by Julia London
Then Michael asked her about Brad.
“My roommate,” Leah said. “We rent a house in Venice Beach.”
“That’s great,” he said.
“No, not great,” she said with a half smile. “It’s a bungalow that’s run down and falling apart, and as a result, we rent it for dirt cheap.”
“Ah,” he said, and sipped his martini. One strand of dark hair fell across his forehead. She had the urge to brush that lock away from his eye like she used to. She sipped her martini and looked around the room.
“So . . .” Michael said casually, “is there anyone else besides Brad?”
“Nope. Just the two of us.”
“I mean a guy,” he said, sitting up and bracing his elbows on the arms of his chair.
“What sort of guy?”
“A guy,” he said, smiling at her obstinate response. “A significant other, a fiancé, a husband—that sort of guy.”
Leah inadvertently snorted into her drink. “Not at the moment.”
“Good.”
She smiled a little at how firmly he’d said it. “I’d ask the same of you,” she said lightly, “but I think I know the answer.”
“Oh yeah? So what’s the answer, Smarty Pants?”
She shrugged, took a long sip of her martini. “It’s not like it’s hard to figure out. Extreme Bachelor—need I say more?” Ha! Michael actually colored a bit. She hoped he was squirming in his chair. “Your reputation precedes you, Smarty Pants.”
He laughed uneasily, but his eyes crinkled in the corners, and his gaze, soft and deep and the color of warm molasses, seeped into her. “That’s just talk,” he said. “I’ve dated around, but it’s not like they make it out to be. The truth is, there hasn’t been anyone serious in my life since you.”
The warm feeling sank a little deeper—but it also infuriated her. No one since her? He had no idea what that really meant. “Dated around,” she said breezily. “Sounds kind of slutty.”
Michael almost choked on his olive. “I didn’t say I was sleeping around. I said I dated around.”
“Oh. So you haven’t slept around?”
He sighed. “Obviously, I don’t know what I am saying.”
Exactly. Leah smiled pertly, but she was suddenly struck with an image of him in bed, having sex with a woman. “So has it always been that way?”
“What way?” he asked, his trepidation evident.
“Did you ever get married?”
“No,” he said. “Did you?”
Oh yeah, right. Married, divorced, dating around . . . Leah rolled her eyes. “No. So you didn’t marry an Austrian woman?” she blurted, hating herself for even asking.
Michael seemed surprised and considered her for a moment before answering, during which time, Leah realized she was holding her breath. “I didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend or a mistress in Austria,” he said quietly but firmly. “I was never even in Austria—I just told you I was. I was never unfaithful to you, Leah—at least not with another woman. I was unfaithful to you with my job.”
Was that supposed to make her feel better? She’d been dumped for a job? She suddenly felt very self-conscious and glanced down, noticed she was almost out of martini.
“I’ll get you another one,” Michael said and signaled for the waitress before she could respond. That was the way he’d been—always knowing what she wanted or needed before she did.
Ooo-kay, clearly she had to stop this little trip down memory lane, because it was only making her crazy, taking her to the precise place she didn’t want to go. Light and carefree, she chastised herself. Definitely disinterested. Be disinterested. “Don’t try and get me drunk and take advantage of me,” she said sternly.
“You don’t get drunk, remember? Two is your limit,” he said with a smile.
Man, he remembered a lot, which was making it very difficult to be light and carefree and disinterested. “And you usually don’t drink at all,” she said, the words coming from that part of her brain that refused to listen to common sense.
“I imbibe on occasion.” He suddenly leaned forward, his arms on the table, grinning. “Do you remember the night in Cape Cod? Remember we had that punch—at least we thought it was punch—and we got so bloody drunk?”
“Don’t remind me,” Leah protested with a wince, flicking her wrist at him. “All I remember is waking up the next morning with my head hanging off the bed, wishing I was dead.”
“Believe me, I wanted to put you out of your misery,” he said with a laugh. “I never heard such moaning in my life, and I was feeling pretty miserable myself.”
“I was dying,” she reminded him, tapping her fist on the table to emphasize just how close to dying she’d really come. “And you were laughing at me!”
“I wasn’t laughing, baby, I was just trying to help.”
That small term of endearment rolled off his tongue as if he’d never stopped saying it, and it hit Leah broadside, right upside the head, leaving her speechless. But one look at Michael’s face, and it was obvious that not only had he stopped saying it a long time ago, to hear it now had been as bone-jolting to him as it had been to her. “Sorry,” he muttered, and shoved a hand through his hair, forcing that lock out of his eyes. “Some habits are hard to break.”
She nodded, wished to hell the waitress would appear with that second martini. “So what about the CIA thing, Michael?” she asked lightly, changing the subject. “What did you do?”
He hesitated. “Not a lot. Just some surveillance, that sort of thing.”
“Oh come on. Surely you did more than that. I’ve seen all the Jason Bourne movies, so I know what goes on.”
“Those movies are nothing like reality. The truth is, I filed a lot of paperwork and not much else.”
“No!” Leah scoffed. “Come on, really—what did you do?”
“Just that. What? Do you want me to say I hung out with opium dealers and arms traders and terrorist types?”
