He slipped three hundred-dollar bills out and placed them on the sleek podium behind which she stood.
“Is there any way you can possibly fit us in?”
My eyes bugged out. I know, after everything I’d seen – ten-thousand dollar a night hotel room, rack of designer clothes, Bentley limo – $300 shouldn’t have even registered on my radar anymore.
But since that was a few dollars more than was currently in my checking account, it still got my attention.
It got hers, too.
She moved her palm over the money, and it disappeared as smoothly as if she were a magician headlining in Vegas.
“You know, I think I do remember those reservations,” she said, warming right up. “Please, follow me. Did you want something in the main room, or something more… intimate?”
“Oh, the more intimate, the better,” he said, flashing her one of his panty-dropping smiles.
She actually stumbled when he did it, then led us back to the table with a red face.
I hate to admit it, but I felt a stab of jealousy. I know he was just turning on the charm for fun… or to help get a table… but it annoyed me that he could do it at the drop of a hat, and could affect other women so easily.
And it hurt a little that he was using it on somebody else but me.
Just a tiny little pinprick… but it was there.
I decided I was being silly, so I swallowed my annoyance and walked along with him, my hand in his.
And thus we found ourselves seated in a tiny alcove away from the rest of the world. Another hundred dollars had secured Johnny at a table down the way from us, where he could keep tabs without being too intrusive.
“That was interesting,” I said between sips of the most wonderful Chardonnay I’d ever tasted in my life.
“What?”
“The bribe to get in here.”
“Oh, that.” He laughed. “It’s amazing how cheaply some people can be bought.”
I arched an eyebrow. Now the flirting really was forgotten. “For some of us, $300 isn’t cheap.”
He shrugged diplomatically. “True.”
“And I wouldn’t say you were buying her.”
He grinned. “She has a certain amount of power. This is her domain… and $300 was her price.”
“You probably could have just told her who you were.”
“Maybe… but I hate people who say, ‘Do you know who I am?’ If they don’t immediately know who you are, you should never, ever say it.”
“I didn’t know who you were.”
“Yes, but… you’re rather slow,” he said in a sad, patronizing voice.
I kicked him under the table.
“Ow!” he laughed, and rubbed his shin. “Careful there, I need that leg.”
“Do you think she knows who you are?” I asked, the jealousy returning a little bit. I didn’t want the tall, elegant redhead showing me up any more than she already had.
“I hope not. I go to great lengths to keep my picture and my name out of the news.”
“Why?”
“You ever talked to anybody who’s famous? I mean, really famous? ‘Walk down the street and people come up to you’ famous?”
I gave him a look like Puh-lease. “Me? No.”
“Well, all the ones I know say it’s the worst part of the deal. Fame is only good for a couple of things: attracting attention to causes, and bedding beautiful women. I have enough money that I can hire other people to attract attention, and I already have a beautiful woman sitting across from me, so I’m fine.”
At first I blushed from the compliment – and then the jealousy hit me even stronger.
“Yeah, but you only met me yesterday. Surely you wanted to attract women before you met me.”
“Well, since the last one was eight months ago, you can see how high up on my to-do list that was.”
I averted my eyes. “Was she beautiful?”
“Who, the last woman I was with?”
I nodded without looking at him.
“She was my fiancée.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
I looked up at him and stared.
“I… I didn’t know…” I whispered.
He smiled – but it was a polite smile that put distance between us. Sort of like what the redhead had used when she assured us she couldn’t possibly let us in. “How could you have?”
“I… did it end… amicably?”
His features turned to stone. “No. Not really.”
“What happened?”
For the first time since I’d met him, his blue eyes made me think of ice. Cold, arctic, glacial. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I dropped my gaze again. “I-I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
His voice thawed, as though he realized he’d been too harsh. “It’s alright… I just don’t want to talk about it.”
It made sense now. Why he hadn’t been with anybody else in eight months.
He’d had his heart broken.
And because of that, mine broke for him.
25
“Enough about me,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of me. Tell me about you. I hardly know anything about you.”
I looked back up at him. He was smiling again.
“Yeah, I guess we kind of skipped the chit chat, didn’t we?”
He laughed, back to his old self. “Yeah, we kind of did.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Who you are. What makes you tick.”
“That’s not exactly something I have figured out yet.”
“Alright, let’s start with basics. Parents? Siblings?”
“My mom and dad still live in Charlotte, North Carolina. That’s where I grew up. I have an older brother. He’s at a software company down in Florida.”
“What was your major in college?”
“Business, with a psych minor.” I winced. “This is… kind of weird.”
“Too much like a job interview,” he agreed. “Alright, tell me this: what did five-year-old Lily want to be when she grew up?”
“Oh, that’s easy – a ballerina.”
“Really.”
“And six-year-old Lily wanted to be a scientist.”
“Those are kind of opposite ends of the spectrum.”
