A hot lance pierced Becca’s gut. “Cal doesn’t like me.”
“Well, he sure seems to like talking to you. I saw you two together while I was waiting at the tables after mud wrestling. Then again today, before volleyball.” Grace tapped the side of her head. “You think I don’t notice things, but I do.”
Maybe it was time to admit to Grace what she’d done with Cal. Maybe Grace would understand. “Look, there’s something—”
“Excuse me, are you Grace and Rebecca Evans?” A tall, attractive man with salt-and-pepper hair approached from the pathway.
“I’m Grace. This is Becca.”
“Oh, forgive me.” He smiled, mostly at Grace, which was not new for Becca. Grace attracted men of all ages, and when Becca was in her sister’s presence, she became nothing more than a backdrop.
Yep. This was her life.
Except…Cal noticed her. The one man who shouldn’t.
With a sigh, she focused on the man who had interrupted them.
“I’m Jeffrey Reid. I own the resort.”
“You sent the strawberries and the card?” Grace touched the man’s forearm.
The man put a hand to his chest. “Yes.” He only had eyes for Grace. As usual. “I have to confess, I’ve been following your career. You have that ‘it’ factor.”
Jesus.
Grace beamed, and in true, trusting fashion, she wrapped her arms around the man and gave him a hug. “Thank you. That’s so very kind of you to say.”
The guy had to be twenty years her senior, and yet she had him tongue-tied. “I’m glad.”
Oh good lord.
Becca inserted herself between Grace and the hotelier. “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Reid, but we should get back to the room and change. Right?” She elbowed her sister.
“Oh. Yeah. We should.” Grace extended her hand and said, “It’s lovely to meet you, Mr. Reid.”
“It was my pleasure, trust me,” he said, gazing longingly at Grace.
After Jeffrey left, Becca whispered harshly, “And now you’ve got a geriatric admirer, dare I say, stalker. Grace, you have to be more careful.”
“Who, him?” Grace glanced back the way they’d come. “He’s sweet. Anyway, like you always say, it’s good to keep my options open. You know. In case I don’t win the pageant.”
“Oh. You’re going to win.”
Grace stopped walking. “But, what if I don’t want to win?”
“Why wouldn’t you want to win?”
Her forehead crinkled and then became smooth again, and Grace resumed walking. “I don’t know, maybe I’m not cut out for how mean-spirited life in the limelight can be.”
“Hey,” Becca said, linking her arm through Grace’s. “You’ve dreamed of becoming famous ever since you were a little girl. Don’t give up now, when you’re so close. Anyway, you’ve already proven that being mean isn’t the only way to get ahead.”
“But what about what we’re doing?” She stopped, looked around, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “We’re cheating to win.”
That was true, and up until this point, Becca had never given it more than a passing thought. “Or…we’re simply using all the tools in our toolbox. You know you want this.”
“I know.”
“I want this for you, too. There’s nothing I want more than for your dreams to be realized.”
An image of Grace and Calum picnicking beneath the Eiffel Tower flashed through her brain. Shit! A cool clamminess engulfed her.
She straightened her back and said, “Come on. Get your head in the game, and let’s go work on those selfies.”
…
After a quiet dinner in his villa, Cal had been called into the hotel ballroom, which was production headquarters, where the team was sifting through the selfies posted by the remaining six women.
“What do you think, Cal?” Jeannette, the assistant director, asked when she caught sight of him.
“Was there any clear winner or loser based on viewer ratings?”
“Grace Evans was the favorite, but there were no clear losers.”
“Can I take a look at the pictures again?”
“Of course,” Eddie said, waving him toward a computer station.
While Cal had viewed the images as they’d come through on his cell phone, he wanted to put them up on a larger screen to view again. Sitting down at a station, Cal located a folder from the selfie challenge on the desktop. Inside that folder were individual ones with each contestant’s name. He clicked through each and found that it wasn’t just the seven images they’d submitted but all the other images that had been taken by the phone.
Hesitantly, he clicked on Grace’s folder. Her images were by far the best, all selfie recreations of iconic images. Marilyn Monroe with a black one-piece suit and a red-and-white striped umbrella. Elizabeth Taylor on the beach, Farah Fawcett in her red swimsuit.
“She must have brought wigs,” Jeannette said.
“Smart girl,” Eddie added.
Cal clicked on another folder titled others.
But it wasn’t Grace’s picture that Calum was looking at right now. Speaking of smart girls…
It was Becca.
Grace had taken a whole series of pictures of her.
“Who’s that?” Eddie asked, looking at the computer screen over Cal’s shoulder.
Strange. Gazing at her picture, he could not see one ordinary thing about her. Her eyes sparkled, her skin glowed, and her laugh was full of life and so infectious that he found himself smiling in return. “This is Grace’s sister, Becca.”
