The Supermodel's Best Friend (A Romantic Comedy) (19 page)

“Now I’m really interested. Was this a hidden
camera? Any self-portraits?”

“Afraid not. All of you.”

He grinned. “None of Alex?”

She’d walked right into that one. Throwing
the stick into the bushes, she smiled brightly at him. “Loads. I
don’t have to hide, so I just click away.”

“Hmph. I bet he’d love to pose.” He shoved
his hands in his pockets and strode over a jagged crack in the
path. “A born poser, Alex.”

“That your snobby upbringing shining through,
Miles?”

“Me?” Miles turned to her. “You have been
listening to Alex.”

“You call him a poser because he’s ambitious.
Determined to make something of himself.”

“I call him a poser because he’s a
poser.”

“Snob.”

“That too.”

“I mean you.”

“I’m not a snob, but you’d know that if you
were processing your analysis with a little more objectivity.”

She laughed. “I’m processing just fine.”

“No, you’re indulging in heavy bias. You want
to like him, ergo, you’ll ignore the evidence before your eyes. You
don’t want to like me, ergo”—he raised his eyebrow and held out his
arms—“you ignore the evidence before your eyes.”

She brushed past him. He thought he was so
damn cute. “‘Poser’ implies somebody pretending to be something
he’s not, as though he’s not entitled to be educated and
respected—”

“He’s a phony, Lucy, always has been. He
cares more about how he looks than who he is. He’s been putting on
the show so long I bet he’s even fooled himself.”

“What about him is a lie? You met him at
Stanford yourself. He must have gone to law school—or do you think
he made that up?”

“Forget it. The more I say about him, the
more you’ll convince yourself he’s Mr. Right.”

“I’m not like that.”

He looked at her. “Maybe not. Never mind. I
shouldn’t say any more. He’s the last person I want to be thinking
about. Well, maybe not the last. Second to last.” He kicked a rock.
“Third to last.”

She studied the tension in his broad
shoulders as he walked ahead of her, debating how much she could
pry. The sun was still high but tilting west, shining in their
eyes—at least until the blanket of fog crept back in.

“Is your father in first place?” She
remembered the scary blond woman with the mean eyes. “Or would that
be your stepmother?”

He swung his head around to look at her. “How
do you figure that?”

She stared back, lifted an eyebrow. “Just
processing the analysis.”

“Hmmph.” He gestured for her to walk ahead of
him. A fork in the path was marked with a tidy wooden sign; a
couple of miles ahead was the ocean, to the left a single loop
trail through the wetlands and back to the lodge. He looked at his
watch then up at the sky. “Fog’s coming in again. If you want to
get back by five-thirty, maybe we should just head back now.”

“Nice try. Ask one little question, and
you’re already trying to get rid of me.” She began striding down
the path to the ocean. “It’s an easy trail. Two miles won’t take
very long.”

“It’s a lot colder than I expected.”

“Look, it’s all right if you want to take a
rain check, but I’m going to keep going. I can handle a little walk
by myself. I’m a big girl.” Looking back, she saw the look on his
face and stuck out her tongue. “In all the important ways.” That
made his look get even more suggestive so she went back to him and
poked him in the chest.

Capturing her wrist, he held her hand against
his heart and looked down at her, a small smile on his lips.
“Wherever you go, I go, big girl.”

She froze. He felt warm and vital under her
palm, a living mountain of a man. Something old inside her soul
rose up in recognition.
I know this one
.

His grip softened. His thumb stroked the back
of her hand, sending tendrils of sensation up her arms, to the back
of her neck, down her spine.

Then he released her hand and lightly touched
her shoulder. “Let’s go see this ocean. Find out what all the fuss
is about.”

She let her breath out slowly and swallowed.
He waited for her to resume walking, and in a moment they were on
their way single file down the path, through the golden, matted
grasses. The creek met up with a widening river, and Highway 1 came
into sight on an elevated bridge. They walked under the road, into
the wall of wind.

Lucy used the time to reboot her brain.
Reattach the cranium to her nerve endings, apply overrides to the
hormonal malfunctions going rampant in her body.