“Yes, I want you to say that. Give me something here. Did you have all the cool gadgets? Talking shoes and camera watches? A gun?”
“No, nothing like that,” he said with a grin. “Just me. And a very deep cover. And a lot of paperwork is about all I can say.”
“Come on, please don’t tell me you dumped me for paperwork.”
The smile bled from his face.
“Sorry,” she said, holding up a hand. “But you did dump me.” She was not going to cut him a break on that front.
“I know,” he said, and looked around for the waitress. She was making her way across the room, two martinis on her tray.
“So?” she persisted. “At least tell me where you were.”
He smiled enigmatically; it was extremely annoying.
“Can you at least tell me how you ended up in the movie business? I mean, as a casual observer, it doesn’t exactly seem like a natural career path. You know, spy,” she said, putting one hand down on the table. “Stuntman,” she said, putting the other hand down on the other end of the table.
“I met Jack on a mission,” he said. “We became friends. And then I reached a point where I was sick of living lies and watching my back all the time. I was ready to end that part of my career, but I figured I would end up at a desk job in Langley.”
If only he had. She would have been spared this entire, mind-boggling emotional course. “So why didn’t you?”
He shrugged. “Jack and I became friends because we both loved adventure. We’d hang out, doing some crazy things.” He paused as the waitress set the two martinis down and thanked her with a smile that probably made her melt.
“Anyway,” he said, as Leah took the martini and sipped, “about the time I got ready to quit, Jack had learned to fly anything with wings on the government’s nickel and had retired from the Air Force.”
“So . . . you guys decided to start your own stunt agency?” she asked, becoming less and less disinterested in what had happened to him.
“They did. I came in later.
Essentially, Eli, Cooper, and Jack go way back. They grew up together in Texas and developed a love for sports—football, baseball, basketball, rodeo—whatever sport they could play, they played. But when regular sports got to be too easy, they began to create their own sports. They went swimming in mining holes, created dirt-bike trails through the canyons that apparently rivaled the professional circuit. They made a game out of breaking horses without using a bit, and built motorized conveyances that they would race across fallow cotton fields.”
“Wow,” Leah said, impressed.
“By the time they finished college, they were into the extreme side of sports in general. They were experts in white-water rafting, rock climbing, canyon jumping, kayaking, surfing, and skiing—a person could name a sport, any sport, and they had tried it. After college, Jack went into the Air Force. Cooper and Eli weren’t as interested in flying as they were in jumping off buildings and blowing things up, so they headed out to Hollywood to hire on as stuntmen. They got their start working on some of the biggest action films in Hollywood, and before long, they were choreographing huge action sequences.”
“They do know their stunts,” Leah said wryly, still sore from yesterday’s training.
“They do. On weekends, however, they trekked out to ocean kayak, or kite surf, or helicopter ski—whatever caught their imagination. But it wasn’t until they got the bright idea to take a couple of pals along who just happened to be big stars that their outings began to be the talk around movie sets, and the next thing they knew, they were taking the Hollywood bigs along on their adventures. As a result, their adventures got even bigger. But what they did really well was to keep the press and paparazzi out of those jaunts.”
“Really?” Leah asked. “Do they still do it? The adventures?”
He nodded. “Cooper came up with the idea of making a business out of their love of adventure. It was expensive to stage, but there were a growing number of Hollywood moguls who wanted the exclusive and exotic outings they offered, particularly if it came with the guarantee of total privacy. So when Jack started making noises about getting out of the Air Force, they convinced him to come to L.A. and join them, like the old days. They figured if they could provide their own transportation and fly their clients to their adventure destinations themselves, they’d be that much more mobile and private. That’s when they founded Thrillseekers Anonymous.”
“The stunt group?”
“That, and the members-only adventure club.” At Leah’s look of confusion, Michael said, “The motto is, ‘Name Your Fantasy, and We’ll Make It Happen.’ We cater to an exclusive clientele who want extreme adventure with a lot of privacy and can afford to have both. Whatever they want—helicopter skiing, windsurfing, volcano hiking—we make it happen, and we guarantee their privacy.”
That sounded like the coolest job on the planet, yet Leah still didn’t understand how Michael had ended up with T.A. She remembered that he liked to ski and surf and golf—all the usual guy things—but she didn’t remember that he’d ever been into extreme sports and said so.
“Oh yeah,” he said, nodding, “I’ve always been into extreme sports. That is what I was trained to do.”
“So how did you hook up with them?”
“I got out of the agency just as T.A. was starting to get a steady stream of high-profile, highly demanding and privacy-seeking clients, and Jack approached me about becoming a partner. I was reluctant at first—you’re right; it wasn’t exactly my career path. I was into extreme sports, true, but I’d never done any stunt work. And I was definitely the odd man out with those three—it was obvious they were real tight. But in the end, Jack convinced me I had something they needed.”
“Which was?”
He looked a little sheepish. “Contacts. Worldwide contacts.”
“They wanted you for your Rolodex?”
