by Leslie Kelly
She chuckled.
“And Mike...”
“Cop?”
“Right. He said anybody who took six years to get through college for a degree in decorating was an idiot.”
She had to agree with that one.
“So what on earth were you doing with her?”
“I don’t know, to be honest.” Sounding sheepish, he admitted, “This’ll seem stupid, but the truth is, I think she just kind of decided she wanted to get married, I was the one she was dating, and I didn’t have much say in the matter.”
“Oh, poor wittle you.”
“Not saying I was blameless, believe me, I wasn’t. I floated into it, having seen all my cousins getting married and pushing out the babies. My mother kept hinting that it was my responsibility to get married first since Rafe was in the military.”
Oy. Old fashioned, indeed.
“Looking back, her cheating on me—and me finding out—was the best thing that could have happened. Otherwise, I have no doubt I’d be breaking the Santori family record by being the only one of my generation to get a divorce.”
That made sense. Heaven knew, Madison had done her fair share of drifting into things because she had nothing better to do at the time. Look at her engagement to Tommy! Sure, she’d been helping her sister, and helping her friend. But hadn’t one small part of her decided to do it because she was bored with her life, unhappy with her job, wanting a change?
“On the plus side, I think my near miss has cooled my mom’s jets for a while. She’s not going to be pushing any of us anytime soon. Right after the breakup, she called my brother Mike and said, ‘Michelangelo, you bring home a girl who spends more money a month on makeup than on food and I’ll smack you in the head.’”
Laughing, she said, “Your brother’s name is really Michelangelo?”
He shrugged. “Yep.”
“And Rafe?”
“Raphael,” he admitted.
“Leo...short for Leonardo?”
“Uh-huh.” He sighed heavily. “You can say it.”
Bursting into laughter, she said, “Your parents named you after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?”
“That’s certainly what all my friends thought, growing up.”
“They must also have thought you had the coolest parents in the world.”
“Well, with that, and my uncle Anthony’s famous pizzeria, I didn’t lack for friends.”
His self-deprecation was cute. The fact that he was a hell of a guy, nice, smart and funny, didn’t seem to enter into the equation.
“Truth is, my grandparents emigrated and were very traditional, and my parents wanted to please them. So they went with really traditional names.”
“Would there have been a Donatello?”
He shook his head. “Don’t think so, though Donato was on the short list when they named Mike.”
She twined her fingers with his. “So, Leonardo, huh? That makes you the lead turtle—smart, always has a plan and fights with two Japanese katana swords...cool!”
Lifting a brow in surprise, he said, “You do know your turtles.”
“What can I say?” She wagged her brows up and down. “I was into dangerous males from a very young age.”
“But not reptiles.”
She thrust her bottom lip out. “Turtles aren’t reptiles...are they?”
“Amphibians, I think.”
“Whew!”
“For what it’s worth, I bet those dangerous males were into you, too.” His brown eyes gleamed with approval as he stared at her, and she saw his lids drop a little. She had no doubt he was thinking wicked, sultry things, and she wished this bus would hurry the hell up.
He lifted her hand and brought it to his mouth, brushing his lips across her knuckles. His tongue flicked out to taste her—just a tiny flash of moisture—and she quivered in her seat.
“Did I mention that Leonardo was always my favorite?”
He squeezed her hand once more as he lowered it. “Glad to know it. I’d hate to have to katana my brothers’ asses if you decided you preferred a hotheaded fighter type like Rafe or a wise guy like Mike.”
“Not a chance.”
She preferred him. Just him. Over any other man she had ever known.
“We’ll be there soon,” he said, reading her mind.
As if realizing they both needed to focus on anything other than the cloud of sexual awareness building between them, he went back to what he’d been saying. “So, was your sister a Turtles fan, too? I thought girls preferred Powerpuff Girls.”
She laughed out loud. “That’s so funny, I was just thinking about those characters!”
“I suppose only people our age would have any idea what we were talking about.”
“Nickelodeon generation.”
“Exactly. Are there any other ways in which you and Candace were different?”
“She was always very sweet.”
A slow, sexy smile. “You’re sweet.”
He didn’t say it, but she knew that somewhere in his mind, he’d reworded that sentence and added the word taste.
“I meant well behaved. She was the good girl.”
“Making you the bad one?”
“Let’s just say I was the one who found all the squeaky floorboards in our house and knew how to avoid them when sneaking out. And was almost always the one who instigated a twin-swap whenever there was a test I wanted to get out of that I knew Candace could do better on.”
“Lucky!” he said. “I look a lot like my brothers, but not close enough that either of them could ever bail my ass out when it came time for the next English exam.”
Before she could reply, they noticed the bus was stopping. Madison glanced out the window, surprised to see they were still on the road. A long line of cars and trucks were lined up ahead of them.
“What’s going on, man? What’s the holdup?” one of the passengers asked.
One of the tour company reps, who’d been checking his phone for information, replied, “Angelina and Brad are in town at a charity event! Miles of traffic.”
