Emma looked at the carrot and briefly pondered the improbability that root would become a desired food source. “No.”
“Go eat,” Francine urged her. “Things are calm. Paul and I have this.”
Emma took Francine up on the offer and walked into the parents’ lounge to the buffet. She picked up a plate and studied the selection of food, but nothing appealed to her. As she debated the selections created by one of the hottest chefs in Hollywood, someone stepped up to the buffet beside her. Emma glanced up and felt her heart do a little skip.
“Hi,” the man said. When Emma didn’t speak or turn away, but stared at him, he smiled curiously at her. “Sorry . . . have we met?”
Alas, only briefly. But it had been a moment Emma had never forgotten. Cooper Jessup looked just as tall, sexy, and robust as he’d been when she’d met him in Costa Rica a couple of years ago. His hair was dark and wavy, his eyes the shade of the fog that rolled in off the ocean. He met all the criteria of her secret desires—he made her blood rush. That made him kryptonite, dangerous to be around.
“Yes, we’ve met,” Emma said, remembering herself, and extended her hand. She was almost afraid for him to touch her. “Costa Rica. The Marty Weiss birthday party,” she reminded him. “I’m Emma Tyler, with CEM.”
“Oh, that’s right,” he said, and took her hand firmly, shaking it. “I thought you looked familiar. That birthday party was bananas, wasn’t it?”
“Totally,” Emma said, and smiled a little. Cooper was a founding member of Thrillseekers Anonymous—a boutique company owned by four longtime friends, all men who loved physical activity. They’d come to Hollywood as stuntmen, had developed a stunt-training and stunt-choreography business, but had wanted more. Their love of extreme sports had morphed into the idea to stage extreme, heart-stopping sport outings for the rich and famous.
Everyone around town knew about TA because their clients were the A-listers that they all aspired to be. TA had developed a clientele by guaranteeing complete privacy for their outings—they had the means and know-how to evade the most ardent of the press corps. Rumor had it that TA took sheiks to surf monster waves, and dropped movie stars from helicopters to ski down rocky, snow-covered slopes. They zipped across ancient gorges with industry power hitters and climbed remote rock faces or drifted down the Amazon River on a raft with film crews. There was no sport, no daredevil activity that the four of them would not try.
So Emma had heard.
She also knew that on occasion, they were asked to do something out of the ordinary, something that was not really about extreme sports, but about the wives and children of their most lucrative clientele. Such as Marty Weiss’s birthday bash on a private island off Costa Rica a couple of years ago. He was a rich businessman from Chicago, whose wife had given him the pop star Audrey LaRue and a jungle birthday theme for his sixtieth. TA had hired CEM to help plan it all. Emma had been called down when the local staff agency couldn’t fill all the service slots they’d needed.
“Cooper Jessup, you are holding up the line!” A woman’s head with stylish red hair appeared just around Cooper’s arm. She eyed Emma suspiciously.
Emma knew her, too. She was Jill Jefferson, an actress on the popular sitcom The Crowleys.
“Hi, Jill,” Cooper said, and smiled at her. “Do you know . . .” He winced apologetically and gestured to Emma.
“Emma.”
“Emma,” he repeated. “We worked together in Costa Rica.”
“Costa Rica?” Jill asked, smiling as if that amused her, and looked at Emma again with an expression that seemed accusatory, as if she suspected Emma had engineered a trip to Costa Rica to be with Cooper.
“Thrillseekers Anonymous hired us to help with a birthday party there,” Emma said.
“Ah!” she said, and smiled. “I’m Jill.” She extended her hand with a desperate-to-be-recognized air.
“Yes, of course, I know you,” Emma said, giving her what she wanted. “We’ve met.”
“We have?” Jill asked, knowing very well, Emma suspected, that they’d met at Haley Rangold’s wedding shower. Haley was Jill’s costar on the sitcom and the true breakout star. And Jill? Emma bet Jill would be one of those perennial actresses, always finding work, never finding true fame.
“Haley Rangold’s wedding shower,” Emma reminded her.