“You could say that,” he said self-consciously. “I’ve just met a lot of interesting people along the way. Granted, most of them really were terrorists, or arms traders, or financiers who supported radical governments with the drug trade—but I’ve also met some solid, law-abiding people who knew how to get things done. Jack and the guys wanted me to bring those contacts to their organization . . . along with the utmost secrecy by which I’d cultivated those contacts.”
“What are you saying?” Leah asked, confused. “You know kings and queens?”
Michael laughed. “What I’m saying is, if one of our clients is on a remote-island hike and wants a particular foie gras flown in at a moment’s notice, I’m the T.A. guy who actually knows what foie gras is, but more importantly, I know where to get the best foie gras and how to get it to that island. Or if we have clients that want to hike some of the greatest red canyons in the Middle East for one of their adventures, I know who to call. Those sorts of contacts.”
“Wow,” Leah said, in awe. Here was Michael, the guy she’d loved and lost, the same guy she believed had been a very cute financial director with a pocket protector. It was a little hard to absorb that he was, in fact, some globetrotting sports guy with more contacts than Elvis. “Sounds like the CIA trained you well,” she said, for lack of anything better to say.
“Yeah,” he said. “They did.”
Leah picked up her martini and took a sizeable swig of it. “So is that it? Just the four of you?” she asked, still trying to wrap her mind around the notion that not only had the man she’d been so incredibly in love with been a globetrotting spy, but he knew who to call in the Middle East if she should ever need a camel. How was that possible? And more importantly, how come she didn’t get to know it at the time?
“There’s one more person. We were contracted to a do a wedding in conjunction with an extreme sports outing for a couple of high-profile movie stars last year. But none of us knew anything about weddings, so we had to hire a wedding planner. Marnie Banks is her name. The wedding ended up not happening, but she stuck around, mainly because she and Eli ended up stranded on a mountain, and . . . and it’s a long story,” he said with a slight roll of his eyes. “But now they are talking about getting married.”
“It sounds like a great job,” Leah said.
“It is.” He glanced down at his martini. “So . . . what did you do after I left?”
Talk about throwing a bucket of ice water on the party. What did he want to know? That she’d worn pajamas for weeks until Lucy made her change them? Or that she’d been almost incoherent for a month? That she’d felt like her heart had been ripped from her chest and smashed into pieces so small that she still couldn’t find them after five years? Or perhaps he wanted to know how many letters she had written him, some of them begging him to come back, some of them condemning him to a fiery pit of hell?
“Leah?”
The question made her angry—a whole lot of stuff was suddenly bubbling up, all the crap that had taken years for her to lock away. And then he showed up unexpectedly, and it was all erupting all over again. “Nothing,” she said brusquely.
“Did you get the sitcom deal?”
She stared daggers at him. A million retorts skated through her mind, but she said only, “No.”
He looked surprised by that. “So you stayed on Broadway,” he said.
“No.”
His brow furrowed in confusion. “So . . . when did you come to L.A.?”
“About a year after . . . Look,” she said suddenly, pushing the martini away from her. “It’s not fair of you to even ask. If you can’t tell me what happened to you, then I don’t have to tell you what happened to me.”
“Okay—”
“No, not okay, Michael,” she said, feeling, inexplicably, angrier. “None of this is okay. I don’t want to go back, all right? You should have left me alone when I asked you to,” she said, and abruptly picked up her backpack, suddenly desperate to be out of there. “This was a huge mistake.” She thrust her hand into her backpack and found her wallet.
“Why is it a mistake?” he asked as she took out her wallet.<
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“Please—It just is.”
“Wait—what are you doing?” he asked as she opened her wallet. He put a hand on hers to stop her, but Leah yanked it away.
“I’m leaving.”
“Leah, I am sorry,” he said, and damn him if there wasn’t a bit of exasperation in his voice, as if she were the one being unreasonable here. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that I’ve thought so much about you—”
“Right. Well you obviously didn’t think enough of me to answer my letters,” Leah snapped, and regretted the words the very instant they flew out of her mouth. That had been her problem all her life—speaking without thinking, always popping off before she could think.
“What letters?” he demanded.
“You know what letters.”
“No, I don’t know what letters,” he said, and this time, caught her wrist and held it firmly. Why that should remind her of sex, Leah had absolutely no idea . . . except that they had shared a mutual desire for experimentation, and there had been the time that he’d held her wrists high above her head—
“What letters?” Michael insisted, yanking her back to the present.
“What does it matter? You wouldn’t have answered them. You wouldn’t have written me back to tell me why—” Oh shit. Shit, shit, shit, this was her absolute worst nightmare because there were suddenly tears in her eyes. She could not let him see them, could not let him guess that there were times that she still ached for him, so Leah angrily jerked her hand away from his grip and fumbled in her wallet for money.
“Put your money away,” he said in a low, stern voice as he reached into his back pocket and withdrew his wallet.
“No. I’m going to pay.”
“Leah. Put your wallet away. I brought you here, and I will damn well pay for it,” he said, and fished out several bills and threw them on the table. He stood up, put a hand on the back of her chair, but Leah was already standing before he could do one lousy gentlemanly thing to upset her even more.
They marched out of the restaurant, Michael slightly behind her, Leah desperate to get away from him. “I’m going to take a cab,” she said, looking up the street.