Exclusively Yours

by Shannon Stacey

  Terry laughed, then grabbed a list from the fridge to double check against the army of plastic bins at her feet. “Okay, almost an adult.”

  “You know Mom’s going to be all over my ass about being ready to go day after tomorrow even though I’m the first one packed every year. If I fall off her radar for even a few hours, she’ll have a fit.”

  “You really are a dumbass. Mom knows she’s in town. Tell her you’re going to dinner with the bitch who ripped your heart out of your chest and stomped on it. Do you think three jars of peanut butter are enough?”

  “We’re only going for two weeks. And I don’t want the whole damn town to know I’m going to see her.”

  “Eight adults and five kids…I guess three will be enough.”

  “Terry.” He waited until she looked up from her list. “Seven adults.”

  “What? Oh. Yeah.” She laughed at herself, but the pain was written all over her face. “Who’s the dumbass now, huh?”

  “He is,” Joe said, not for the first time. “Did you call that divorce lawyer my agent recommended yet?”

  “I’m putting it off until the trip is over.” She held up a hand to ward off the argument she knew was coming. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’d rather talk about Keri Daniels.”

  “Fine. If she agrees to dinner, I’m going to tell everybody I’ve got a meeting in Boston tomorrow night. Will you back me up?”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me that, too?” she asked, clearly exasperated now.

  “I thought about it. But I kept seeing Keri a secret from you once, sis, and it hurt you when you found out. I didn’t want to do it again.”

  She sighed and Joe tasted victory. “Okay, I’ll back you up, but I still think you’re a moron. How many jars of pickles did we go through last year?”

  “You want me to do what?”

  Joe stretched out on the battered leather couch in his office and tried not to laugh at the tone of horrified shock in his agent’s voice. “Dinner date. Reporter from Spotlight Magazine. You heard right.”“Did that Deschanel bitch kidnap one of the kids? Threaten your mother? I know people, Joe. I can take care of this for you.”

  “It’s Keri. Keri Daniels.”

  A loaded pause. “That’s great. Sure I want to do that for you, Joe, because with a big movie premiere coming up and a deadline approaching, I absolutely want your head fucked up over your high school sweetheart. And exposing yourself professionally to somebody you’ve exposed yourself to personally? Great idea.”

  “Dan. Take a breath.”

  “Oh, I’m taking so many breaths I’m hyperventilating. I need to put a fucking bag over my mouth. Or maybe put a bag over your head because your brains are leaking out.”

  “I’m pretty sure Tina Deschanel found out Keri and I dated in high school and I doubt Keri wants to do this any more than I do.”

  “Then don’t do it. Please, for the love of my fifteen percent, don’t do it.”

  “I’m just going to have dinner with her and then she can go back to California and tell her boss she tried.”

  “Then why don’t you call her?”

  Good question. One he didn’t particularly care to share the pathetic answer to with Dan.

  After all these years, he didn’t want to be reunited with Keri by telephone. He wanted to see her face at the same time he heard her voice. Okay, if he was being honest, he wanted to know if he could see the Keri he’d loved in her.

  Worst case scenario, whatever business she felt she had with him could be conducted over the phone and he wouldn’t get to see her at all. It was just curiosity—for old times’ sake—but he wanted to see her again.

  “I’m famous,” he said lightly. “I pay people to make my phone calls for me.”

  “Bullshit. And speaking of paying people, why are you dumping this on me? Jackie’s in charge of publicity and press.”

  “Her head would explode.”

  The silence on the other end lasted so long Joe thought his agent might have hung up on him. But no such luck. “Joe, we’ve been together a long time and, speaking as a guy who’s had your back for almost a decade and a half, I think this is even a worse idea personally than it is professionally.”

  “I know, but I’m going to do it anyway.”

  Keri swallowed another mouthful of non-designer water and resisted glancing at her watch again. Maybe she’d been spoiled by a generous expense account, but meeting in a cheap chain restaurant in the city was too high a price to pay for privacy, in her opinion.

