Extreme Bachelor

by Julia London

  In answer to that question, Adolfo suddenly appeared, breezing into the small room wearing nothing but boxer briefs and munching on a section of an orange. “Buenos dias, mi amor! How do you feel?”

  This was the very reason she didn’t drink to excess, because she always wanted to be dead certain she knew who she was in bed with, what she was doing, and if she at least enjoyed it. Her mouth dropped open, but no words came out. What did one say the morning after one did something she really wished she hadn’t done, but wished she could at least remember—hey, was it good for me, too?

  Jesus, how did she get out of this mess now? And speaking of getting out, she looked around for a clock. If she missed the all-call for the boats this morning, she’d be toast.

  “You are pale. I will bring you orange juice, si?”

  “No thanks,” Leah said, pulling the cover up around her neck. “What time is it, anyway?”

  “Time.” Adolfo chuckled, popped the rest of the orange section in his mouth, and wiped his hands on his boxers. “Time is irrelevant,” he said with a smile.

  “Oh-kay. But do you have a watch?” she persisted.

  He plopped down in an old greenish-gold Naugahyde chair and grinned. “Perhaps I do.”

  One thing was certain—Leah was definitely not in the mood for post-coital fun and games.

  IN the camp, Michael and Jack were gearing up for another day of rafting—actively separating the non-rowers from the rowers on a sheet of paper—when Trudy burst into their cabin looking so panic-stricken that Michael’s first thought was that someone had drowned. Her dark hair was sticking up in really strange places, and she was wearing only a skimpy little sleep shirt that barely covered her butt, fur-lined boots that rose mid-calf, and dark aviator shades.

  “Good morning,” Jack said, obviously taking her bizarre appearance in stride. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes! No! I don’t know—but I think something is really wrong,” she exclaimed through chattering teeth. She folded her arms across her body and held on tightly. “Leah didn’t come back to camp last night.”

  Michael felt his gut drop. He grabbed up a jacket and put it around Trudy’s shoulders. “Calm down, Trudy. Are you sure she didn’t come back? Maybe she’s just in another tent.”

  “No, no, I checked,” Trudy insisted, tears welling in her eyes. “The only other place she’d land is with Michele and Jamie, and they didn’t see her last night, either. She didn’t come back,” she said again. Her bottom lip was starting to tremble, which was a sure sign that she believed something had happened to Leah.

  Michael’s heart began to pound. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Last night, at the Italian restaurant in town,” Trudy said as she pulled the jacket tightly around her. “She was drinking wine with Adolfo, the Italian guy.”

  Michael’s stomach twisted. “Italian?” he asked. “Or possibly Spanish?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know! Maybe. He went to the restroom before I got to meet him, but he was really good-looking, and he had an Italian look. I think.” She looked at Michael. “Maybe he was Spanish. I don’t know.”

  Now Michael felt absolutely ill.

  Trudy was looking at him, waiting for him to speak. “I think maybe she hooked up with that guy. Only I don’t know who he is, except one of the crew—”

  “The crew?” Jack interrupted. “What makes you think he’s part of the crew?”

  “Leah said so. Lighting.”

  Michael and Jack exchanged a look. The crew was in Bellingham. It was possible one of them had come out, but he doubted it—they had too much to set up before filming began on Tuesday.

  “What?” Trudy demanded, looking first at Jack, then at Michael. “Why are you looking at each other like that? You know something, don’t you?”

  “We don’t know anything. But don’t worry, we’ll find her,” Jack said smoothly. “You’re right, she probably hooked up with the light guy and just needs a ride back to camp.”

  “I don’t know,” Trudy said uncertainly. “I thought so, too, at first. But Leah . . . Leah isn’t like that.”

  Michael glanced at Trudy, but she wasn’t looking at him; she was looking at the floor.

  “I mean, okay, she’s human, obviously, and the guy really was handsome . . . but of all of us, Leah is the least likely to just hook up with a guy she doesn’t really know. That’s why I’m so worried. But then again, like I’m saying, he was really handsome, and you know how that is.”

