by Julia London
Leah was aware of the shrill protests and boos being bellowed from her teammates, but the fall had knocked the wind out of her, and she laid there, her eyes closed, trying to get her breath back, frantically wondering if she’d really seen a ghost or if he was real.
“Okay, this is what I’m talking about. Your team leader said go right, and you went left.” That was Cooper’s voice, and presumably, Cooper’s hand on her forehead. “You gotta work like a team out there and listen to your leader, okay? Anything broken or sprained?”
Only her pride. Leah shook her head.
“Are you all right, kiddo?”
She recognized Eli’s voice. “Yes,” she sighed, and opened her eyes and pushed herself up on her elbows.
Jack’s face was looming above hers, squinting with concern as he touched her hairline and her temple. “Think we ought to call the nurse?”
“No, no, don’t call a nurse,” she said quickly, mortified by the suggestion. “I’m fine. I just had the wind knocked out of me.” She tried to get up.
“Don’t move too fast,” Jack cautioned her.
“I’m fine. I’m more embarrassed than anything else—who gets hurt playing dodgeball, for Chrissakes?”
“Good question,” Jack said.
Someone’s cell phone rang. “Hey. No cell phones!” Eli shouted. “This isn’t a break. Beth, you sit down over there.”
Leah groaned. “Let me up, will you?”
Jack moved back, and that was when her ghost came into full view. He was down on his haunches at her feet, his face as handsome as ever, his expression every bit as stunned as she felt. He stared at her hard, as if he couldn’t quite make her out, and then asked incredulously, “Leah Kleinschmidt? Is that really you?”
“Kleinschmidt?” someone echoed.
“Oh. My. God,” she said, squeezed her eyes shut, and wished she’d been knocked out cold.
Chapter Four
IT was no nightmare, unfortunately, because when Leah opened her eyes again, Michael had come closer. Cooper helped her up and sandwiched her between Michael and himself so they could walk her over to the bleachers and check her over.
As if the whole scene wasn’t bone-jarring enough, Trudy’s frowning head popped up over Cooper’s like a jack-in-the-box. “Hey, are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine, I’m fine!” Leah said, jerking back from Michael’s peering at her head. “This is so stupid. I just tripped and embarrassed the hell out of myself, but that’s it,” she insisted, swatting Cooper’s hand away from her jaw.
“Actually, it looked like you stopped and then tripped,” Trudy clarified. “Right over your own two feet.”
Leah wished someone would just shoot her now. “Thanks, Trudy.”
“You know, someone ought to do something about her,” Trudy said, tapping Cooper’s shoulder with her finger and pointing to Beth. “That chick was aiming for Leah’s head.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Cooper said. “You can go back to your army now. We’re going to start another game in a minute.”
“You better take care of it, pal, or you’re going to have a mutiny on your hands. They’re already talking about it,” she whispered, nodding fiercely in the direction of some of the Starlets. “Do you want me to stay?” Trudy asked Leah.
“No. I’m fine.” Leah smiled brightly to prove it, but she wasn’t fine, how could she be fine? She felt absolutely ill. A rush of old and long-buried feelings were gushing up and drowning her—hurt, anger, humiliation, to name a few.
Trudy shrugged, handed her a bottle of water before reminding Cooper to do something about that chick, and then disappeared behind him again.
Leah didn’t want water, she wanted a giant shot of tequila and a single minute with no noise, no one asking her how she was, just so she could think, because her mind was whirling hard and fast around the unbelievable coincidence that after all these years, Michael Raney would show up here, on this studio lot, of all the places in the universe.
It was so unreal that she glanced at him again out of the corner of her eye. His expression was full of concern, and he put a hand on the small of her back the way he used to do a hundred million years ago when they were together and he’d lean over to tell her something.
What made the whole scene outrageously bad was that while she probably had a huge welt on her head where she’d hit the floor, and was wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt and no makeup, he looked so damn good. He still had that sexy thick, collar-length black hair and penny-colored eyes. And he was nicely tanned, too, with little lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes. To top it all off, he had a dark stubble of beard.