  And what was with Joe having his agent contact her to set up the dinner? He couldn’t pick up the phone and call her himself? Maybe his over-inflated ego interfered with telephone use, so he had to use his agent as though she were a total stranger. As if she didn’t know he had a birthmark shaped like an amoeba on his right ass cheek.Unfortunately, her opinions didn’t seem to matter. Tina had made it very clear that if Joseph Kowalski held up a hoop, Keri was to jump through it, wearing a pom-pom hat and barking like a dog if that’s what it took to make the author happy.

  It really burned her ass to be in this predicament, and just thinking about her boss made her temples throb. The temptation to walk out was incredibly strong but, while she knew she could walk into any magazine editor’s office and come out with a job, it would set her back years in her quest to climb to the top of the masthead.

  It was only an interview, after all.

  There hadn’t been a new press or book jacket photo of Joe since his sixth book. That picture had pretty much looked like him, albeit without the grin and dimples. It was one of those serious and contemplative author photos and she’d hated it. But by now, especially considering the coin he was pulling down, he was probably a self-indulgent, fat, bald man with a hunched back from too much time over the keyboard.

  She, on the other hand, thought she’d aged well. Nothing about her was as firm as it had been in high school, but she was still slim enough to pull off the pricey little black dress she’d chosen for tonight. Her hair, now sleek and smooth to her shoulders, was still naturally blonde, though she would admit to some subtle highlighting.

  “Hey, babe,” a voice above her said, and just like that the sophisticated woman was gone. She was eighteen again, with big dreams, bigger hair, and an itch only Joe Kowalski could scratch.

  She could almost taste the Boone’s Farm as she turned, braced for an old, fat Joe and finding…just Joe.

  He’d aged even better than she had, the bastard. His face had matured and he had a trace of what men were allowed to call character lines, but he still had that slightly naughtier version of the boy-next-door look. Of course, he wasn’t quite as lean as he used to be, but it probably wasn’t noticeable to anybody who hadn’t spent a significant amount of senior year running her hands over his naked body.

  All in all, he resembled the boy who’d charmed her out of her pants a lot more than he did the stodgy author she’d hoped to charm into an interview.

  “Hi, Joe.” She’d stored up a mental cache of opening lines ranging from cute to funny to serious, and every single one seemed to have been deleted. “Thank you for coming.”

  He slid onto the bench seat across the booth from her. “Time’s been pretty damn good to you, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  No, she didn’t mind at all. “You, too. Interesting choice of restaurant, by the way. An eccentricity of the rich and reclusive author?”

  He flashed those dimples at her and Keri stifled a groan. Why couldn’t he have been fat and bald except for unattractive tufts of hair sprouting from his ears?

  “I just like the all-you-can-eat salad bar,” he said. “So tell me, is Tina hiding under the table? Waiting to pounce on me in the men’s room?”

  Keri laughed, partly because it was such a relief to have the topic out in the open. “No, she refuses to leave the city. Says her lungs can’t process unpolluted air.”

  His smoky blue eyes were serious even though his dimples were showing. “Terr
y’s been expecting you to sell me out for your own advantage since I first made the NYT list.”

  Hearing his sister’s name made her wince, and knowing she still held such a low opinion of Keri just made her sad. During the very rare moments she allowed herself to dwell on regrets, she really only had two. And they were both named Kowalski.

  “I’m being professionally blackmailed,” she admitted. “If I don’t get an exclusive interview for Spotlight from you, I’m out of a job.”

  “I figured as much. Who spilled the beans?”

  Keri pulled the 8x10 from her bag and handed it to him. “I don’t know. Do you remember who took that?”

  “Alex did, remember? The night we…well, the caption’s pretty thorough.”

  She remembered now. Alex had been a friend of Joe’s, but they’d all traveled in the same circle. “But Tina said the blogger who claimed to go to school with you was a woman.”

  “His name’s Alexis now. You wouldn’t believe how much he paid for his breasts.”