Jill laughed. “Oh my God! It was my horrible karaoke, wasn’t it?” she asked, and put her hand on Cooper’s arm to gain his attention, to turn his gaze away from Emma. “Haley made me do it,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “She kept insisting. It must have been really awful, because it became a clip on EW Online. Tell him how bad it was,” she urged Emma.
“I didn’t hear the karaoke,” Emma said truthfully.
“You must have!” Jill said, laughing, her gaze fixed on Cooper. “I’m sure everyone in the neighborhood heard it.”
“I heard your toast.”
“My toast! Did I toast Haley?” Jill asked with a playful roll of her eyes. “I’m always toasting her on the show. She insists.”
“Not that toast.” Emma hadn’t heard any toast to Haley at all.
Jill looked at Emma. “What toast, then?”
“You toasted yourself, remember?” Emma said. “You toasted yourself and unmarried women, and then talked about how you wanted to get married.” Emma did not add that the toast had turned into a long and tipsy rant about how awful men were in general and how badly Jill wanted one that she could actually marry. That clip was probably looping on Radar Online.
Jill’s smile froze at the reminder, and Cooper’s brows floated upward with surprise. “Is that right?” he drawled, looking at Jill.
Jill flashed a brief, forced smile. “Oh, I probably did,” she said dismissively. “Of course I’d like to be married someday. Wouldn’t everyone?” She stepped around Emma and Cooper. “Nice to see you again, Emma. Is there any fruit?”
“Yes,” Emma said. “Down at the end.”
Jill wandered off, her dress skintight, her legs long and lean in her heels.
Cooper shifted to stand beside Emma, leaned down, and said low, “I don’t think you were supposed to remember that.”
“Probably not,” Emma agreed with a slight shrug. “But it’s impossible to forget. The speech was long and kind of whiny.” She glanced up at Cooper.
He hesitated, as if he expected her to make a joke of it. When she didn’t, he chuckled. “You’re a firecracker, aren’t you? That’s no way to win friends and influence people, Emma Tyler.”
“I’ve heard that.”
He laughed again and, with a shake of his head, moved on.
This was the way it usually went for Emma. Socially awkward and tactless, as her parents had always said. Hard and flinty. That was a phrase from the novel Jane Eyre, which Emma had read in high school. She remembered how struck she’d been by those words when Jane used them to describe herself. It was as if Jane were describing Emma, and the phrase had stuck with her all these years.
Emma may have been hard and flinty all her life, but she’d never intended to hurt anyone. In her head, the things she said never sounded as people perceived them. Jill had surely known which toast Emma meant, and if she didn’t, how else was Emma to say it? When she tried to shade the truth, she sounded ridiculous—she had no feel for telling stories. Something was wrong with her in that regard.
Emma watched Cooper move down the buffet, admiring him. She could still recall the sight of Cooper in swim trunks, helping fat old men zip down to the beach. He’d been all rippling muscle and sweaty sheen, glorious to behold. But Emma . . . Emma had made a date with one of those fat old men, and she’d missed Cooper’s departure from the island.
Not that it mattered. She never went near him. Men like him—handsome, competent, sexy men—had the power to crush.
Cooper caught up to Jill, and they struck up a
conversation over the shrimp before disappearing into the crowd.
Emma ate a piece of chicken, and the party wore on.
Some of the parents with young children began to leave. A few drunken young men took over the kiddie bowl and bouncy castle, a big no-no, and it took some doing by Paul to get them to leave. Emma decided to close down the kiddie lounge before more drunken teens or young adults attempted to commandeer the rented equipment. By the time they’d finished deflating, the karaoke was going strong in the adult lounge and the kids were swarming the photo booths, unable to get enough of themselves.
Emma sent Paul out of the kiddie lounge to check on Princess Brat. “I’ve got this,” she said, gesturing to what was left of the cleanup. There wasn’t much to do but pick up the pins and balls—someone would come tomorrow and take care of the rest. And the best part was that karaoke wasn’t so loud in this lounge. Emma could actually hear herself think.
