Not a Fairy Tale: HarperImpulse Contemporary Romance

by Romy Sommer

  She shrugged. “I don’t like to get attached to material things.” Or to people.

  She pulled a bottle of beer out the fridge; one she hadn’t even remembered was there. “I also don’t have much to offer you. Will this do?”

  He nodded, took a bottle from her and popped the lid. She watched as he drank, swallowing hard against the tug of desire that shot through her. God! It was like watching beer porn.

  Now that she had him here, she didn’t quite know what to do with him. She was too tired, too achy, and too dirty to make any attempt at seduction. Thank heavens there was no one else to see her and judge her in this sorry state. Dom seeing her like this was bad enough.

  “So, when do I start my training?” she asked.

  His eyes glittered. “You already have. But I’m wondering if you even need me at all. We just need a video of you doing what you did this afternoon and we can send it in as your audition tape.”

  “Nice try, but I’m not letting you off the hook that easily.”

  He smiled, moving closer, to stand right in front of her so she was forced to look up at him. “I won’t let you off the hook that easily, either. I’m going to make you work. First, we’re going to need to build your core strength and improve your endurance. I want to teach you some basic tumbling and martial arts, and I have friends who can teach you the other skills you need: firearms training and driving.”

  “I drive,” she said defensively. Though not often since she’d become famous. The day after she’d stopped for gas and been mobbed at the gas station she’d offered the super- organized production assistant on her current movie a job. Wendy had driven her car ever since.

  “A stick shift?” Dom asked.

  Slowly she shook her head. She hoped he couldn’t read her thoughts because he did not want to know what image had just popped into her head at the thought of handling a stick shift. Sheesh! But she’d turned into a raging mess of hormones in his presence.

  “You’re also going to meet some of the friends I work with. If you want to get inside the head of some badass people, that’s as good a place to start as any.”

  “Will there be any more like you?” she looked up at him through her long eyelashes and smiled. It was hard to do coy when you felt like you needed a very long soak in a bath to decontaminate, but she hadn’t been nominated for an Academy Award for nothing. Even if it had only been for Best Supporting Actress, and even if she hadn’t won.

  That naughty smile ticked up the corner of his mouth. “Any more like me in what way?”

  She met his gaze head on. “Sexy, single…”

  He held her gaze for a long moment, saying nothing. Then his gaze dipped to her lips. “Are you flirting with me, Ms. Alexander?”

  “Is it working?”

  His smile deepened, into the one he used to soften his brush-off. “I need a day to get a few things sorted and to speak to the rest of my crew. Meet me on the Venice Beach pier at six-thirty on Thursday morning.” He leaned in and brushed a kiss against her temple. Her lungs forgot to breathe. “Thanks for the beer.”

  He let himself out the apartment and she was still standing in the kitchen, leaning against the counter to keep herself up. She was pretty sure the boneless feeling in her legs had nothing at all to do with the excruciating workout of the afternoon.

  But her emotions weren’t nearly so boneless. She pushed herself away from the counter and headed for the bathroom.

  Yet again, she’d practically thrown herself at him, and he’d walked away. What was it about her that a man with his reputation with women could keep walking away?

  She was more than half an hour late. Dom paced the pier, drawing curious stares from the early-morning fishermen. He hadn’t brought his mobile. Should he head home to fetch it? Perhaps she’d decided to bail already and he was wasting his time here.

  He was on the verge of giving up waiting when he spotted her, a curvaceous figure in leggings, a running jacket with the hood pulled up and big sunglasses jogging towards him down the pier, scanning the area as she ran.

  He set his hands on his hips. “You’re late. I thought you’d already changed your mind.”

  She shook her head. “I’m so sorry. There were reporters camped outside my building, so we had a hell of a time getting out, then the driver had to lose them before we could come here.”

  He led her down to the beach and they headed north, jogging along the soft sand.

  “I could go running with an ordinary trainer,” she pointed out.