  Keri laughed, but Joe was still looking at the photo. Judging by the way the corners of his lips twitched into a small smile and how he tilted his head, Keri figured Tina had been right about the nostalgia angle.

  The waitress approached their table, order pad in hand.

  Joe still hadn’t looked up. “Remember the night you started drinking your screwdrivers without the orange juice and did a striptease on Alex’s pool table?”

  “I bet the jokes about Alex’s pool table having a nice rack went on forever,” the waitress said, and then Joe looked up.

  “You bet they did,” he said easily, but he was blushing.

  “There must be a whole new slew of jokes about Alex’s rack now,” Keri said, making Joe laugh.

  The waitress tapped her pen on the tab. “So do you guys know what you want?”

  And then he did it, just as he always had whenever he’d been asked that question—he looked straight at Keri with blatant hunger in his eyes and said, “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

  The shiver passed all the way from her perfectly styled hair to her Ferragamo pumps. Then she watched in silent amusement while he ordered for them both—her regular high school favorite of a medium-well bacon cheeseburger with extra pickles, fries and a side of coleslaw. There was no mention of salad, all-you-can-eat or otherwise.

  When the waitress left, she gave him a scolding look. “That’s more calories than I’ve consumed in the last two years, Joe.”

  He waved away her half-hearted objection. “Let’s get down to business.”

  Keri didn’t want to. She was too busy enjoying that sizzle of anticipation she’d always felt when Joe looked at her. Apparently those blue eyes hadn’t lost their potency over the last two decades.

  Joe leaned back against the booth and crossed his arms. It was probably supposed to look intimidating, but all the gesture really did was draw attention to how tan and incredibly well-defined his biceps were against his white T-shirt. Typing definitely wasn’t the only workout his arms got.

  “Let’s see if I can synopsize our situation,” he said. “I never give interviews. You want an interview. No, strike that. You need an interview, because the rabid jackal you work for has made it clear your job is on the line. Am I close?”

  The sizzle receded to a tingle. “You’re in the ballpark.”

  “I’m not just in the ballpark, babe. I’m Josh Beckett on the mound at Fenway. If I don’t give you what you need, you’re hiding behind palm trees waiting for drunk pop stars to pop out of their Wonderbras.”

  And that pretty much killed the last of the lingering tingle. “Payback’s a bitch and all that, right, Joe?”

  The dimples flashed. “Isn’t it?”

  Keri just shrugged. She wasn’t about to start putting deals on the table or making promises. After years of dealing with celebrities, she usually knew how to handle herself. But this was Joe Kowalski. He’d seen her naked and she’d broken his heart. That changed the rules.

  “I’m leaving town tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be gone two weeks.”

  The tingle flared up again, but this time it was a lot more panic and a lot less anticipation. “There’s always the telephone or fax or email.”

  “Not where I’m going.”

  She laughed. “Would that be Antarctica or a grass hut in the Amazon Basin?”

  “I’m not even leaving the state.”

  Joe had sucked at cards in high school—he had no poker face—but she couldn’t read him now. The instincts that had skyrocketed her to the top of the Spotlight food chain were giving her nothing, except the feeling he was setting her up for something she might want no part of.

  The waitress brought their food, buying Keri a few more minutes to think. One thing Joe had never had was a mean streak—if there was no chance in hell of the interview happening, he wouldn’t have agreed to meet her for dinner. He’d never had it in him to humiliate somebody for the sake of his own enjoyment.

  Granted, the kind of checks he had to be cashing changed a person, but she’d already seen enough of him—and heard enough from her mother—to know Joe was still Joe. Just with more expensive toys.

  That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to have her jumping through hoops, of course. Probably an entire flaming series of them.

  She bit into the bacon cheeseburger and the long-forgotten flavor exploded on her tongue. She closed her eyes and moaned, chewing slowly to fully savor the experience.

  “How long has it been since you’ve had one of those?” Joe asked, and she opened her eyes to find him watching her.

