by Nancy Warren
Chapter Three
“All right,” Lise said, determined to be all business. She glanced up into that meltingly gorgeous face and stifled a sigh of longing.
On the negative side, she’d made a complete fool of herself, flashed her less-than-impressive assets all over San Francisco International Airport, and snoozed when she should have been meeting the man who was going to be her most important project to date.
On the plus side, she knew Crane’s U.S. spokesmodel wasn’t gay.
It wasn’t simply that he’d stared at her breast—anyone would stare at a woman whose breast fell out of her dress at the airport; it was the frankly carnal way he looked at her. This guy had more testosterone than ought to be legal in one man.
No wonder Jen had been so enthusiastic. On TV he was going to be amazing. Still pictures showed his way-too-perfect-to-be-real looks. But in the flesh, his animal magnetism and blatant manliness somehow imbued his face with ruggedness.
She was going to suggest to Jen they do as much as they could with TV. Once people recognized him from the tube, she’d be willing to bet they’d never look at a still photo of him in a magazine, newspaper, or grinning down at them from a billboard without adding in for themselves the strong personality behind the face that they’d already seen on television. And movie trailers, she mentally added.
“All right,” she repeated, realizing that she was staring and that he was gazing back at her with barely banked amusement.
Great. She was supposed to be his guide and mentor, the woman who would transform him into the perfect face, voice, and body of Crane Surf and Boogie Boards, and he thought she was a joke.
Since she was pretty sure all her body parts were tucked back where they should be, she held out his coat to him. Feeling at a disadvantage to be sitting here staring up at a man so very much taller than she’d imagined he’d be, she hoisted herself to her feet, trying to keep the wobbling of her ankles to a minimum.
“You must be tired,” she said primly as she tottered along beside him, knowing he was half-crippling himself to keep to her pace. Couldn’t Sonia at least have let her keep her own shoes?
“No. I’m right, thanks. I slept on the plane.”
“Oh.” She felt at a bit of a standstill. She’d assumed he’d want to head to the hotel and go straight to sleep. “We should check you in first anyway.”
“All right. Then I’m ready to go to work.”
“I really hadn’t planned to start until tomorrow.”
“That’s fine. I’ll look around a bit.”
She nodded. “I can arrange a car and driver.”
He looked at her as though she’d just tossed her breasts out in the open again. “I’ve got legs. I’ll walk.”
“Don’t get lost.” He was expensive property. Already plans had been made, campaigns toyed with around his image. If he wandered into the wrong area and got murdered, she’d lose her job.
“Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself,” he said, and she realized that he was probably six foot three and had the muscles of a bodybuilder. Still, she ought to go with him, but not in these shoes.
“Where are the rest of your bags?” she asked when she realized he had only one modest carry-on piece, which looked expensive and new, and a well-used backpack.
“This is it.”
“Oh,” she said faintly. So he was both manly and traveled light. Two surprises. She hoped there wouldn’t be any more today. She was pretty sure she’d reached her quota.
“Nice place,” he said when they pulled up in front of the hotel.
“I’m glad you like it. It will be home for a while.”
She checked him in and he stood meekly behind her. They rode the elevator in silence up to the executive level, and she led him to his suite. He didn’t say “nice place” when he saw it. He didn’t say anything at all, merely walked through twice, then opened the sliding door and peered out at the view.
“Is everything all right?”
“This whole place is for me?”
She nodded.
“It’s enormous,” he said.
Steve watched Lisa roll her head around on her neck as though it were too heavy to hold up. The gesture caused her hair to dance and her dress front to shift about. Since he’d already had a tantalizing glimpse of exactly what was under that dress, he was hard-pressed not to stare.
Sexy, she was, but then you’d expect that of a hard-partying California girl.
She closed her eyes briefly, then dug into her purse for the headache tablets he’d spied earlier. “Do you mind if I get some water?” she asked.
He shook his head. “You want to take it easy.”
Those sexy brown eyes blinked at him slowly. “That’s what everyone tells me. But you’ve only known me an hour.”
“I’m very perceptive.”
A knock sounded on the door and before he could move, she was opening it and ushering in the bellhop with his single bag. A bag he was well able to carry himself without help, but he’d felt so oafish and out of his element in the swish hotel that he hadn’t protested when a uniformed bellhop picked up the bag he’d dropped at his feet.
“Can you put that in the bedroom?” she asked and fished out a bill. It was hard to tell with all the American bills looking the same, but he thought it was a fiver.
“Did you tip that bloke five dollars?” he asked her once the boy had gone.
“Yes.” She seemed surprised at the question, then nodded briskly. “Right. I forgot. You don’t tip much in Australia. It’s very important to do so here. Especially at the hotel or anywhere where anyone might associate you with Crane Enterprises.”
“Well, Crane’s from Oz, too. I doubt he tips.”
“When he’s in the States he does. Image is everything. Believe me, you don’t want it showing up in People magazine that you stiffed the waiter at Le Cirque.”
Since that sounded both French and expensive, he doubted the waiters there had anything to fear from him.