  “This is just the warm-up. You’ll be running every morning to build your stamina.”

  She cast him a coy look. “Is that how you keep up your stamina?”

  She wasn’t talking about his exercise regimen.

  He ignored the question. Of course, she knew his reputation. He made no apologies for who he was and what he did. But he didn’t feel like discussing his sex drive with Nina, of all people.

  The beach was not yet busy, though the sun was up over the horizon. In spite of the easy pace he set, Nina was panting for breath by the time they’d reached his usual halfway mark.

  “This is so much easier on a treadmill,” she wheezed, bending over, her hands on her knees. “And my calves are still sore from yesterday.”

  “It’ll get easier.”

  “Please tell me I get coffee when this is over?”

  “You get coffee when this is over.”

  He let her have a rest before they turned back. She collapsed on the beach, her hoodie falling back and her ponytail swinging free. But not before she’d first checked their surrounds, that no one was watching her.

  Dom resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Vain much?

  She removed her sunglasses and he realized the fake eyelashes were gone. Why she needed them, he had no idea. She had the longest, glossiest natural lashes he’d seen.

  “It’s really pretty here,” she said, looking out over the breakers toward the horizon.

  “So maybe you can be converted to liking the sea?”

  She shivered. “It’s still way too scary.”

  He’d seen enough people caught in riptides, or surfers submerged by waves, to know the sea could scare the faint-hearted. But knowledge was the only way to combat fear. Staying calm and knowing how to reduce the risks were more important in any crisis than brute strength.

  Every stunt he did was planned to within an inch of its life, and rehearsed and rehearsed to eliminate as much of the unknown as possible. There was still an element of danger – he wouldn’t do it otherwise – but Nina needed to learn that preparation eased the greatest fears.

  “Did you have a bad experience with the sea?” he asked.

  She rose and dusted the beach sand off the seat of her pants. “Let’s head back. I could really use that coffee now.”

  He took pity on her and they ran back along the pedestrian paths rather than on the soft sand.

  He took her back to his house and they ate breakfast on the deck, Sandy running mad circles around them and Hana, his housekeeper, serving them fresh coffee.

  “You need some feeding up,” Hana observed, and Nina laughed.

  “You and my Gran are the only people on the planet who tell me that. Everyone else wants me to live on a diet of celery sticks.”

  Hana shook her head and piled more bacon on Nina’s plate before heading back inside.

  Nina trimmed the fat off the bacon and snapped her fingers for Sandy. As the dog nuzzled against her hand, eating up the fatty bits, Nina laughed and scratched between her ears.

  “You like animals?” he asked, surprised. Her pristine, white apartment was so clearly not home to any pets.

  “I had a dog just like Sandy when I was a teenager.” She rubbed her face against the dog’s fur so he couldn’t see her face, but he heard the catch in her voice. “I still miss her.”

  “You should get another,” he suggested.

  “And who would look after it when I’m away on a shoot? I even managed to kill a ca
ctus once.”

  “You have a PA,” he reminded her.

  She shook her head. “Wendy goes wherever I go.”

  “She didn’t come with you to Westerwald.” He would have remembered.

  “I gave her some time off. Her sister was having a baby.” That was definitely a catch in her voice. She downed the last of her coffee and stood up. “I’m ready. Where are we headed next?”

  They walked the short distance to the dojo where he often worked out. On the soft matting he tested her basic tumbling skills, showing her how to fall and roll safely. She wasn’t half bad and she still had some of that flexibility she must have learned cheerleading. She managed the shoulder rolls from kneeling easily enough, but break falls and dive rolls from standing required more effort. And a great deal of touching and close proximity.

  When he’d fantasized about having his hands all over her, he hadn’t imagined he’d be showing her how to hold her head or correcting her posture.

  He held out a hand to help her up from the mat. She came up with too much impetus and had to grab hold of him to steady herself. He caught her arms.

  They stood chest to chest, both breathing heavily, though it wasn’t from exertion.