That stubble had always been her undoing.
Dammit, had he always been so gorgeous? His lips that full? His jaw that square? This sexy? Her mind suddenly flashed back to a night he’d gone down on her with that stubble . . .
She couldn’t look at him. She glanced at the bottle of water Trudy had given her and pretended to read the label so he wouldn’t know it was official—that seeing him again after all these years had knocked her completely off her axis. She was spinning off into the universe without a net.
God, she was so unprepared. So self-conscious. The weird thing was, Leah couldn’t even count how many times during the years she thought she’d seen him—the way some guy would get in his car would make her think it was him, or she’d see the back of a man on the street ahead of her and know it was him. Worse, there were times she’d fantasize about seeing him again, but in her fantasies, she was gorgeous and skinny and fabulously successful and— here was the important part—always with another guy. That was really key to the casual encounter with an ex— she had to at least appear to be way better off without him. At that moment, she’d have given her life to appear to be better off without him.
After that awful night in New York when he’d dumped her, she hadn’t seen him again. Actually, no one saw him again. He just vanished. He’d gone off to Austria or God knew where and her life had been completely shattered by one simple phrase: I am leaving and I’m not coming back.
It had taken Leah a long time to get over him, but she really thought she’d done it—she’d been so sure she’d done it—yet judging by the fact that she was having to remind herself to breathe just now, it was impossible, even after five years, to see the man she had once considered the love of her life and not sink into despair with a sick sort of longing.
Seriously, if her heart didn’t stop pounding, it was going to pop right out of her chest.
But waitwaitwait just a damn minute, she thought as the world began to take sharper focus. This was totally unfair! How in the hell could Michael Asshole Raney show up here? How was it possible he could have made the leap from that successful career of a hotshot financier and ended up in L.A. at all, much less on her first feature film?
She abruptly looked at him again to assure herself that she wasn’t hallucinating and that he really was even better-looking five years later. Nope, she wasn’t hallucinating. It was Michael all right, and he still had that same sexy, quiet smile that used to reduce her to complete mush. And yes, apparently it was possible to be better-looking five years later.
“I got this,” Michael said to Cooper, without shifting his gaze from Leah’s face.
“Okay. Just drink some water, Leah, and you’ll be fine,” Cooper said. “I think I’ll go have a chat with Beth.”
Cooper walked away, leaving Leah alone with Michael. She stared blindly at the court, taking big sips of water to keep from talking. In the background, she was vaguely aware of Jack talking loudly about teamwork and safety and how it wasn’t very nice to fire dodgeballs at other people’s heads or something like that, and how Beth wouldn’t be playing any more dodgeball because of her disregard for the rules, but the whole thing was fading to background noise.
She was still having serious trouble catching her breath. It felt as if there was a vice around her heart. All the things she thought she’d say if
she ever saw him again had vanished into thin air, and the only thing in her head now was one question: Why?
She definitely wasn’t going to ask him that. Okay, Leah, she told herself, do NOT be a wimp. So what if he is not seeing you exactly at your best? This is YOUR film and YOU can do this, you can do this, you can do this, she chanted in her head.
She wasn’t looking at him, but she could feel him, every single inch of him, strong and hard and warm.
“Leah . . . I don’t know what to say,” Michael said at last. “I didn’t notice your name on the list.”
Be fabulously successful! Be nonchalant! Be someone who is glad she moved on! “Oh,” she said, finally forcing a smile. “Well, that’s probably because it’s not Kleinschmidt anymore.”
“No?”
“No,” she said, screwing the lid back on the water bottle, her consciousness rousing from its fog of confusion to take hold. She had shortened it because she’d gotten such a bad rap for being a basket case after he’d left her, but that didn’t sound very glamorous. “It’s Klein. I shortened it for my acting career.”