She assumed he meant Jolie and Pitt. Funny how superstars needed no last name, even when in a different country.
“So, you want to stop by and say hi to Brad and Angie?” Leo asked. “You run in their circles, right?”
She snickered. “Not exactly.” She’d spied the couple from a distance once at a premiere Tommy had taken her to, but hadn’t gotten anywhere close to them.
“But you will be someday.”
“You don’t know that,” she said, wishing the whole topic of Hollywood hadn’t come up. That brought back issues she’d been trying very hard to run from this week.
“You never have told me what your screenplay’s about,” he said. He leaned against the window of the bus in their double seat, turning slightly to face her. His hair was windblown, his face tanned and flushed, his eyes sparkling after their exciting day.
“You don’t really want to hear about that,” she said.
“Yeah, I really do.”
Well, she might not want to discuss why she’d fled Hollywood, but she did like talking about her work. She was proud of her project, protective of every word she’d written, and found herself wanting to share some of that with him. “It’s a dark thriller about sexual obsession and murder.”
His eyes popped.
“Sorry you asked?”
“Uh, no.” He grinned broadly. “As long as you’re not here doing research on the murder part of the story.”
“No. Just the sex part. Thanks, by the way. I’ll be sure you get an acknowledgment in the credits.”
“My mom’ll be so proud.”
“Oh, I’m sure all your friends will line up to see it.”
“What will my title be? Maybe gripper. Or best boy.” His dimple appeared as he loaded the movie tech terms with innuendo. “I’ve always wondered what that person did on a movie set.”
“It’s key grip, not gripper, and you don’t grip, you care
ss.”
His voice low, he said, “And? What else do I do?”
She dropped hers too. “You stroke.”
“And?”
“And squeeze.”
“And?”
“And pound, and thrust, and kiss, and lick, and hold and...”
He lifted his rum punch to his mouth and took a sip. “I shouldn’t have started that.”
“No, you probably shouldn’t have.”
He dropped an arm across her shoulders, tugging her closer so she rested against him. Gently squeezing her, he said, “We haven’t talked about this, but...”
“Yes?”
“Well, to be honest, I don’t know how I’m going to leave here without you on Monday.”
Hearing a note in his voice that said he wasn’t finished—and that he might have been thinking about something they could do to remedy the this-was-a-vacation-fling-and-we’ll-never-see-each-other-again thing, she said, “I know.” Then, thinking a little more, she blinked. “Wait, Monday? You mean, tomorrow?” The idea horrified her.
He appeared puzzled. “No, I mean Monday...four days from now. Today’s Thursday.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Uh, yeah, babe, it is.”
Not totally believing it, she grabbed the backpack in which she’d carried her wallet and some other stuff from her purse. She found the small calendar that went with her checkbook and looked at it, counting back the days since she’d left California.
He was right. It was Thursday. Good lord, she’d been traveling so much in recent weeks—from L.A. to Napa to Florida to Central America—that she’d totally lost track of not only where she was, but when she was. How bizarre!
“See?”
She nodded slowly. “That’s so weird, I completely messed up the days. I have no idea why I was so sure today was Sunday.”
Of course, it could have been more than the travel and the jet-lag. There’d also been the matter of the stress, the tears, the long, sleepless nights, the races with the paparazzi. All of which had been the driving forces in her life until she’d come here and met him.
So yeah, it must have been all those confusing things that had led to the screwup in her internal clock.
But something was niggling at the back of her mind. Some small detail or memory that told her there was more to it. She just couldn’t grab the thought, and it was irritating her. She swiped a hand through her hair, loosening the ponytail that had begun to give her a bit of a headache, and tried to focus, but nothing came to mind.
“So, now that you know what day it is, can you tell me how long you’re staying?”
“I guess until Monday also. I booked for a week.”
Or, well, Tommy’s travel agent had booked her for a week. She thought.
It was late in the evening, which meant they had only three more full days. That didn’t sound like very much time at all.
Part of her wanted to ask him if he could stay a little longer—if they gave up one of their rooms, perhaps they could put it toward extending their stay.
Another part wanted him to make the suggestion.
You can’t hide here forever. You’ve got to go home and straighten your life out before you can take this thing much further.
“You’re sure?” he asked her. “You might want to double-check your reservation.”
He was teasing, but only just. And she realized he was right. “I know. At least, I think it was a week. This trip was planned on the fly and I’ve been pretty out of it, obviously.”
“Remind me to never let you be in charge of the scheduling calendar.”
Scheduling calendar.
That thought whizzed by again. Suddenly, she wrestled it into coherence and when it formed in her brain, she gasped.
“What?”
She didn’t answer, bending over to grab her backpack again, worry overwhelming her. No, you couldn’t have been that stupid, right?
“Madison, what is it?”
She kept digging, looking for a small, hard plastic case. Casting quick glances up at him, hating to admit what was going through her mind, she said, “I had a thought about why I might have had my days mixed up. If I’m right, the bus is going to have to pull over for me to throw up this time because I feel just sick about it!”