  He should step away. He should let her go. Instead, his arm snaked around her waist and Nina looked up at him, her pupils so large and dark that it was like looking into a deep well. She ran her tongue over her lips and every part of his body sprang to attention.

  “You can let me go now.”

  Slowly and reluctantly he let her go and stepped away. Barely half a day in her presence and he was already finding it difficult to remember all the very good reasons why he hadn’t taken her to bed long before now.

  Number one being that he was only a step away from being a man whore and she was … Nina. Smart and sexy and spunky, and definitely in a class of her own.

  He had nothing to offer a woman like her, and he had better remember that.

  They had lunch at a tiny Italian bistro frequented by the trendy advertising set.

  “I can’t go in there,” Nina whispered urgently. “I’m not dressed to be seen.”

  “And you won’t be,” Dom assured her.

  The owner himself took their orders. Nina was careful to keep her back to the room, hiding behind a leafy pot plant.

  “Your usual?” Antonio asked.

  Dom nodded.

  “What’s that?” Nina asked.

  Antonio lowered his voice. “Salmon pesto pasta. Special family recipe, but it’s not on the menu. My wife makes it only for Dominic.”

  “Make that two,” Nina said, with a smile that won her another fan.

  Antonio headed back to the kitchen and Nina cast a furtive glance around the restaurant. “What if someone recognizes us?” she whispered.

  “Would that be so bad?”

  “With the rumors Paul’s been spreading about me, someone might assume you and I are having an affair.”

  Again, would that be so bad? Clearly it was, because her brow furrowed with anxiety.

  He shrugged. “No one’s paying us the least attention. Look – a room full of people too busy texting to pay any attention to us.”

  After lunch, which Nina devoured ravenously, he took her to the firing range at a police training facility. Two days of almost constant physical exertion and she was looking forward to the rest. Except that the target range wasn’t the walk in the park she’d expected it to be.

  Though Dom let her sit while she learned the theory of firearm safety, actually learning to load and fire a gun was another matter. The intense concentration required to fire at the life-size paper targets was exhausting, her ear drums were left ringing in spite of the ear protection, and her wrist and arm ached from the revolver’s recoil.

  “You have good hand/eye coordination,” the instructor said. He was an ex-SWAT officer and a hard taskmaster, not given to praise, so she glowed at the compliment. “But you still hold the gun like a girl. Next time we’ll work on improving your grip. I want you handling these weapons with confidence before we move you onto rapid fire and combat shooting.”

  It was late afternoon when Dom rode her home on his bike. She wrapped her arms around him, pressed herself against the solid heat of him between her legs. Forget the adrenalin rush of the bike ride, it had nothing on the rush of hormones flooding her.

  This time, when he turned into her street, he pulled up to the curb half a block from her condo.

  “Oh hell,” she moaned. “I was sure they’d have left by now.”

  The street had been overrun. There were more cars than she’d ever seen in the quiet street, and the huddle of reporters guarding the tall gates at the entrance to her building had swelled to double the size.

  She still wore the same running gear she’d left in this morning, creased, sweaty, and dirt-stained now, and she hadn’t had a chance to touch up her make-up. “They can’t see me like this,” she groaned, immensely grateful for the bike helmet concealing her identity.

  “They can’t see you looking like a kick-ass action woman? Isn’t that the whole point of this exercise?”

  If only she looked kick-ass. At best, she probably looked like a love-starved teen with the hots for her teacher. “The training’s for the benefit of the film’s producers and director, but not how the reporters will spin it. They’ll make it look like I’m falling to pieces over Paul.” Or worse, like she’d been cheating on him. “What the hell are they doing here, anyway? All I did was turn down a frigging marriage proposal, not end world hunger.”

  Unless someone had spotted them together and blabbed? All those cell phones in the Italian restaurant, Antonio, Dom’s friend at the firing range…

  Dom looked back at her. “We have two choices: we either go through them, or we go someplace else.”

