Mystery Date

by Crystal Green

  She bit her lip as he worked her with his fingers, pushing her toward a place where, hopefully, she was going to see the light.

  * * *

  DURING THE CAR ride to the Sea Breeze Suites where Margot and Leigh were staying for a couple of nights, Leigh answered every question Margot had about the date. Even when they’d gotten back to their room, camped out on their beds while hardly able to even think about getting to sleep yet, Margot didn’t stop her inquisition.

  “Really?” she asked for about the twentieth time. “You’re going on another date with him?”

  The more Margot disbelieved her, the more determined Leigh was to have her next encounter with Callum.

  Leigh Vaughn, with her skinny jeans and a whole new attitude. She hadn’t realized how boring her life was until tonight, when she’d experienced a little bit of adventure.

  And craved more.

  “You bet I’m going back,” she said. “And you know what? If he can play a game with me, I can play just as well. You should’ve seen me at dinner with the honey. You would’ve been proud.”

  Seemingly persuaded, Margot leaned back against the pillows she’d propped against the headboard. Then she smiled like a well-fed cat. “Leigh has arrived.”

  Was that a blush she felt creeping up her face?

  Nah. Women who flirted with unknown men didn’t blush.

  After kicking off her hand-tooled red boots and putting her feet on the mattress, she leaned back against the headboard, too.

  “I’ve been asking myself one question since I left,” she said. “What kind of man invites over a well-known cook he somehow knew from college and cuts out of the date as if his house is on fire?”

  “You really want me to answer that?” In the car, Margot had compared Callum to everyone from Count Dracula to the Marquis de Sade. You just never knew, she said. But now she sighed. “I was on the computer while you were gone, conducting another search of Phi Rho Mu. But there’re no millionaires who matched the name Callum.”

  “Whoever he is, I think he’s kind of shy.”

  “Shy? Some of the things he said to you—especially that opening line about coming—aren’t the stuff shy men say.”

  “Playing a game can make a person brassier than they usually are.” Leigh thought about the moment she’d licked the honey off her fingers and when she’d spread it over the bread with suggestive slowness. “I know that having him in the shadows did something to me. It gave me some...”

  “Power?”

  “Yeah.” Leigh turned her head so she could look at Margot. “I’ve never had power before.”

  “Yes, you have. You’ve got a TV show. You’re a rising star, Leigh. That’s some power.”

  “Business is different.”

  They were both quiet for a moment. In fact, Margot seemed too quiet. And she had that expression on her face that she got whenever she and Leigh talked about their jobs.

  Enough was enough. “What’s going on with you, Marg?”

  It must’ve been the compassionate tone of her voice, because Margot closed her eyes, then put on an embarrassed smile.

  “I was going to tell you sometime or another. Might as well be now.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “More than okay. In most ways.” She tucked a dark strand of hair behind her ear. “Do you know why I’m not writing the ‘single woman on the go’ books anymore?”

  Something was already sinking inside Leigh’s chest. “No.”

  Margot shrugged. “My publisher canceled my last contract. Sales were declining, they said.”

  “Oh, Margot.” Leigh sat away from the headboard.

  She held up a hand. “No pity, please. Don’t they say that when a door closes on you, a window opens? Well, that’s what happened with this new blog and the ‘city girl goes country’ book I’m working on. You know the blog’s getting a lot of hits, and maybe that could lead to another publisher buying a book or two. And then there’s Clint.” Margot got a dreamy look in her eyes. “He’s the best opened window of all.”

  “So life is good?”

  “How can it not be with him around? Everything’s great, including the fact that his brothers, who were about to sue the pants off of him because he didn’t want to sell the cutting-horse ranch, have backed down now that we’ve got a bulldog lawyer on our side.”

  Leigh leaned against the headboard again, smiling at her friend.

  Margot returned the gesture. “Know what the worst part of all this was, though?”

  “What?”

  “Telling you that I’d failed.”

  Leigh knit her brows, about to argue, but Margot went on.

  “We’ve had this competitive thing going on since college. Last month you even told me that you’ve always wanted to be just like me, and that everything came so easily to me.”

  Leigh remembered. They’d been in a bridal shop, perusing gowns for Dani. She had gotten a pang that day—the sense that she would probably never get married because her inner chubby girl kept telling her no man would want her in the long run, after she inevitably gained all her weight back. She’d told Margot that she more or less envied her because Margot had always been the perfect one, but then her friend had gotten that expression on her face....

  Now Leigh understood the reason.

  “In my eyes,” she said to Margot, “you’re always going to be a winner. Look at how you’ve bounced back already.”

  Margot smiled, and she was just about to say something when Leigh’s cell phone rang.

  They looked at each other, gazes wide.

  “Well?” Margot said, nearly bursting. “Are you going to get that or what?”

  Leigh promised to talk to Margot later as she grabbed the phone and peered at the ID screen.

  “It’s Beth Dahrling,” she said, her pulse whipping into a frenzy again, just before she pushed the answer button.