“They are. But it gets better. At eight, I wanted to be an astronaut. At nine, a psychologist. I guess that’s the one that stuck the most, what with the psych minor.”
“Why a business major?”
“My dad was paying for my education, and he wanted me to do something practical. So… I did.”
“Mm-hm.” Connor looked at me as though he were staring deep into my soul. “And what does the… how old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“My God, you’re a baby.”
I flushed. “No I’m not.”
Connor grinned. “You’re still wet behind the ears.”
“Yeah, whatever. How old are you?”
“Thirty next month.”
“Good Lord, you already have one foot in the grave.”
He shook his head with mock sadness. “And here I am in an early midlife crisis, robbing the cradle.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m going to come over there and smack you if you keep saying stuff like that.”
He arched an eyebrow and smiled seductively. “You like that, don’t you.”
“What?”
“Domination. Aggression. You’re very physical.”
“I’m just playing around!” I protested.
He put a finger up to his lips, as though he were pondering something. “Maybe we can do a little something about that later.”
My eyes widened. “Like what?”
“I don’t know… maybe a little spanking or something.”
I blushed. “What?! No.”
“Oh, I think so.”
“NO.”
“Have you tried it?”
“What?”
�
��Being spanked.”
I was flushing a deep crimson by now. “NO.”
“Oh. Pity.”
“You keep talking like that, I’ll come over there and spank you,” I snarled.
He arched the eyebrow again. “…promise?”
I gulped down some wine for something to do. “You were saying something before you got sidetracked into your 50 Shades Of Grey moment.”
He laughed out loud, then tilted his eyes up to the ceiling as though thinking. “What was – oh yes. I asked you what little Lily wanted, and you told me about at seven, eight, nine years old… so what does twenty-four year-old Lily want?”
I looked at him for a couple of seconds, thinking.
“Twenty-four year-old Lily is still working on that,” I finally answered.
He nodded and smiled. “I’m sure she’ll figure it out.”
Our eyes locked, and I felt my heart speed up.
And then the waiter came with our food, and the moment passed.
26
My smoked salmon was incredible. Connor got pork tenderloin with some amazing kind of sauce made with puréed cherries. For the second time that day – the first being when I shaved him in the tub – I felt terribly intimate as we fed each other bites of food from each other’s plates.
I mean emotionally intimate; obviously we’d been closer… um, physically. But as I fed him bites of salmon from my fork, and he laughed at me when I freaked out about dropping some on his suit, there was a comfort there I usually only felt after months and months of dating somebody.
When we left, Johnny fell in behind us.
“How was your dinner?” I asked him.
“Nobody got shot, so it was good,” he grumbled.
“You’re not going to let this go, are you,” Connor asked.
“Not until you’re safe back at the hotel.”
“Well, then, you’re going to have to wait awhile.”
As though he were psychic, Sebastian called exactly as we exited the restaurant.
“Hellooo!” he said gaily over the speakerphone. And, I might add, rather gay-ly.
“Somebody’s happy,” I remarked.
“I’m catching a flight out tomorrow! Javier was thrilled – ”
“The hairdresser?”
“Yes, of course!” Sebastian almost sang, then a note of worry crept into his voice. “Are you sure it’s alright?”
“Sebastian, when was the last time you had a vacation?” Connor asked. “Other than Cabo, whenever that was.”
“I can’t recall.”
“Then it’s completely fine. Just don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Unless you have sex with dudes, I don’t think that’s the best advice,” I pointed out.
“Oh yeah,” Connor realized. “Good point. Okay, do everything I wouldn’t do, then.”
“No need to be crude,” Sebastian said, though he sounded more like Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music than his old snarky self.
I grinned. “You sound so happy, Sebastian.”
“I am!”
“You were only half-right,” I said to Connor. “He doesn’t even have to get laid, he just needs the potential of getting laid.”
“Someone didn’t get the memo about being crude,” Sebastian snapped, sounding more like his old self now.
“So what’s in store for us this evening, courtesy of Javier the hairdresser?” Connor asked.
“The biggest party he knows of is being thrown by a producer, he did that movie last year everybody thought would win the Oscar for best picture but didn’t? Well, he’s working with the star again on his new picture, so it’s sure to be a humongous shindig. Not only that, but he produced three other movies starring everybody from Matt Damon to that little singer girl who’s trying to be an actress, and supposedly everybody’s going to be there.”
Connor looked over at me. “Sound good?”
I felt both elated and horribly nervous at the same time. “I guess…”
Connor knit his brows. “You guess?”
“Are we going to fit in?” I asked nervously.
“Connor will. You won’t,” Sebastian said matter-of-factly.
“Hey!” Connor barked.
But, strangely enough, the honesty was a bracing tonic. “What happened to the kinder, gentler Sebastian from earlier in the conversation?” I laughed.
“He’s still only got the POTENTIAL of getting laid,” Sebastian said sassily.