His worried expression told her he was concerned only for her, not for himself, not for any repercussions. He didn’t get what she was worried about.
Hell. If her suspicions were correct, there could definitely be some repercussions for them both.
“What can I do?”
“Pray.”
He gaped, obviously seeing how frightened she really was.
Finally, she found the object she’d been looking for and pulled it out of her backpack.
Her birth control pills.
“Are those...”
“Yeah.”
She gulped, flipped the lid with her thumb and studied the dial of pills. She was very careful, every month, to set the starting day correctly, because she’d had problems with the pill in the beginning. And there had been that one pregnancy scare in her high school years that she had never wanted to repeat.
According to this package, those pills, and the little days of the week imprinted above them, tomorrow she should be taking Monday’s pill. That was why she’d thought today was Sunday.
Only, today was Thursday.
For a second, she prayed she’d taken them ahead of time, too many instead of too few. Crazy hopes blossomed within her and she sought frantically for an explanation. You took extra protection for all the extra sex, right?
But she knew she hadn’t done that, not consciously, anyway.
Leo had obviously been studying the case, too. His brow was furrowed, his expression serious. “What’s the verdict? Are there too few or too many?” he asked, jumping to the same conclusion.
She thought about it. Last week she’d been in Florida, the week before in Napa. She’d started this package of pills while she was still in L.A.
The days rolled out in her mind, and by the time she’d finished calculating them, she realized she was in trouble.
“There are too many pills left,” she whispered. “Three more should be missing. So I have apparently missed three doses at some point over the past few weeks.”
He was silent. She was silent.
Dropping the plastic case into her backpack, she threw herself back in the seat and closed her eyes, her mind swimming with confusion.
Three pills. Three little pills. That couldn’t be a catastrophe, could it? She’d been on the pill for ten years. After all that faithful service, surely one minor mistake like this wouldn’t result in...couldn’t mean she was...
“So you could be pregnant.”
He’d put it right out there, voicing the words she’d been unable to even think. She flinched, slowly lowering her glass of rum punch and putting it into the drink holder in her armrest. She told herself it was instinct—that she felt queasy. But she couldn’t deny that something, some tiny spark of oh-my-God-what-if-it’s-true, had thought this isn’t good for the baby.
“No. Of course not,” she insisted. “It’s crazy.”
He wasn’t in a panic and he wasn’t angry. Not happy, certainly, but not reacting the way she’d expect most twentysomething single men to react to the news that they might have knocked up a woman they’d met a few days ago.
“It’s possible, though.”
She gulped and slowly nodded. “I’m so sorry, Leo. It’s been... I’m never so careless. I’ve just had an awful few weeks, my mind’s been spinning. I screwed up. I totally screwed up.”
She finally worked up the nerve to open her eyes again, knowing there were tears in them. Blinking rapidly to hold them back, she looked at him, dreading his reaction. Maybe his was a calm before the storm.
But oh, that warmth, that understanding in his expression. If she’d been standing, she would have lost her legs and fallen to the ground, so overwhelmed was she by the t
enderness in his handsome face.
“Shh, it’s okay,” he insisted. “Stop beating yourself up about it. I’m sure it won’t happen. The odds are crazy.”
“Right.”
“Worse odds than encountering two snakes in Costa Rica.”
She forced a chuckle that came out a little like a sob. “Yeah. Of course they are.”
He lifted her across the seat onto his lap, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her head onto his shoulder. His hand gently stroking her hair, he said, “It’s okay, Madison. It’ll be fine.”
“I can’t believe you’re not freaking out.”
“Over a mistake that anybody could make that might lead to a bigger problem? Why would I freak out over that?”
Amazing. She didn’t know any other guy who wouldn’t have already started losing it, or stated his stance on abortion, or accused her of dumping pills into the toilet to trap him, or at least calling her careless.
This man was unique and so wonderful. Aside from that, he also calmed her, steadied her. She’d always been told she was too volatile, that she had a temper, that she could be thoughtless at times.
Leo was everything she wasn’t. He was like a port in a storm, soothing and so damned strong. She wondered if there was any crisis he couldn’t weather, and acknowledged that, God forbid this slipup of hers resulted in pregnancy, she couldn’t imagine anyone better to go through it with.
“If there’s something to worry about, let’s deal with it when it happens,” he said, brushing a kiss across her temple. “In the meantime, let’s just make sure we stop in my room when we get back to the hotel so I can grab some condoms.”
She tried for a real smile. “That’s a deal.” She promptly ruined that with a big, sad-sounding sniffle.
“And maybe a blue necktie. I can tie holes in it and tie it around my face, and maybe get some fake katanas and really be your hero.”
The smile was a little more genuine this time. “You already are.”
They were silent for another moment.
Finally, he said, “It’s really okay. It’ll be fine, Madison. Let’s not worry about it until next month.”
Next month. They hadn’t even exchanged phone numbers, yet Leo was assuming they would still be...something. She really believed he thought they were going to have some kind of future after this Monday.