She smiled at me, but it was obvious that she wasn’t entirely convinced. “I guess so.”
“What?” I questioned.
She shook her head. “Nothing.” She was nibbling on that lip again.
“No really, what?” I asked.
“I feel like you should be out there shouting the truth about your dishonorable discharge from the rooftops,” she told me. She pressed her curls back from her face and looked around herself like the world was just silently judging me. “Everybody thinks you’re this one thing, but you aren’t.”
I sighed. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone’s forgotten me. And honestly? That’s a good thing.”
“The truth doesn’t matter? The bad guys are still out there! They might be doing even worse stuff these days…”
I hoped her idealism would stick around for a long time. It was nice to see it. But it was silly to pretend it was anything less than naïve.
“Nobody cares whether I’m innocent or guilty,” I told her. “The world loves a good hate-fest. I gave them that in spades. Now I’m living a different life. And that’s okay. I don’t need to be famous again. I don’t even want to; it was tiring. I just want to have my family, live my quiet life, and enjoy being super rich. I mean, I’m not exactly suffering here, am I?”
She smirked at me. “I guess I can understand that.”
She didn’t though. It was clear on her face. She didn’t understand why I wouldn’t fight the prevailing narrative floating around about me. In her mind, I’d been unfairly cast as a villain. It was nice to have someone on my side other than Luc, Jimmy, and my immediate relatives, but I had my doubts. I wasn’t sure I wasn’t a villain. And I didn’t think the world would listen or care if I tried to suddenly come out with the truth.
“Do you want to see the slide,” I asked Isabelle to distract her.
Her eyes went huge. “There’s a slide?”
I grinned. “There’s a slide from the second floor down to the first floor by the kitchen,” I told her. “It’s behind a secret panel. Want to see?” I’d been meaning to keep that from her. Pregnancy and slides didn’t seem like a great mix, and as she got rounder she might get stuck, but I needed a distraction.
She grabbed my hand and it sent a little electric jolt straight through my body. In an instant, I had a vivid, visceral fantasy of kissing her. “Show me.”
I tried to conceal how shocked I was that she’d willingly touched me, but my brain was struggling to believe it was true. Hope simmered up again from nowhere and I tried, less successfully this time, to beat it back down into hopeless bleak despair.
“Okay,” I managed. I didn’t kiss her, although I wanted to. “It’s this way…”
If being with her made me feel like this, working together was going to be complicated.
25
Connor
The Houseguest
The first evening in the LA house felt very strange. At the castle, I couldn’t feel Isabelle’s presence. I knew she was there, of course, but the size of the estate was so incredibly vast that I rarely ran into her. Here, in four thousand square feet, it wasn’t quite the same. I felt like I could feel her through the walls.
And then there was the fact that we were alone. The castle necessitated a small, live-in support staff just to keep things running; the LA house didn’t. So, it was just me and Isabelle. As the sun set and Isabelle settled into her new room (down the hall and to the right from mine), I could hear her moving around, humming to herself, walking up and down the stairs, going down the slide, and simply being another living, breathing person in my general vicinity.
I tried to focus on my work. I had a lot of paperwork to do related to Night Stalker. The production company ran well under Luc’s day-to-day leadership, but I still insisted on doing a lot of the high-level financial and organizational work. It was no use though. All I could think about was Isabelle.
Should I have put her bedroom farther away from mine? Maybe she was too close. I could have put her in the downstairs master bedroom instead of the nicest upstairs guest room. I even could have put her in the casita next to the pool. But I’d wanted her close.
And now she was so close that I could almost taste her. It had been a long, long time since I’d had live-in female companionship of any kind. My body remembered what that was like though and having Isabelle here in the house was ticking too many of those boxes. But there were a number of reasons that nothing could happen between us, and I went through them in my head as I procrastinated on my emails.
First, Isabelle was my surrogate. That alone should have been enough to discourage me. She was going to have my baby and then leave my life. She’d entered into this arrangement for money, and we had a whole thirty-thousand-word contract that was meant to keep our feelings confined to the narrow roles that we were meant to play in each other’s lives.
Second, she was much too young for me. I was more than fifteen years older than her. Even if, by some incredible miracle, we overcame the utterly insurmountable first problem, I was just too damn old. She was in a totally different generation from me. She was even younger than my nephews. I didn’t know how to connect with someone so young. Even if I hadn’t been living under a metaphorical rock for basically the entire age gap between us, Isabelle and I probably had nothing to connect on. My attraction to her was only physical.
And her attraction to me was probably just hormonal. That was the third problem. She’d told Slick the horse that she found me attractive, but come on. That had to be the massive amount of pregnancy endorphins or something. I’d been attractive to women once upon a time, but that was a long time ago. I’d managed to keep my body in good shape, a necessity when doing stunts, but I barely knew what my face looked like anymore. I’d stopped looking in mirrors a long time ago. I no longer liked what I saw staring back at me.
Which brought me to the fourth problem. Even if we magically transported to a parallel universe where the first three problems could somehow be surmounted, I was not the kind of man who’d be good for Isabelle. She deserved someone capable of going out with her in public, not someone who would bring shame and derision on her forever.