God, that sounded even more stupid than the real reason. She’d been on top of the world when she’d last seen him, and now she could barely get a gig.
“It was a good move,” she added, upping the stupid quotient to moronic. A good move? she yelled at herself. Jesus, she couldn’t even act fabulously successful. No wonder her acting instructor said she didn’t know the meaning of the word spontaneous.
Okay, but it didn’t matter, because she didn’t owe this man an explanation about anything. Not her name, not her spectacular fall from the Broadway marquee—Nothing. If anyone owed anyone any explanations at all, it was him.
“This is so weird,” Michael said again with a funny little smile.
“Weird? I wouldn’t call it weird,” Leah snorted. “I mean, granted, it’s not every day you run into old, ah . . . okay, all right, you are definitely the last person I expected to see here,” she admitted. “But it’s not that weird.”
Okay, that was pretty good. Breezy, sort of like an old school acquaintance, nothing more.
Michael chuckled. It was a warm, familiar sound that slid all over her, trickling down her spine, reminding her of how he used to chuckle in her ear when they were fooling around. “You are definitely the last person I thought I’d see, too,” he said, and smiled fully, his teeth still white and straight and damnably sexy. “So how are you, Leah?” he asked, peering too closely. He was probably trying to figure out what he saw in her back then.
“Me? Great,” she said, nodding enthusiastically. “Oh yeah, I’m doing great,” she said, flinging one arm out to emphasize how great, and flashed him an I’m-doing-great! smile before turning her attention to the dodgeball game they had just started.
“I always knew you’d end up in Hollywood,” he said quietly.
The soft timbre of his voice dredged up a memory so deep that Leah’s heart sank a little deeper. She was instantly transported back to one snowy night high above the streets of Manhattan, when they had lain in his bed after making love, their naked bodies entwined, talking about the future. “I want to be a film actress,” she’d said. “Not Broadway. Film. Do you think that’s crazy?”
Michael had stroked her hair and had said easily, “Not at all, baby. If you really want to be an actress, then we’ll move to L.A. so you can be one.”
His response had surprised her, and she’d twisted around in his arms onto her stomach, propping herself on her elbows to look at him. “Just like that?” she’d asked incredulously. “You’d really give up your career and move to L.A. for me?”
He’d laughed, had touched his knuckle to the tip of her nose. “I can do my job there. And yes, I’d do it for you,” he’d said, and slipped his hand around her nape, pulling her forward. “I’d do anything for you.” And he had kissed her until she really believed he would do anything for her.
She wondered if he was remembering the same moment. Probably not. He probably hadn’t remembered it a week after he’d said it. Just a lot of bullshit from a player.
She looked at him again, the face that had betrayed her, stunned her, wounded her so deeply that she was almost buried beneath her own bitter sorrow and suddenly blurted, “Michael, what the hell are you doing here? How did you end up here, of all places?” she exclaimed, her hand waving at here. “You never said anything about wanting to be in movies. You’re in finance, for Chrissakes—so what the hell, you’re a stunt guy? Are you the fourth stunt guy now? The fourth stunt guy? How is it possible that you are a stunt guy?”
“Well,” he said, wincing a little as his gaze dipped to her lips, “It just sort of happened.”
“No, no, no, something like that doesn’t just sort of happen,” she said, stabbing her hands in the air for emphasis. “And even if it did, how would it happen on my film?”
“My guess? Karma.”
He had to be kidding. He would chalk this up to something as stupid as karma after what had happened between them? Try the devil. Or a hole in the cosmos. Anything but karma. “Karma?” she echoed incredulously. “You think this is karma?” And did he have to look at her lips like that? “This isn’t karma, Michael, this is just . . . just really really . . . un-freakin’-believable.”
For some reason, Michael chuckled. “You know what, Leah? You look amazing.”
Leah instantly put a hand to her hair. “I usually look so much better than this,” she muttered and happened to glance down at her PF Flyers. Oh Jesus, what lame run-into-your-ex shoes. They just screamed loser.
