't even know?”

She didn't answer. Because she wasn't ready to tell the truth. She didn't know if she'd ever be ready. Without the words laid out for her on a page, scripted by someone else, how could she say that the stranger she really wanted a chance with was the stranger standing just two feet away?