  Keri swallowed, already anticipating the next bite. “Years. Too many years.”

  He laughed at her, and they enjoyed some idle chit-chat while they ate. She brought up the movie and he talked about it in a generic sense, but she noted how careful he was not to say anything even remotely interview worthy.

  There would be no tricking the man into revealing something that would get Tina off her back.

  “You know,” she said, still holding half her cheeseburger, “I really want to enjoy this meal more, and I can’t with this hanging over my head. What’s it going to take?”

  “I gave it some thought before I came, and I think you should come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “To where I’m going.”

  Keri set the cheeseburger on the plate. “For two weeks?”

  The length of time hardly mattered, since she couldn’t return to California without the interview anyway. But she’d like an idea of what she was signing up for.

  “Whether you’re there for two weeks or not is up to you. For each full day you stick it out with the Kowalskis, you get to ask me one question.”

  Keri, unlike Joe, did have a poker face and she made sure it was in place while she turned his words over in her head. “When you say the Kowalskis, you mean…”

  “The entire family.” The dimples were about as pronounced as she’d ever seen them. “Every one of them.”

  Her first thought was oh shit. Her second, to wonder if People was hiring.

  Joe reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded sheet of spiral notebook paper. “Here’s a list of things you’ll need. I jotted it down in the parking lot.”

  Keri unfolded the paper and read the list twice, trying to get a sense of what she was in for.

  BRING: Bug spray; jeans; T-shirts; several sweatshirts, at least one with a hood; one flannel shirt (mandatory); pajamas (optional); underwear (also optional); bathing suit (preferably skimpy); more bug spray; sneakers; waterproof boots; good socks; sunscreen; two rolls of quarters.

  DO NOT BRING: cell phone; Blackberry; laptop; camera, either still or video; alarm clock; voice recorder; any other kind of electronic anything.

  She had no clue what it meant, other than Joe wanting her half-naked and unable to text for help.

  Chapter Two

  The first day of the annual family vacation was always hell for Terry Kowalski Porter.
Her twelve days of fun and relaxation were book-ended by two days of wanting to throw herself under a speeding RV.

  The convoy of Kowalskis usually managed to make it up the interstate and across Route 3 in a somewhat organized fashion, but as soon as they entered the campground they scattered, leaving Terry to run her ass off helping everybody get settled in.First, her parents, because their forty-foot luxury liner on wheels brought all campground activity to a screeching halt until it was docked. Leo Kowalski refused to let anybody else drive the baby his son had bought him, so Terry’s main purpose was keeping her impatient brothers on a tight leash while Dad executed a precision eighty-point turn to back it in to their site.

  Then came landing pads, leveling and sewer pipes. Water hoses and electrical connections. They had the routine pretty much down by this point, but heaven forbid Leo and Mary Kowalski not have drama.

  “That seem level to you, Mary?” One thing about their parents, they were loud.

  “I’m inside, Leo! How would I know?”

  “Are you listing to the left?”

  Next came her middle brother Mike and his family, who needed three adjoining sites for their sprawl. The first site held their RV—a much smaller one than their parents’—in which Mike, Lisa and their two youngest boys slept. The site also held a multi-burnered barbecue grill-slash-cooking center so massive it took all three brothers plus the oldest of Mike’s sons to lift it out of the trailer.

  The second site held the pop-up camper they pulled behind the RV and in which their two older boys slept. It was also here Lisa erected the complex and extensive network of clothesline strung from tree to tree until it was large enough to contain their family’s wet clothes.

  The third site would contain a large screenhouse and a series of tarps which served to guarantee that, no matter how hard it rained, Lisa would not be confined in her RV with her four rambunctious boys.

  The youngest of the Kowalski siblings, Kevin, was the easiest to get set up. Since his divorce, he required only a small tent, a hibachi and the largest cooler money could buy. He claimed to be a camping purist, but Terry knew he didn’t see any point in going whole-hog when his parents were four sites over in a half-million-dollar home away from home.