She had gathered up an armful of Nerf bowling pins and was carrying them across the room when she heard the door open. “Kids’ lounge is closed,” she called out.
“Need some help?”
Emma glanced over her shoulder, startled to see Cooper. A smile spread her lips before she could even speak. “As a matter of fact, yes. Did you come to rescue me?”
“I did,” he said, and walked into the lounge and bent down to pick up a stray bowling ball. “Karaoke is definitely not my thing, so . . . I thought I’d wander around. Where is everyone?” he asked, gesturing to the room.
“Dispatched.” Emma nudged a box with her shoe, maneuvering it around until she had it in front of her, and knelt down to stack the pins inside.
Cooper grabbed some pins and squatted down beside her. “Is it just me, or do parties like this make you wonder why anyone thinks kids are a good idea?” he asked as he put the pins and bowling ball into the box.
Emma laughed. “The little ones are cute.”
“True.”
“But the teens? I’d like to tee them up and kick them right out of Beverly Hills.”
He grinned. “You don’t like kids?”
“I love kids,” Emma said. Children didn’t make judgments about her. They didn’t care if she was tactless. “I love kids who aren’t from Beverly Hills,” she amended, and smiled at him. “Kids who don’t get facials and massages.”
“Or get to choose their own nannies,” Cooper said.
Emma gasped with delight. “You read about that, too?” she asked, referring to an Us Weekly article about a certain supercelebrity who allowed his children to choose their nanny. They’d been through six in the last year alone.
“I may or may not have flipped through a magazine recently,” he admitted with a charmingly self-conscious smile. “But it’s unbelievable, isn’t it? When I was a kid, I was hardly allowed to choose a shirt for school, much less a nanny. Not that there were any nannies floating around where I grew up.” He stood, gathering up some of the foam squares that had been lost from the pit. “And believe me, if I’d spoken to my mother like I just heard the guest of honor speak to hers, I would have been skinned alive and left to hang in the Texas sun.”
“Same here!” Emma agreed as she gained her feet. Her mother had never let Emma get away with anything. Her stepsister, Laura, could get away with everything. Not Emma.
“Have you ever done a bat mitzvah like this?” Cooper asked Emma as he tossed the foam blocks back into the pit.
“I’ve never done a bat mitzvah at all! I had no idea so much was expected. I mean, the girl is turning thirteen, not twenty-one.”
“Right,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s a lot of work. Looks like it might have been a complicated event.”
“Not really.” Emma glanced up; Cooper was looking at her. Sort of studying her, his gaze discerning. She realized she was having a conversation with him, an actual conversation. She nervously tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Complicated is like a wedding anniversary I was involved with a few months ago. A polygamist wedding anniversary.”
Cooper blinked. A grin spread across his face. “Get out.”
“I am so not kidding. Four cakes,” Emma said, holding up four fingers and wiggling them at him. “And that was only the beginning. There were four wives who all had completely different ideas for the event.”
Cooper laughed as he picked up a riding toy. “Tell me.”
“Well, the first wife thought it ought to be a barbeque. Nothing too fancy, and trust me, she was none too fancy,” Emma said with a laugh. “But the second wife wanted a big formal sit-down dinner at a hotel. She was the loud, opinionated one. She convinced one of the other wives to be on her side, and it looked as if she was going to get her way, but then the newest wife—who looked like she was eighteen to their thirty- or forty-something—said she wanted a dance.”
“A dance,” Cooper repeated, as if he was trying to imagine it.
“Like a high school dance,” Emma said, thinking back. “Which I think was not cool with their religious beliefs, not to mention all the awkwardness around deciding who gets the first dance with the hubby. Oh, and they wanted the event to happen in two weeks.”
Cooper laughed at the absurdity of that as he tossed more foam blocks into the pit. “So what happened?”