I was busy ruminating on all the reasons that it could never work between us when Isabelle knocked on my study door. I looked up to see her standing on the threshold in a pair of tiny shorts and a black transparent tank top. She was not wearing a bra. I swallowed hard at the sight of her.
“Can you help me with something?” she asked.
All of a sudden, all my reluctance went out the window. My hopes skyrocketed.
Please want sex. Please want sex. Please want sex.
“Sure, what’s up?” I managed. “Is everything alright?”
“Everything’s fine except I can’t reach the cups in the kitchen,” she explained. “I wanted to make myself a cup of hot chocolate, but everything is too high up.”
Damn. Not sex.
I should have been relieved, but I was mostly just disappointed.
“No problem,” I told her, rising to follow her into the kitchen. “We’ll have to get you a stepladder or something. When the house was built, I had them put everything up where it would be comfortable for me.”
All the counters were at thirty-seven inches instead of the standard thirty-four, and I’d had the upper cabinets raised accordingly. The kitchen designer said it was bad for resale, but it was totally worth it for my back and shoulders. It was great for me, but probably not so great for tiny Isabelle.
“I thought everything seemed a lot higher up than usual,” Isabelle huffed, looking around the kitchen like it was personally betraying her. “It’s built for giants.”
I smirked down at her. “How tall are you?”
She looked up at me, squaring her shoulders and standing up straight. “I’m five foot one and three-quarter inches.” The fact that she really cared about that extra three quarters of an inch made me smile more and she scowled. “That’s a perfectly respectable height,�
�� she added. “It’s just two inches under the average.”
“I wasn’t judging,” I said defensively. “I was just curious.”
I thought Isabelle was a great height. She was a bit on the small side, but nothing extreme. Plus, she was round, firm, and fully packed like a perfect, tiny hourglass. Everything I liked in a woman. And I definitely liked Isabelle. It was getting harder and harder to resist telling her just how much.
But so far, she hadn’t figured it out. She was still frowning at me like I was disappointed in her. “If you wanted a taller kid, you should have picked a taller surrogate.”
I reached up into one of the cabinets that Isabelle would never see the inside of without stilts and got her a mug. We really would need to get her a stepladder.
“I don’t care how tall the kid is,” I told her. “Honest. I was just curious.”
“How tall are you?” she asked, looking at me like I was a hulking monster. “You’re the one who needed a custom kitchen to accommodate his extra-large size. So, if anyone’s weird it’s you.”
“Six foot four.” I decided to make her hot chocolate for her. She stood back as I got the milk out of the fridge. Isabelle figured out what I was doing and seemed startled. I kept talking to cover my resulting awkwardness. “I’m not that tall in the great scheme of things.”
Was it weird to make Isabelle a cup of hot chocolate? She was my guest, wasn’t she? I wanted to make sure she was taken care of.
“That’s very tall,” she told me. She was still staring at me intently, and I had to admit that I didn’t mind the attention. Or the conversation. It was nice having someone around to talk to. I’d forgotten what that was like.
“Hey now,” I argued. “I didn’t say you were a freak for being little.” I paused. “Do you like marshmallows?”
She nodded.
“I didn’t say you were a freak,” she replied. Her expression turned thoughtful. “It’s just very tall. Maybe our genes will even out, and the kid will just be average.”
I smiled. I’d actually given a good amount of thought to that. I’d even broken out the Punnett squares from eighth grade biology to try and figure it out, until I’d read a bit online and realized that it was way more complicated than a guy with an associate’s degree in history like me could hope to solve. “Probably so.”
Isabelle looked back at me thoughtfully, chewing on her bottom lip.
“Do you think the baby will have blue eyes like you or brown eyes like me?” she asked.
The Punnett squares hadn’t solved that one, either, but they did suggest at least a seventy-five percent chance of brown or green.
“I hope the baby has your eyes,” I replied, and then wondered if I shouldn’t have told her the truth.
Isabelle turned bright pink. “You do?”
I nodded before I could think better of it. “I hope the baby gets all your physical attributes. I’ve got nothing to offer. You’re much more attractive than me.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Why would you say that? You were People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. Clearly that ought to count for something.”
I laughed. “I’d totally forgotten about that,” I confessed. “That was a long time ago.”
Isabelle smiled shyly at me. “Do you really hope the baby looks like me?” She seemed weirdly gratified. She looked at her reflection in the window. Now that it was dark it acted like a mirror. She frowned at herself.
“Of course,” I told her, feeling like the question was silly. “You’re gorgeous.”
Her eyes flashed back from her reflection to me.
“Don’t make fun of me. It’s not nice. You’re the world’s sexiest man according to People Magazine. I’m a prop designer who can’t do eyeliner without smearing it all over her face like a rabid raccoon.”
“I’m not making fun of you Isabelle. You’re beautiful.” If she didn’t realize it, she was a fool. I’d thought she was beautiful from the first second I laid eyes on her. She was perfect.