Yes, he was adorable. He was big and sweet
and charming, had dimples she wanted to touch, a trustworthy
demeanor, sensuous hands, gentle eyes.

All wonderful qualities, qualities that would
be great in a pal or a boyfriend, but she was looking for a
different kind of man. She’d wasted eight years waiting for Dan to
be “ready” for marriage. There wasn’t time to waste eight more. Men
had it easy; they could dawdle. Women might have more years at the
end of their lives, but her ovaries didn’t know that. They hadn’t
even realized the Ice Age was over. They wanted her to have babies
before her stone tool wound got infected or she got eaten by a
giant prehistoric bird with obsidian-sharp claws.

Lucy glanced back at Miles, reflecting that
he would be a good candidate for continuing the species. She could
easily imagine him whacking a flying predator with a club, a heavy
fur pelt on his broad, powerful shoulders—

He grinned at her, his dimple flashing.
“What?”

This was why she had to use her brain, not
biochemistry, for decision-making. Flying predators were not on any
of her lists.

She swung her head around and focused on the
path ahead. “Nothing.”

He tromped up next to her. “What?”

“You and your dad look alike,” she said, if
just to make that dimple go away and stop tempting her.

Sure enough, his smile fell. “There’s an
evolutionary advantage to looking like your father. Helps pressure
the man to stick around. Not that it always works.”

“Just thinking about evolution myself.”

“Yeah?” A twinkle came back into his eyes.
“Was that when you were admiring my body?” He patted his chest,
wiggled an eyebrow. “Millions of years of natural selection went
into this physique, baby.”

She bit back a grin. “It’s very nice.”

His gaze raked down over her body, came back
to her face. “You think so?”

“Of course,” she said, now smiling, amused he
looked a little insecure. “I’d kill for a little of your…
stature.”

The wind blew the hair across her face. He
reached out and tucked it behind her ear, staring down at her. Then
he lowered his hand and cupped her face. Her heart thudded,
expecting a kiss, and she told herself to reach up and pull his
hand away and keep walking. But when he dropped his arm and strode
past her, she was tempted to complain.

“What kind of birds are those?” he asked her
briskly, pointing at the beach.

“Seagulls.”

“Ah. Right.”

She snorted, passing him, in control of her
biology again. She jogged ahead to look for tide pools.

* * *

“Thanks for not prying,” Miles said.

Barefoot in the surf, Lucy turned and caught
his gaze, her green eyes matching the ocean behind her. Her cheeks
were flushed pink from the wind. He noticed freckles along the
bridge of her nose and he lost his train of thought, absorbed in
the details of her face.

“I’m a little curious, I admit,” she
said.

He dropped to his knees in the sand and dug a
hole until he hit water. He mounded up hills of wet sand, imagining
it was her body, wondering if that made him a creep. “My father and
I haven’t spoken to each other for a long time.”

Lucy sank down to the sand next to him and
began digging her own hole about two feet away. They worked in
parallel, each making a tower just out of reach of the waves.
Finally she asked, “What happened?”

Should he tell her? He glanced up and was
surprised she wasn’t watching him but starting her hands, submerged
in a sandy puddle. The wind whipped her coppery hair around her
cheeks. He saw she had a triple piercing in her left ear, and was
surprised he hadn’t noticed earlier. Three little pearls, not much
larger than the freckles on her nose, outlined the curve of her ear
like stars.

“I wouldn’t think you’d like pearls,” he
said. “Kind of old-fashioned for you, aren’t they?”

Now she looked up. “They were my mother’s.
She died when I was nine.”

He saw the calm challenge in her eyes.
If
I can talk about it, you can
, she seemed to say.

He bent down for another handful of sand. “I
was three. Barely. I don’t remember her very well.” His memories of
a little apartment with a huge, smelly dog were more vivid than his
memory of his own mother’s face, which had always bothered him.
“That’s when I went to live with my father, but it was my
stepmother—not Heather, but a couple of marriages earlier—who
really took me in. I still think of Pat as my mom. She lives in
Arizona now, a great human being, generous to a fault. I spend the
holidays with her.”

“How old were you when—” she stopped herself.
“Sorry. Prying again.”