  * * *

  WHEN ADAM RECEIVED Beth’s Skype call on his computer that night, he was in his bedroom near the attic of the mansion, a room that hadn’t been included in Leigh’s tour.

  He pushed aside the quarterly projections for one of the biofuel companies he’d invested in and focused on Beth instead.

  She was wearing a silk dressing gown, her hair in a bun at her nape, as she sat at a desk in the guest cottage on the mansion’s property. “I just thought you might want to know that Leigh officially said yes to tomorrow.”

  Adam sat back in his chair, smiling. He’d been trying to steady his heartbeat for the past couple of hours while wondering if Leigh would sincerely want to have a second encounter with “Callum.” He’d ended the date so abruptly that he thought he might’ve made a mistake in trying to leave her with her curiosity about him intact.

  “You’ll make arrangements for a limousine to pick her up at her hotel tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Yes, and I told her where to wait on the beach below the mansion after she’s dropped off. After your date, it’ll be taking her back to her hotel, too.”

  “She’ll be here just in time to enjoy the sunset.”

  He had a little something planned—slow seduction, heated suggestion, sweet words on a phone as she strolled down the shoreline much as she’d strolled through his rented mansion tonight, flirting with him.... He wasn’t sure what would come after that, though.

  All he knew was that he had to see her again. Hear her voice, her laugh.

  Beth reached for the keyboard as if to terminate the connection.

  “Wait,” he said. “You’re not still angry with me.”

  “Angry isn’t the word.” She looked away from the computer, offscreen.

  “Then what’s going on with you?”

  Her jaw tightened, and he could tell he was in for it.

/>   “We’ve known each other a fairly long time, Adam,” she said, still unwilling to meet his computer gaze. “I didn’t know you in college—you weren’t there long enough for that—but you were still young when you and Carla hired me to manage your business affairs.”

  “My late twenties wasn’t that young. Especially after what I’d gone through when Dad died.” And a few years later, he’d felt even older after watching how much Carla had suffered with the damned cancer.

  “Believe it or not,” Beth said, finally looking into the computer’s eye, “you were different back then. You were...normal.”

  The word struck him. “Normal?”

  “You actually had the capacity to feel. You wouldn’t have shut yourself away and screwed with a woman’s head like you did tonight...and like you’re probably going to do tomorrow. Unless I’m wrong and you’re going to be Adam Morgan with her.”

  A short laugh escaped him. “What’s normal anyway?”

  Was it setting yourself up like a target and waiting for life to shoot bullets at you? Was it taking those bullets and pretending that they hadn’t ripped you apart? Or was “normal” the opposite—putting on layers and layers of protection just so you could make sure you never got hit again?

  Beth was shaking her head. “Don’t ever ask me what normal is, Adam. I might not have the definition, but I know it’s not this. And I don’t think for a minute that this Callum act is going to make you happy in the end. As I told you earlier, someone’s going to get burned in your little game, and I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be you.”

  He bristled. “Overly concerned for Leigh, are we?”

  “She was one of my sorority sisters and in general she’s a nice person. I don’t like to see people hurt.” She tilted her head. “I don’t like to see you hurting, either.”

  At that moment, he wished he could be different, if only for Beth’s sake. But he liked being this way, didn’t he? Or maybe he just had to be this way to tolerate what life dealt out.

  “Truthfully,” Beth said, drawing her robe around her tighter, “I’m surprised Leigh is going for this.”

  He was, too, but he didn’t say so.

  Beth lifted up her hands in a “who can figure it out?” gesture. “I guess you must have caught her at the right time. She lost all that weight, and I can tell you that as a woman, even taking off five pounds makes you feel like a goddess. She’s feeling that with Callum, I suppose.”

  “Leigh’s a big girl, and she knows what she wants,” he said. “Tonight she flirted with Callum. It was good for both of us. Why ruin it when there’s only going to be one more date?”

  Beth merely nodded, looking so tired. He sensed a surrender, as if she had no idea what to say to him anymore.

  But she might as well have been telling him that Carla wouldn’t have known who he was. His wife wouldn’t have recognized Adam in the guise of Callum at all.

  As he and Beth said good-night and ended their connection, Adam tried to get his mind back on work, but it never quite got there. He couldn’t stop thinking about tomorrow night, when Leigh would come again.

  And when he would go back to being the man he wasn’t.

  4

  THE LIMOUSINE DROPPED Leigh off near a gate at the foot of the driveway that led to Callum’s rented seaside mansion, and she donned her white sweater just before she got out of the backseat.

  The uniformed driver beat her to the door. She was an older woman in a suit, her hair pulled back in a gray bun and light pink lipstick her only note of color. As Leigh got out, the driver handed her a phone.

  Probably a disposable one, knowing the lengths Callum went to in order to maintain his privacy.

  “From your host,” the woman said, nodding in farewell. “You have a good night, miss.”

  Leigh squashed the urge to ask if the driver knew who’d hired her, but she was sure Beth Dahrling would’ve kept her boss’s identity private just like everything else.