“Hurry up and give us the address before the non-laid Sebastian comes back in full force,” Connor sighed.
27
I was buzzed from two glasses of wine as the limo headed into the Hollywood Hills. The lights of Los Angeles spread out below us as we twisted and curved up into the darkness, and I could see the Dubai standing taller than all the other buildings around it, outlined against the night sky.
The houses started off very expensive at the base of the hills, then moved into ‘extremely expensive’ range, and from there blasted off into the stratosphere. It was easy to tell when we were getting closer to the party: a long string of BMW’s, Mercedes, Aston Martins, Ferraris, and Porsches lined the narrow street as white-jacketed valets parked new cars at the base of the hill and then hustled back up to the main house.
It was an enormous mansion, very Mediterranean, like it had been airlifted in by a multi-millionaire from the coast of Greece. Johnny drove us up to the front, a valet opened the door and helped me out, and then Johnny grudgingly surrendered the car and followed us inside.
I stayed right up against Connor.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Just nervous.”
“Don’t worry, you’ve already slept with the hottest guy here, that gives you a certain amount of street cred.”
I poked him in the side. “You are so in love with yourself, aren’t you?”
“Unconditionally,” he grinned, and hugged me close with his arm draped around my body.
I might have been annoyed at his extreme self-confidence, but I was eternally thankful for how protective he was being.
We walked through the main front door into something out of a movie. Literally. I could have sworn I’d seen this foyer in one or two films over the years. It was a gigantic hall with a ceiling thirty feet overhead, with a sweeping marble staircase and dark red carpet. Handsome men and gorgeous women gathered in little clusters, holding champagne flutes and cocktail glasses, and laughing and talking their asses off. Everywhere I looked there was a famous face: an actor, an actress, the lead singer of a band with a current Top 10 hit, a rapper, a director… not to mention lots of people who were basically famous for being famous. It was like God opened an US WEEKLY magazine, shook it real hard, and everybody just dropped out of the pages and landed in here.
I had always nurtured a secret pride that I wouldn’t be starstruck if I actually saw anybody famous. That I was immune to that sort of thing.
Turns out, not so much.
My jaw dropped open wider than a big-mouthed bass.
Although, in my defense, it could have just been the sheer volume of famous people in one place that got to me.
Yeah, that’s it. There was a critical mass of star power in the place, and it overwhelmed my normally worldly ways.
I like telling these little lies to myself to feel better afterwards.
Anyhow, I was gawking like a four-year-old at Disneyland.
Connor ribbed me gently. “Better close your mouth before something slips in there.”
I turned and narrowed my eyes at him. “Can’t you wait until we get back to the hotel room?”
He tipped back his head and laughed loudly.
Across the room, a little bald man in a tux and horn-rimmed glasses looked over – and his mouth dropped open once he saw Connor.
When I saw his reaction, I felt a little better about my own starstruck…ness.
The little bald man said something to the people he was with – which included an actor who had won
an Academy Award a few years back – and hustled over to us.
“Oh my, this is a wonderful turn of events,” he beamed, and stuck out his hand to Connor. “Lewis Vonder. Welcome.”
I figured this must be the producer throwing the party. I didn’t know him or recognize him, but on the other hand, I didn’t know any producers except ones who were famous directors. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron…
They weren’t anywhere to be seen, thank goodness, or my inner geek would have come out in a truly mortifying display.
Connor smiled tightly and shook his hand. “I’m Connor, and this is Lily – ”
“Oh, I know who you are, Mr. Templeton,” the man said slyly, then glanced at me with a cursory “Hello.”
Then he went back to Connor like he was drawn by a magnet. “If only I’d known you were in town, I would have invited you personally!”
“Javier beat you to it.”
The man frowned. “…Bardem?”
“The hairdresser,” I added helpfully.
“The… hairdresser?” the man asked, obviously lost.
“All the stars love him,” Connor said, as though everybody knew THAT.
Then he gently steered me around the producer.
Mr. Lewis Vonder wouldn’t give up, but trailed alongside us like a puppy dog. “Are you thinking of expanding into the movie business, Connor?”
“No, I’m just here for the free food,” Connor said as we walked through the hall towards the back of the house.
Lewis laughed like he had just heard the funniest joke EVER. “Hilarious! You’ll be a hit in Hollywood!”
Connor looked at him. “No, really… I’m just here for the free food. Javier said it was great.”
The producer frowned, like he wasn’t sure whether he was the butt of the joke or just talking to a cheap-ass, Howard Hughes-worthy eccentric. He did want to keep talking, though, and he pushed people out of the way as he tried to keep up. “Obviously you’re a busy man, so I’ll make this quick. I have a slate of three films, all with major stars attached – Cruise, Clooney, Pitt – and we’re looking for financing outside the studio system. We should talk, we could set up a meeting – ”
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