“People magazine?” He’d taken a peek at that one in the airplane. He couldn’t imagine them having any interest in Steve Jackson and his tipping habits.
“Steve, once the campaign gets underway, you can’t be too careful, so it’s better to practice now.” She pulled out an electronic notebook and scribbled something on the screen. “I’ll get Sonia to put together a tipping guide for you.”
“Ta,” he said, wondering what he’d stumbled into.
“Oh, and here’s some cash for incidentals,” she said, handing him a fat white envelope.
He felt strangely as though he’d flown, not to another continent, but to a parallel universe.
Once Lise Atwater had gone, Steve stripped out of his fancy suit and into jeans and a white T-shirt, and felt much more like his old self. His real self, and he’d better remember that.
He slipped into his boots, stuffed some of the American bills into his wallet and the rest carefully into the safe the hotel provided inside the closet, and headed out.
“Taxi, sir?” asked a deferential guy in uniform who held open the door for him.
“No, thanks.”
And he was free to set foot as he pleased on American soil.
The hotel was on a hill, so he followed the slope down toward the sea. Then, working from the tourist map he’d found on his hotel desk, he headed for the busier area. Fisherman’s Wharf and so on.
He let it all flow over him. The voices, with their different accents, the endless cell phones, the atmosphere of Europe mixed with the drive of America.
He bought a newspaper and sat at an outdoor café drinking frothy cappuccino while he tried to work out the who’s-who of California politics. Maybe he was jet-lagged after all, for the politics here seemed too complicated for words. He was in a state where a bodybuilder could become state governor; no wonder he felt more like an extra at Disneyland than a man with a job to do.
People-watching was more rewarding anyway. So he sat idly in the suns
hine and watched the beggars and hustlers, the business people and shoppers, the tourists and students and masses of people who could be anyone out doing anything.
After a while he got up, bought a few postcards, and wandered on down the street, where he bought two slices of pizza. After he’d devoured those he discovered he was still hungry, so he went into a likely looking pub and ordered a beer and a hamburger with chips. The waitress came back with a mound of potato chips on the plate beside the burger. “I asked for chips,” he reminded her politely.
“That’s what those are, honey. Potato chips.”
He was a friendly man by nature, and the busty woman seemed nice in a harried way, so he decided to ask her for his first lesson in American. “Where I come from we’d call these crisps.”
“Hunh,” she said, wiping his table clean of beer rings.
“What do you call the long, deep-fried potato sticks?”
“French fries, honey.”
“Right, thanks a lot.”
“You want me to change these for you?”
“No, that’s all right.”
Since he didn’t have his tipping guide yet, and for all he knew, the fellows in baseball caps at the next table could be spies for People magazine, he tipped the waitress five dollars. She seemed happy, giving him not only a big smile, but her home phone number, “In case you need somebody to show you around, honey.”
He thanked her politely. He’d been receiving similar requests since he’d left his teens, and he was always polite about it. He wouldn’t toss the scrap of paper with her name and number on it until he was out of sight.
Steve wolfed down his first American hamburger while half watching a golf game on the telly mounted behind the bar. Not so very different from a Saturday afternoon at home, he decided, as he finished his beer and made his way back to his hotel.
He settled back with a second beer, this one from his own personal mini-bar, and wondered what his family would make of this. They all seemed so impossibly far away just now. He calculated the time and figured he’d just catch them at home.
His uncle picked up the phone and was as delighted to hear from him as though he’d been gone a month.
“How are they treating you over there, son?”
“Great. I’ve got a nice room in a decent hotel. All the comforts.”
“How are the birds?”
Since Steve didn’t think his uncle had taken up ornithology, he said, “Not bad so far.” Though in truth he’d only met one American woman who’d whetted his appetite for more.
“A pretty girl in a sundress met me at the airport,” he informed his uncle.
“Pretty, eh?”
“Nice tits. Well, I only fully saw one, but it was very nice.”
“Young dog,” his uncle chuckled. “I know you’re only teasing, but you watch out for those girls. They’re terrible, with their cosmetic surgery and take-no-prisoners divorces.”
Steve rolled his gaze. “You been watching those Dallas reruns again, haven’t you?”
“All right, all right,” his uncle muttered. “Your aunt wants to talk to you.”
Steve grinned into the phone. He hadn’t lived with them for years now but he could picture the scene because it hadn’t changed in longer than he could remember: the working-class row house, rising astonishingly in price now that Sydney real estate values had climbed to such absurd heights, but that didn’t make a damn bit of difference to his aunt and uncle. They’d never move.
After his mum got sick and his dad left, his aunt and uncle had stepped in. When she died, they took the younger children to live with them while seventeen-year-old Steve went to work on his first steel rig.
It was the only real fight he ever had with Gwen and Sid. “You’re smart, you could get a scholarship to the uni, boy. Don’t be a fool.”
But what kind of man didn’t stand up and do what was right? What kind of man didn’t support his family?
A man like his dad, and that’s the kind of man he’d never be.