“Well,” Emma said, warming to the tale, to actually talking without annoying him, “I was called in at the last minute to help get it resolved. So I drove out to their house in the Palisades—” She laughed. “That house had four master suites and umpteen bathrooms and my God, the kids! There were kids everywhere, like it’d been infested. And the wives, holy shit—they were all so mad, they talked over each other. I wasn’t much help, either, because I couldn’t really concentrate, you know? I kept thinking, how do you do this? How do you pass him around? And none of them seemed to like each other, so I really didn’t get it.” She laughed and shook her head. “I like to think I’m open to different lifestyles. But that one? It confuses me.”
“I don’t get it either,” Cooper said, walking back to where she stood. “I can’t seem to wrap my head around one wife, much less four.”
“Exactly,” Emma said. “Our planner, Gage, kept pleading with the wives to agree and finally got them to a compromise on a sit-down barbeque. He pitched it as being an under-the-stars event. You know, out in the open to accommodate all those people.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“I thought so,” Emma said. “But then the youngest wife? The cute eighteen-year-old with the curvy figure and no kids?” she said, sketching out a woman’s figure. “She told the old lech what she wanted and that was that. He told the other wives to stuff it, they were having a dance. And they did. But with four separate cakes.”
Cooper laughed roundly. “I’m sure that went over well.”
“It was the most uncomfortable party we’ve ever thrown, and I’ve been to more than a few. You couldn’t have bulldozed through the tension in that grand ballroom. Oh, and our great idea for putting it under the stars went the way of the dodo bird, too. I had to scramble to get a venue.” She smiled and sat down on top of a table. “What about you?” she asked, kicking off one shoe, and then the other.
“We’ve never done anything like a bat mitzvah, and after today, I can promise we never will,” he said. “TA does extreme sports, not this kind of thing . . .” He paused and smiled lopsidedly. “Unless Reggie Applebaum asks.”
Emma tossed back her head with a bright laugh. “I guess we all do what Reggie Applebaum asks, right? So what is the most complicated event TA has ever staged?”
Cooper had to think about it. “The Costa Rica gig ranks right up there,” he said with a nod. “Rigging a zip line just to push a bunch of out-of-shape guys down it is not my idea of a good time. But the most complicated?” He leaned up against the table where she sat, his arms folded across his chest, his hip against her thigh. “You know M
arnie Banks McCain, right?”
“We’ve met.” Marnie Banks was a wedding planner in town.
“She planned the wedding of Olivia Dagwood and Vincent Vittorio.”
“So she got that gig!” Emma exclaimed. Olivia and Vincent had been the hottest stars on the planet a couple of years ago. Every wedding planner in town had wanted that event. “CEM threw all that we had and then some at that one. How long did that marriage last, anyway? A hot minute?”
“Not even,” Cooper said with a snort. “Olivia and Vincent wanted to be married where they’d filmed a movie, in the Rockies, of all places. They wanted to hike up to the place of a scene where they’d determined they had ‘fallen in love,’” he said, making invisible quotes with his fingers. “That location is not exactly accessible, which is where we came in. And that was how the wedding from hell came to be,” he said with a shake of his head.
He told Emma how a freak thunderstorm had knocked out the only bridge across a very steep ravine and had separated a group including the bride, groom, Cooper’s partner Eli McCain, and Marnie, from the rest of the wedding party.
It sounded like an unbelievable and ludicrous weekend, complete with a bickering bride and groom and the successful rigging of snow blowers to shoot sandwiches and apples across a ravine until the stranded party could be rescued. Emma laughed with delight as Cooper entertained her with a description of shooting peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches across the ravine. “You’re lying!” she accused Cooper, playfully shoving his shoulder. “No way that happened.”
“It happened,” Cooper assured her. “It will go down as one of the most bizarre weekends of TA’s corporate life.”
“Honestly, it amazes me that no one has been hurt in all the things I’ve heard TA does,” Emma said. “How do you keep from getting hurt?”
“Oh, I’ve been hurt,” he said with a laugh. “I guess I’ve got a secret weapon.”
“What’s that?”
Cooper dug into his pants pocket, then held out his hand and opened his palm.
The Perfect Homecoming (Pine River) Page 2