Not to mention the T-shirt cropped at the waist that said Tampa Bay in cursive letters across her chest. She’d never even been to Tampa Bay—she’d picked this up at a thrift shop along with the PF Flyers.
“I don’t know how much better you could possibly look, because you look fantastic.”
He said it so sincerely that the warmth of the compliment seeped under her skin, and she couldn’t help smiling a little. “Thanks. Ahem. So, do . . . ahem . . . ah . . . sodoyou.”
Now his brown eyes were shining in a way that was making her feel slightly woozy. She wondered how he could possibly have that effect on her after what he’d done to her and after all this time. Yet the pull was powerful enough that she felt a slight panic and abruptly stood up. “So listen, I gotta get back to work.”
“Are you sure?” he said, standing, too. “Just take it easy, sit this one out.”
“No, really, I’m okay,” she said, now suddenly feeling frantic to get away from him. “So thanks for helping me and . . .” What? And WHAT? And nothing. There was nothing she wanted to say to him. She gave him a dorky little wave and jogged back to her group, hating him for showing up here after all these years. Damn him.
Once again, Michael Raney had ruined everything.
Chapter Five
SEEING Leah Kleinschmidt knocked Michael flat on his ass—he’d thought so much about her, had lamented leaving her more times than he could count—but this was so unexpected and so shocking, he was not prepared to face her.
Not like this.
Unfortunately, it was too late, because he had seen her, and now he had to get his shit together, because he had to work, and before he did anything else, he had to kill Jack for this little surprise.
Not before he got an explanation of how that asshole had managed to pull this off.
Jesus, the moment he realized he was seeing Leah, that it was Leah out there hurling red balls and dodging even more of them, his heart had stopped beating and had climbed right up into his throat. When their eyes met, and she was hit broadside with a dodgeball and lost her balance, falling in one ugly sprawl of arms and legs, all he could think about was whether she was all right, and he had rushed forward without deliberation.
Myriad thoughts raged through his head as he’d sat next to her, thoughts he couldn’t quite grasp or put into words. All the things he’d wished he’d said the night he’d ended it, all the things he’
d wanted to say over the last five years, how incredible it was to see her now. He tried to make conversation, tried to at least say hello without sounding like an idiot, but frankly, when Leah had half-trotted, half-limped away, Michael had felt relieved.
He wasn’t ready for this at all. He needed time to get his thoughts together, to figure out how to proceed, but it was proving impossible with her in the same room. Hell, the same state. He couldn’t keep his eyes off of her, and he watched her at the other end of the gym talking to some women, her hands flying. He wondered where she’d been, what she’d done . . . who she was with now.
His torch for her had never died. The very moment he’d seen her and knew it was Leah, he’d felt a rush of all the loose and fuzzy things that he used to feel for her bubbling up inside him again. It was weird and intense—a feeling he’d only experienced a couple of times in his life. At thirteen, he’d felt it for Candace Flores, who was two years older than him and never noticed Michael at all—except to call him a major geek one day in front of several other kids and then laugh.
After that spectacular put-down, Michael hadn’t felt this way again until he’d met Leah at a happy hour one night in New York. There was something about her that felt familiar from the very start, something that had caused the first ribbon of desire to curl around his heart with no more than a hello from her.
And here he was five years later, having been the one to have ruined everything, feeling it all over again.
She looked so good. The image Michael had carried around all these years hadn’t done her justice. She’d let her hair grow out—it was below shoulder-length now, but still the color of corn silk. Her eyes were large and crystalline blue, and her mouth still made the man in him squirm. She’d always had that effect on him—when he saw her, the guy instinct in him wanted to be with her, in every way possible.
She was wearing shorts and a tight T-shirt that outlined her near-perfect shape. Her legs were long and athletic, and she looked healthy, not anorexic like so many others in the gym. She looked absolutely fantastic.