After talking to Aunt Gwen for a few minutes, and having a quick chat with Sara, his younger sister, who was studying for an exam, he felt better. Sometimes you made sacrifices for the people you loved. Sara was going to get the chance to use her brains and go on to university next year, and this job was going to get her there.
Not that staying in a swank hotel and getting paid to have your picture taken was exactly a hardship, but if it ever got out back home, his life wouldn’t be worth living.
When he hung up, he noted the message light was flashing. Someone had called when he was on the phone. But who had his number?
Lise Atwater, that’s who. He heard her breathy voice sounding half-panicked that he wasn’t answering at—he glanced at the clock on the desk—eight o’clock at night. “Please call me as soon as you get in,” she pleaded and left two numbers.
Since he didn’t believe in torturing women—and besides, he quite liked the sound of her voice—he gave her a ring back right away.
“Oh, thank goodness you’re safe,” she gushed.
He was amused, but also mildly irritated. He wasn’t the sort of person to run into foul play in broad daylight in a tourist area. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a good thing you called. Bloody dangerous city this. I was nearly run down by a tram.”
“Cable car,” she corrected, then laughed dutifully. “This is an important job for me. I can’t let anything go wrong.”
“Well, I’m safe tucked in for the night,” he said. “You can go off to your parties without a thought.”
She laughed a second time, a lot more genuinely, he thought, and he found he liked the sound. He wondered what it would have been like if he’d met her at a party. And damn, he wished he could get the image of that single, tantalizing breast out of his mind.
“I’m putting together your schedule for tomorrow. How about I come and pick you up at nine in the morning? We’ll do a script run-through back at the office.”
He made a face at the phone. But it’s what they were paying him for, so he’d be there. “Sure. Fine.”
“Listen,” she said after a short pause, “I’m really sorry about earlier today—when I picked you up. I can’t believe I fell asleep.”
“No worries,” he said in utter sincerity, thinking again how a glimpse of unexpectedly intimate flesh could be amazingly erotic. “That was the nicest thing that happened to me all day.”
There was a kind of choking sound coming from the phone. “I—I have to go.”
“Enjoy your party.”
Lise put down the phone slowly, as though it were a baby she’d just rocked to sleep and it might start to wail if she wasn’t very, very gentle.
“He thinks I’m a party girl,” she said.
Sonia snorted with laughter, pretty much as she would have expected. “It’s eight o’clock and we’re still in the office. When does the man think you party?”
“It was your dress,” Lise said, “that’s what gave him the idea.”
“And the way you spilled the goods, so to speak,” Sonia agreed.
“Don’t remind me,” Lise dropped her head in her hands on a groan. “And you know the worst part of all?”
“There’s something worse?”
“He said it was the best part of his day.”
“You know, I like the sound of this guy. I think he likes you. He’s gorgeous and he likes you.”
“He thinks I’m a total flake, underwear-challenged, and a party girl.”
“You see? It’s what I keep telling you. Men really go for that stuff.”
And she could really go for Steve, Lise realized. She didn’t think her stomach had yet recovered from the impact of first staring into those mesmerizing green eyes. It was totally like being Sleeping Beauty and waking up to look into the eyes of the handsome prince.
Except, of course, in fairy tales princesses tended to have a stricter dress code.
Her poor stomach. Between the stress and the lack of sleep, she d
idn’t think her gastrointestinal tract could survive unrequited lust for a man so good-looking he’d never give a woman like her a second glance.
“He likes women like that because they’re the kind he usually hangs out with. He’s either a professional model or a surfer boy they picked up off the beach somewhere. He’s into partying, girls, no responsibility—” She gasped as a dreadful thought occurred to her. “I’d better tell him that drugs are absolutely forbidden while he’s working with us. Can you imagine what would happen if—”
“You know, you worry too much?”
“Thank you. Yes. I know. But someone has to take life seriously.”
Sonia shrugged. “Not me. I finished proofing all that ad copy. I’m going home. You should, too.”
“In a minute,” Lise said, already getting back to her computer.
“I still think he likes you.”
“Well, he’ll see the real me tomorrow,” Lise said, feeling a momentary pang for the loss of Steve’s mistaken version of her.
“What if he didn’t?” Sonia said in a totally different tone.
“Pardon?” She glanced up to find her assistant and friend, back in her own dress, since Lise had stopped by her apartment to change on her way back from the airport, leaning against the credenza and staring at her.
“Simple. You need to keep his attention so you can train him. He likes the party-girl type. He thinks you are one. So why not keep dressing that way? It’s not difficult and frankly, it would do you a lot of good to dress like a woman in her twenties instead of a matron of a correctional institute.”
“I’m not that bad!”
“A middle-aged matron.”
Lise gasped. “I can’t think about this right now. I have to get our schedule arranged for tomorrow. Here are the scripts for the TV spots. Can you make sure there are enough copies before you go?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks.” She sighed. “He may be a great surfer, but I sure hope he can act.”
“You should do some acting, too,” Sonia said as she picked up the script. “Start acting like a woman in the prime of her life.”