  “Thank you,” she said, accepting the phone. No doubt Callum was going to call her to tell her what would come next. All she’d been told by Beth last night was that she’d be picked up in a limo at the hotel and then she needed to wait on the beach.

  But Leigh didn’t mind the lack of information. It made this brief game she and Callum were playing that much more interesting. And, hell, when she went back to her ho-hum real life, she’d be grateful for “interesting.”

  Going to work, coming home or to whatever hotel she was staying at for the show, going over scripts, going back to work... She hadn’t known how much she’d been missing out on until she’d had a glimpse of something much different last night.

  The driver gestured toward the bougainvillea-lined beach gate, and Leigh went through it, walking on a path that brought her to a quiet stretch of sand and the murmuring of waves.

  As she headed toward the water, she pulled her sweater tighter. The mild November evening wasn’t that cold, though. So why was she shivering deep in her belly?

  Because she was excited. Nervous. Just as worked up as a girl on her first date—one who had no idea what to expect from a guy. She hadn’t slept last night because she’d kept reliving their date over and over, smiling as she lay in bed, hearing Callum’s sexy voice echo through the mansion and through her, too. Even now her arms got goose bumps as she remembered his low, mysterious tone, just as thick and sinful as the honey she’d used to make dinner for him.

  But everything about him was darker than honey. So much darker. And it was almost as if last night’s date had never ended, wrapping itself into this one.

  They’d had their foreplay. Bring on whatever came next.

  The sun almost looked like honey as it set over the rolling ocean, drizzling down the sky in shades of gold, blue and orange. A few seagulls winged overhead toward the craggy cliff. Up above, she recognized the graceful stone exterior of Callum’s rental mansion, and she wondered if he was at a window watching for her. Wondered if his hair really would be black, as she’d imagined. Or if his eyes were that Irish-blue she’d pictured. If he was tall and muscled, or maybe—

  The phone rang, and she stopped in her tracks, staring at the cell as the vibrations of sound danced up her arm. It was him.

  Whoever “him” really was.

  Looking up at his mansion, she took a deep breath, making sure he didn’t see how anxious she was, then answered the call. “Enjoying the view?”

  He greeted her with a soft laugh that sent ripples of pleasure all through her, settling between her legs. How could he do that to her with just a laugh?

  “I’m very much enjoying it,” he said.

  “You’ve got a perfect view of the sunset.”

  “I wasn’t talking about that.”

  She absently tugged at the bottom of her big sweater, which covered most of the country cotton dress she’d chosen for tonight. It was light blue, breezy, almost innocent except for the way the hem fluttered to the middle of her thighs, hinting at sauciness. She was wearing a pair of below-the-knee leather cowgirl boots to go with it.

  He spoke again. “You look beautiful, Leigh.”

  Right. She still looked like a country girl, except with a bit of shine on her. “That’s nice of you to say.”

  A pause stretched over the line. Then, “If I didn’t know better, I would say you’re not used to compliments.”

  She shrugged. The people who worked on her cooking show complimented her enough: the makeup artist, the stylist, the director. But she’d always figured it was their job to make her look good.

  It could be that Callum was right about how she took compliments, though. It was just that, she’d never been the gorgeous one. She’d never been in first place for anything. That distinction had always belonged to someone else, like her older sister, Hannah, before that fateful day she
’d gone for her last swim at a summer party. And then there’d been Margot in college, leaving Leigh in the dust again when it came to looks as well as accomplishments—at least until last night, when Margot had confessed that she wasn’t Miss Perfect anymore, what with losing her latest book contract.

  But Margot was never a loser, and she would end up even more perfect in the end. Just wait and see. Hannah had been like that, too, and Leigh had done nothing but admire them both, wanting to emulate them, always trying her best to keep up.

  Then, by some hormonal miracle, she’d lost her baby fat recently, and that was when she’d realized that maybe she could be in first place, too.

  That didn’t mean she wanted to ruin this date and talk about life epiphanies with Callum, though.

  She made a show of glancing around the abandoned beach. “Not much of a crowd here.”

  “This is a secluded stretch, and it’s not tourist season right now. That’s why it’s so peaceful.”

  “Are you coming down to join me?”

  “Once again,” he said with a chuckle, “good try.”

  She looked back up at the mansion—its blank windows, its imposing facade, its secrets. “I half expected to see a makeshift kitchen set up down here so I could cook you some beach food this time around.”

  “We’ll get to the food, and the good news is that you’ll have the night off.”

  “I liked cooking for you.”

  “And I liked eating your meal after you left.”

  If there was one thing she’d always done well, it was cook. The scales had always testified to that.

  She brushed off the thought, knowing that Callum was watching her as she was right now—pounds lighter, with the breeze blowing her skirt around her much slimmer thighs. She felt impulsive. Totally revved up and ready for more adventure right now.

  “So,” she said. “Are you telling me that you’ll be cooking for me this time?”

  “I’ve prepared something.”

  “Nothing too decadent I hope. I splurged enough last night.”