  Juan Carlo—if it was truly Juan Carlo as Michael feared—was not that handsome.

  “Yeah,” Jack said, and shrugged a little sheepishly when Michael narrowed his gaze.

  “But Leah? I don’t see it,” Trudy reiterated.

  While a regular guy might take a small measure of comfort hearing that the woman he loved did not sleep around, it didn’t give Michael any comfort at all. It just filled him with sick dread.

  “Why don’t you get dressed and ready for rafting, and we’ll have a look around,” Jack suggested.

  “But she’s not here, I already looked—”

  “Right, but we’ll look, too, and one of us will run into town and have a look around. In the meantime, you need to eat something and get ready,” he said, ushering Trudy out the door.

  “Maybe I should go with you,” she suggested, but Jack already had her outside.

  “You don’t want to miss rafting, do you? Don’t worry. It’s a Podunk little town. It won’t take more than half an hour.”

  “Okay,” Trudy said, sounding very reluctant to let them go without her. “Just start at the Italian restaurant.”

  “We will,” Jack promised her, and gestured her to go on. With one last look back at Michael, Trudy left.

  When Jack closed the door behind her, he turned around to Michael. “You know something.”

  “No. Well, maybe. Not really, it’s just . . . hell, I don’t know,” he said with a sigh of exasperation.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I can’t really say,” Michael said, hands on hips. “A friend of mine from Washington let me know that a guy I put away a few years ago—a Spaniard—was out and looking for me. They know he is in the States. They don’t know exactly where, but they were fairly confident he wasn’t on the West coast. At least not yet.”

  “What does this guy want with you?” Jack asked.

  Michael’s laugh was sour. “He wants me dead.”

  Jack’s brows rose. “No shit? What’d you do, steal his girlfriend?”

  Michael shook his head, thinking back to Spain, to those nights in Costa del Sol, to Barcelona, to Madrid, where he had lived and worked. “Worse. I slept with his wife, took his livelihood, and set up a sting that sent him to prison for what was supposed to be the rest of his life.”

  Jack whistled. “That’s not good. How is he out?”

  “Money, drugs, who knows?” Michael said with a shrug. “It happens.” He rubbed the nape of his neck. “But how does he know about Leah? How could he have found her?”

  “My guess is he found you,” Jack opined. “And once he found you, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out she’s important to you.”

  That was exactly what Michael feared. He picked up his cell phone. “Where can I get reception? I need to call a couple of people.”

  “Bellingham.”

  Michael picked up keys. “Go on without us. When I find her, we’ll meet you back at camp.”

  “Are you sure?” Jack asked, following him to the door.

  “No, I’m not sure about anything. But I don’t know what else to do,” he admitted honestly, and walked out, headed for one of the Jeeps they had rented. He had a sinking feeling there wasn’t a moment to waste.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THIS was an absolute nightmare, the worst thing that could happen, other than maybe a serious burst of cellulite—but Leah felt just that hopeless.

  Adolfo had moved from orange to bread and cheese, which she woul
dn’t have any of, either, and refused to cooperate with her by telling her what time it was. He seemed to be enjoying her massive hangover.

  She was sitting in the bed, her arms around her legs, pressing her forehead to her knees. “Shit,” she said into her knees. “I cannot believe I did this.”

  “Spanish wine is very powerful,” he said, as if it was a proven, scientific fact.

  “It was California wine, and I’m not talking about that,” Leah moaned, and gestured wildly to the bed. “But that!”

  “That?” Adolfo asked pleasantly.

  Why did he have to be so obtuse now? “Yes. You know . . . that.”

  Adolfo blinked, and then he laughed. “You’re a beautiful woman, mi amor. But I do not take advantage of sleeping beauties.”

  Now Leah blinked at him several times. She could hardly see him her head hurt so badly. “Then why . . . ?” she asked, looking down at her underwear.

  “You seemed to be not in comfort.”