Her expression softened into something I didn’t recognize. It made my heart race though. “Thank you,” she whispered. “That’s nice of you to say.” She drifted closer to me across the kitchen.
This conversation was getting out of hand. It was going somewhere, but I wasn’t sure I should let it. Indecision held me on the edge until the microwave beeped and woke me up. Her hot chocolate was done.
“Here’s your drink,” I told her, placing it in front of her and backing up abruptly. “Good night.”
I got out of there as quickly as I could, leaving her blinking at me in surprise.
“Good night, Connor. Sleep well.”
I wasn’t going to be sleeping at all. I would be up all night thinking about her.
26
Connor
The Lawyer and the Accountant
Every Sunday afternoon, I had lunch with Luc and Jimmy. It was a longstanding lunch date. We’d been doing it every week, without fail, for something going on about eight years unless someone was deathly ill, out of the country, or otherwise indisposed.
We’d take the helicopter and go to the same restaurant, Nate’n Al’s—a lovely, famous little delicatessen in the bustling, glamorous part of Beverly Hills—and eat the same meal. I’d get a roast beef sandwich, extra tomatoes, on rye bread, with onion rings, and half-sour pickles. Luc? He got a pastrami on rye and a bowl of matzo ball soup. Jimmy got the worst thing on the menu, the veggie wrap, and then ate it dry with no condiments and a glass of skim milk. For dessert we’d each get a black and white cookie.
It was the same very week. Every week we’d razz Jimmy on his terrible taste in Jewish deli food, and he would protest that as the only Jew of our trio, we were unfit to criticize his choices. Luc would eat too damn much and have to take a Pepcid because matzo ball soup and a pastrami sandwich was enough to feed like four people. And I would eat my food while being briefed by both of them on the business at hand.
“So, tell us about Isabelle,” Jimmy said as we settled into our booth. He was hardly ever this direct. “What, exactly, happened on Friday night?”
I paused. This was not business. This was personal.
“How about we go over the Night Stalker budget,” I suggested instead, opening my menu and looking at it like I didn’t have the entire thing memorized so thoroughly I could recite it backwards as if doing a sobriety test. “I’m concerned the production delays might be sending us in the wrong direction.”
I’d managed to avoid explaining the whole Friday night snow adventure to Luc and Jimmy by feigning exhaustion (well not feigning, I was tired), and rushing off to my room. Then I’d been busy putting in place everything to go eat Chinese food and then move Isabelle and me to LA. But now they had me cornered. Literally cornered. We were in our usual corner booth and they were on either side of me. I was trapped.
“We can do both at once,” Luc said smiling at me in a way that I’m sure wasn’t meant to be threatening but was. I watched him warily over the edge of the menu. “How about you tell us why Isabelle Schmidt appears to have been hired on as the effects supervisor.”
Because she’s pretty and I want her around me all day was not the correct answer. It was an answer. It was even an honest answer. But it wasn’t the right answer.
“She was miserable at the castle,” I told my lawyer and accountant friends. “She hated it there and she wants to work, so I figured it was a win-win.”
“You’re going to let her work?” Jimmy repeated, looking like he couldn’t quite believe it. “After all that work you made Luc do on that contract?”
Luc made a fake-pained look. “I slaved away on that contract,” he said, playing along. “Many a sleepless night was spent making sure Isabelle would be as far away from the real world as humanly possible via contracts law without committing a felony and getting into chattel slavery or indentured servitude territory.”
I sighed. “Yes, yes. I see that now,” I groused. “I was too harsh. My approach was all wrong. It
made Isabelle miserable and that’s why she tried to run away into the snow.”
Luc and Jimmy exchanged a look, and I realized I’d fucked up. I’d just revealed a detail they didn’t know yet. “She tried to run away into the blizzard?” Jimmy asked, stunned. “I thought you two just decided to go out for a sexy, romantic midnight snow jaunt or something and got stranded.”
I swallowed. A romantic midnight jaunt? “It was not a romantic thing.” I remembered the distinctly sexy feeling of her soft ass right up against my hard cock and then wished I could forget it. “There was no romance.” Sex appeal, sure. But not romance. I wasn’t lying.
“Why’d she try to run away?” Luc asked.
“I yelled at her,” I mumbled, figuring it was better to admit it than weave some sort of elaborate, less incriminating fiction around what was probably the low point of my last few years. “Not like before about dinner… Worse. I yelled at her a lot and she got scared and decided to leave.”
“You just went up to her room and yelled at her?” Luc asked. “Why?”
I swallowed. “She broke into the movie theater.”
Jimmy and Luc exchanged another glance. I couldn’t or didn’t want to interpret what it meant. Thankfully, the waiter came by just then and momentarily distracted Luc and Jimmy. We put in our usual lunch orders, and I was just beginning to hope that they’d been thoroughly diverted by the thought of food and that I might weasel out of the rest of this conversation, when Luc refocused on me like a laser beam as soon as we were alone again.
“What did you two fight about? Just the fact that she went in there?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter.”
“Then what happened? Why was the Jeep out there?”
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