“It’s all right. I was in sixth grade. He
dumped her for an ‘on-air personality.’ A TV reporter. That one
only lasted a year. Then, when I was in high school, he married
Heather.”

“Ladies’ man, your dad?”

“To hear him tell it he’s just very honest.
Not one to sneak around. When he wanted to be with a different
woman, he said so.” Miles pounded the tower of sand he was
building. “I’ve never bought that, but maybe that’s because he
seemed to have different standards about different kinds of women.
As if the women who worked for him didn’t count.”

“Your mother… ”

“One of the secretaries at the firm. In case
you’re keeping track, that would have been after wife number one
and during wife number two,” he said. “More proof Pat—my
ex-stepmother—is a wonderful human being. She never ever let on
that I was anything but one of the family.” He cleared his throat,
fighting down unwanted emotion. “Even though I was a reminder of my
father’s disloyalty. If my mother hadn’t died, Pat might never have
found out I existed.”

Lucy traced a circle in the sand with a
stick. “What happened?”

“Car accident. Yours?”

“Cancer.” She shrugged. “For a long time I
was terrified of being an orphan. My mom had died and I knew my
father was much older than any of the other kids’ dads. He’ll be
seventy-five this year.”

Miles realized with some discomfort that he
didn’t know precisely how old his own father was anymore. His
half-brother had mentioned a big seventieth birthday party a few
years back, maybe hoping he’d come. “I suppose I felt a little
vulnerable too. My father’s about that age. Heather… Well, she’s
obviously much younger. Your dad remarried?”

“Just recently, thank God. Trudy is a little
younger and the type to alphabetize her spice jars. Managing my
father’s life is a snap.” She smiled weakly. “Before she came along
I had a lot less free time. My dad is a stereotypical absent-minded
professor—he’d lose his own butt if it wasn’t bolted on. My
stepmother is a gift from heaven.”

“They can be. Especially if you have a large
pool to draw from.”

“So, what’s the story with Blondie?”

“Heather?” He jabbed his fingers into the
sand to make a doorway to his castle. “I don’t like her.”

Lucy choked out a laugh. “I gathered
that.”

He hesitated. Was he really going to tell
her? He watched her work on her own castle. Very carefully, she
dripped wet sand from her pinched fingers, making an impossibly
delicate column reach up to the sky like a tower in a fairy
tale.

He scooped up a handful of wet sand and tried
to imitate her technique. “The problem,” he said slowly, “was that
she liked
me
.”

Lucy moved her hand away from her fragile
creation and stared at him. “How old were you?”

He shrugged. “That wasn’t the problem.”

Her eyes bored into him, deadly serious. “How
old?”

“Old enough. I was a big boy. Just had an
issue with her being my father’s
wife
.”

Lucy crossed her arms over her chest,
ignoring how her hands left clumps of wet sand on her clothes. Her
eyes narrowed. “You were in high school when they got married. Then
dropped out of college your freshman year. So you couldn’t have
been much over eighteen.”

“Alex loves to gossip, doesn’t he?” He dug
his knuckles into the sand to make ramparts. “I would’ve felt
exactly the same way if I’d been twenty-five. It was the disloyalty
that offended me.”

“You were just a kid,” she said fiercely.

He laughed, amused by her protectiveness.
“You’re cute when you’re on the warpath.”

“What did your father do when he found out?”
she asked.

Time to change the subject
. He swiped
his sand castle into the hole and climbed over it on hands and
knees. She leaned back, arms still folded over her chest, but the
fierce gleam in her eyes turned into something else. When his face
was only a few inches from hers, she licked her lips.

His hands were too cold, wet, and sandy to
touch her, but his mouth wasn’t. He moved closer, smiling as a
tendril of her hair tickled his cheek, and kissed her gently on the
lips. She was so sweet. Her mouth was soft under his, yielding, and
he tilted his head to deepen the kiss.

Two cold, sandy hands clamped onto his face
and pushed him away. “Nice try, but I’m not so easily distracted.”
Her voice was low, shaky.

“My father blamed me, we fought, I moved on.
End of story.” He broke free of her grip and kissed the side of her
neck right under the constellation of pearl earrings. He could feel
her pulse racing under his tongue. “This was my plan all along, you
know.”