  Oh dear God, that was a huge relief. Somehow, being a drunk was preferable to being a drunk and a skank. “Thank God,” she breathed. “Oh thank God.”

  “Poor girl,” Adolfo said sympathetically. “You want orange juice? We have orange and papaya juices.”

  No, she didn’t want orange juice, she wanted to be dragged outside and shot. “No thanks. I think I just need to get my clothes and go, okay, Adolfo? I think our little flirtation thing,” she said, gesturing at the two of them, “is over.”

  “As you wish,” he said genially. But he didn’t move.

  She frowned at him. “Come on, what time is it?”

  Adolfo smiled sympathetically. “It is as I said, mi amor. Time makes no difference to us now.”

  It did to her. Time would tell her, for example, how long she had been living this horrible drunk, and if she had any prayer of making the all-call for the rafting trip, or had to show up later when everyone would know—or guess—why she hadn’t been on the raft in the first place.

  She hated that. She wasn’t like that, didn’t go home with guys she didn’t know. Frankly, she wasn’t the type to go home with guys at all, and especially not drunk. Leah put her head down again and closed her eyes. Her head was spinning, her mouth incredibly dry.

  “Have some orange juice, Leah,” Adolfo said again. His voice startled her—it was suddenly very close. She looked up and instantly swayed backward. The man was standing over her with a glass of OJ shoved in her face. She recoiled at the sight of it. “Thanks . . . but I don’t know if I can keep it down.”

  “You must try.”

  Leah shook her head and rolled away from him, to the edge of the bed. “Okay, all kidding aside now, Adolfo. Where are my clothes?”

  “You don’t need them here.”

  “I beg to differ.” She needed them even worse than she needed liposuction on her thighs, and speaking of which, she had never intended to show those puppies to anyone. “I really need my clothes. I have to get back to camp or they will leave without me.” And really, did she have to justify needing her clothes? Didn’t everyone, eventually, get up and dress after they’d recovered from a dead drunk?

  “Let them leave without you,” Adolfo said cavalierly.

  Clearly, Adolfo was not getting the message that she was regretting the whole thing, so she grabbed a sheet and stood up, testing her weight on her legs. When it looked as if they would hold, she turned around to look at Adolfo through the haze of a remarkably bad headache.

  He was so relaxed. He was sitting in a threadbare upholstered chair, his feet propped on the end of the bed, sipping from one of two glasses of orange juice and casually checking Leah out. He was, she noticed through her haze, rather bold in his checking her out, nodding approvingly at her shape in that awful sheet, a wolfish grin spreading across his face.

  Leah really did not care for that look—it was a little predatory for her tastes, and if he thought anything was happening now that she was conscious, he had another think coming. “Where are my clothes?” she demanded, a lot less nicely this time.

  He shrugged. “Here. There. Everywhere. Come then, mi amor, have some orange juice,” he said, and held up a glass. “Trust me, you will feel much better once you have had the orange juice.”

  What was it with him and the orange juice?

  He was really beginning to annoy the hell out of her. So they’d had a fling that stopped short of completion due to her inebriation. Okay, she could accept it. Well, not accept it, really, but at least swallow the awful lump that accompanied the realization of how close she’d come. She could get used to the facts and maybe even believe that life would go on again after this spectacular mistake if she could only get the hell out of here. “Listen, I don’t want any orange juice,” she said sternly. “I just want my clothes, and I want to go home. Or at least to camp. So please show me where my clothes are, so I can get dressed.”

  Adolfo shrugged and nodded in the direction of what looked like a bathroom.

  Leah stumbled in that direction, managed to make it inside and shut the door. She let the sheet fall away from her body, grabbed the edge of the chipped tile countertop, turned on the cold water, and stuck her face beneath the cold stream. A few minutes of that went a long way toward making her feel less foggy.