  She wasn’t usually such a coward, but after the couple of days she’d had, she wasn’t up to facing down reporters. She’d have to call Wendy to sneak her back into her apartment again. And then repeat all over again in the morning. She pulled at the neck of her t-shirt but it did nothing to ease the suffocating feeling. Even her refuge wasn’t safe these days. The idea of a big house in a gated community grew more appealing every day.

  “Someplace else,” she decided. She gave him another address and he turned the bike around.

  Chrissie’s suite was on the fourth floor of a glass and steel office building not too far away. The lobby was mercifully empty, but the security guard gave them a curious look as he buzzed them through. Nina almost wept with relief to find her publicist still at her desk.

  “There’s a mob of reporters outside my building,” she said without preamble as she strode into Chrissie’s corner office.

  Chrissie broke into a smile. “I know. Isn’t it wonderful? You’re back as front page news and I’m a genius!”

  Foreboding whispered down Nina’s spine. “What have you done now?”

  Chrissie held up her mobile phone. Nina stepped closer to look at the picture that filled the screen. She and Dominic in the booth at 25 Degrees. It had been taken at the exact moment she’d leaned across to steal the fries off his plate. Dominic’s face was part-obscured, but hers was clear as daylight. The mix of hunger and mischief in her flushed face was unmistakable. On the plus side, she definitely did not look like a girl pining for her ex.

  She looked like a girl in lust.

  As long as no one realized it was food that had put that look on her face, rather than a man. Though the man hadn’t hurt.

  “I had my photographer follow you,” Chrissie said, beaming. “You were so clever to choose that restaurant. There’s nothing more All-American than a burger diner. We’re going to turn you back into America’s sweetheart, everyone’s favorite girl next door. And now everyone will be wondering who this paragon is who’s stolen your heart from Paul.”

  She still didn’t get it. Nina didn’t want to be the girl next door anymore. And she was pretty sure Dom didn’t want to be anyone’s paragon.<
br />
  Dom reached over her shoulder and removed the phone from Chrissie’s hand. “Are there any other pictures?” he asked. His voice sounded tight.

  “That’s the only one I’ve put up on Instagram so far. I’m drip-feeding them to keep the press intrigued.”

  Nina had never seen Dom angry before. His lips pressed hard together and the skin around his mouth turned white with tension. His eyes glinted in a way that made her shiver. “I agreed to train Nina. I didn’t sign up to have my name and face dragged into the tabloids.”

  Chrissie’s eyes widened.

  “You upload any more pictures, or so much as whisper my name, and you’ll regret it. Get it?”

  Chrissie nodded.

  Without another word, Dom shoved the phone back at her, turned on his heel and strode from the room.

  “Shit.” Chrissie laid a dramatic hand over her heart. “He can be scary. Does he really mean it?”

  Nina nodded.

  “I don’t get it. Who wouldn’t want to be linked to you?”

  Nina didn’t get it either. She shrugged. Perhaps he thought it would interfere with his love life. “Dominic likes his anonymity.”

  “He was the one who gave me the idea. The way he made it look as if you’d left the Vanity Fair party together…” Chrissie sighed. “It was all so perfect. He’s exactly the ‘ordinary man’ we were looking for.”

  Nina shook her head slowly. Dom was anything but ordinary. “I thought you didn’t approve of him when you first met him?”

  Chrissie shrugged. “Not when you still had a shot at Paul de Angelo. I mean hello? Paul’s an international superstar and your stunt man is a nobody. But since Paul isn’t an option any more, I have to admit the stunt man is a very nice piece of eye candy.”

  Nina swallowed a smile. Better than nice. And it didn’t hurt that he had brains, too. And a sense of humor. And that crooked smile. “From now on, please run your plans by me first. Until then, can you make the press go away?”

  She found Dom outside in the hall, leaning up against the wall. The pinched looked around his mouth had disappeared.