  She stood up, glanced around the small bathroom, looking for a towel. Seeing none, she used the sheet. She noticed that the cute pale blue dress she had worn last night was draped over the edge of a pink tub. She grabbed it, pulled it on over her head, and struggled to zip it. But the thing wouldn’t zip, and upon further examination, she saw that the zipper had been mangled.

  Fabulous. It looked like it had been yanked apart. “Don’t go there,” she muttered to herself, unwilling to think of how that might have happened. Whatever, the damn thing was unwearable, unless she wanted the whole world to glimpse just how badly she wore a thong as she walked down the street and tried to hail a cab.

  With a sigh of exhaustion, Leah fell against the door of the bathroom and slid down to her haunches. Where was this place? She glanced up at the ceiling—stained and peeling in here, too, she noted. The rest of the bathroom looked like a seedy hotel. The linoleum on the floor was cracked, the mirror was tarnished, and a dark, rusty stain around the edge of the toilet made her shudder with revulsion.

  She pushed herself up and looked around for something to put on. Finding nothing, she donned her dress with the ruined zipper—a dress she’d paid very good money for instead of buying it at a discount barn like she normally did. That really pissed her off. What sort of guy was Adolfo, anyway, that he’d ruin a dress someone worked to pay for?

  She yanked open the bathroom door and marched into the small bedroom with the intent of giving Adolfo a piece of her mind. Except that Adolfo wasn’t in the bedroom— she could hear him banging around in another room.

  There was, however, a bag next to the chair in which he’d been sitting, and she bent over, peering inside. It was full of men’s clothes. Apparently Adolfo was thinking of making a weekend of it. She squatted down, picked up a shirt lying on top, and stabbed her arms into it, tied the ends around her waist, looked around for her fabulous shoes, which were, thankfully, at the end of the bed, and picked them up before marching into the adjoining room.

  Adolfo had donned a pair of jeans and a polo shirt and was at the kitchen sink, such that it was, cutting up an apple, munching as he went along.

  There were a couple of brown paper bags on a counter cluttered with pots and pans and dishes, as if he’d just gone to the grocery store. “Ah,” he said with a bright smile when she stomped in. “You found your dress. And my shirt.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry that I looked in your bag, but since my dress was ruined” —she paused there to glare at him for a moment— “I had to have something to cover it.”

  “Yes, that was regrettable, but necessary,” he said. “Orange juice?”

  What is with the orange juice? she screamed in her mind. And what the hell did he mean, it
was necessary? Since when was ripping clothes off a comatose woman necessary? “Adolfo . . . we need to talk.”

  “Please,” he said, gesturing to a scarred kitchen table.

  Leah ignored that, and ignored him as he passed by and set two glasses of orange juice on the table. “I am having an apple. Would you like?”

  “No! I don’t want any orange juice, or apples. Adolfo, please listen to me. I don’t remember anything from last night,” she said gesturing wildly.

  Adolfo laughed, as if fooling around with a woman who didn’t remember it was funny somehow.

  “It’s not funny,” she snapped. “Regardless of how we ended up here—and where is here, by the way?” she asked, looking around the dilapidated kitchen.

  For some reason, Adolfo looked around, too, as if he had just noticed he was in a strange cabin. “A cabin of some sort,” he said. “Perhaps it is for the holidays, although I cannot imagine who would want to holiday in such a place.”

  “Huh?” Leah asked, confused by his answer, but quickly shook her head. “Never mind. I guess what I am trying to say is that whatever happened, it happened, although I don’t know how it happened, but the thing is, I never intended for it to happen in the first place, and I’m sorry, but I guess I got really drunk, and you know how it is, you never know what you’re doing when you drink, and who are we kidding—I especially didn’t know it last night. But at any rate, I can’t let it happen again. I mean, my head’s not into it, and while it’s been a lot of fun flirting with you, Adolfo, it should never have gone this far. Do you understand what I mean?” She paused to take a breath.

  Interestingly, Adolfo did not seem upset. He seemed to mull over what she said and nodded thoughtfully. “Si, if this is what you want.” He smiled again. “Have some orange juice to feel better.”