“No kidding,” Eddie said slowly. “I never would have guessed. The two look nothing alike.” Eddie made a contemplative sound at the back of his throat. The man’s comment felt like a sucker punch. Why?
Cal closed the folder, stood, and stretched his back, feigning indifference. But by the way Eddie eyed him through narrowed lids, he could tell that the man was assessing him.
Time for a distraction.
“Why don’t we keep the ratings for this competition live all night? That way we keep interest high until the challenges tomorrow, and I’ll give my top picks tomorrow morning, as well.”
“Good idea,” Eddie said, nodding to Jeannette in a “get ’er done” sort of way.
“Speaking of which, what’s on the agenda for tomorrow?” Cal asked.
Referring to her tablet, Jeannette said, “Surfing and Sexting are the top pics, so we’ll go with those. The next day is oyster sucking and a sexy talent contest.”
Somehow, miraculously, Cal managed to keep himself from rolling his eyes.
When Cal got back to his villa, Becca was waiting for him, sitting on the lip of his plunge pool, her feet dangling inside.
“This is a nice surprise.” Kicking off his shoes, he sat beside her and draped his own feet in the cool water. “That feels nice.” He nudged her with his shoulder before wrapping his arm around her.
Her expression was serious when she turned her face up to his. “I’ll make you a deal,” she said.
“Okay…”
“I’ll sleep over. I’ll be your sex slave, submissive, sometimes even have my way with you…” She paused, her lips quirking up at the corners, reminding Cal of some of the pictures he’d just viewed of her. Her playfulness hidden behind a serious facade.
“If…” Cal queried.
“If you choose Grace as the winner.”
“Hmm…” Cal tapped his lips, pretending to be deep in thought. Meanwhile his other hand slid from her shoulder, down her back, and around her hip to her thigh, where he single-handedly bunched the soft cotton of her skirts so that he could slip his hand beneath.
“Cal.” She panted with mock indignation. She covered his hand. “I can’t think when you do that, and I need to hear your answer first before…”
“Before I tease you?” His hand slid higher, despite her trying to stop him (with very little conviction). “Before I torture you?”
“Yes,” she panted, more
of a plea then an agreement.
Just as his fingers slipped beneath the elastic of her panties, he whispered, “Deal. Now take your clothes off and get in this pool. I need you. Right fucking now.”
Chapter Twelve
It was hours later, and Becca lay warm and snug in Cal’s arms, her head against his chest, her body completely relaxed.
Deliciously sore.
“Why is it so important that Grace win this contest?” Cal asked.
Becca stilled. “Why wouldn’t I want her to win? It’s been her dream to become a movie star. I want her to achieve that dream.”
Cal made a rumbling sound deep inside his chest. “So, why do I feel as if there is more to the story?”
Becca was tempted to deny it and to simply say they needed the money. It was a plausible explanation, not to mention, partly true. But after the intimacy they’d shared over the last few days, she felt compelled to tell him more.
“I guess, I’ve always sort of taken care of Grace.”
“Why? Are you her older sister?”
“No. Younger.” Becca sighed and rolled within his arms. “It’ll sound weird and won’t make sense.”
“Try me.”
To the lazily turning ceiling fan, she said, “I’m moving to New York City in September because I was offered a position at Cornell in their Physics Department, and I haven’t told Grace yet.”
“Why haven’t you told her?”
“Because I’m worried about her. We’ve never been apart.”
“So, you’re like her guardian angel?”
She smacked his bare chest. “I’m certainly no angel.” She propped herself up on his chest, gazing into his face.
“If angels are pure and innocent, then no, you are not.” His hand cupped her ass, squeezing. “But you have shown me a piece of heaven…so maybe you are.”
Becca laughed before lowering herself to kiss him. “Anyway,” she said. “I guess I was hoping that if she won this contest, she wouldn’t need me as much. You know?”
She looked away.
He tilted her chin so that he could look directly into her eyes. “And why do you feel like Grace needs you so badly?”
Something stirred deep inside of her, something she’d never felt before. It was like Cal had some deep connection to her soul that enabled him to truly see her.
She tried to turn away because she couldn’t let him see what lay hidden down there.
“What?” Cal asked, holding her chin in place. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
She’d never been with a man who read her so well.
“Come on, Bec. If you can trust me with your pleasure, you can trust me with this.”
She rolled so that she was on her back beside Cal. She’d never even been tempted to tell anyone else the story; it was too humiliating. But now, strangely, she wanted to tell Cal the truth. Or at least, the partial truth. “It was back in high school. There was this guy—one of the popular kids.”
“What happened?” While soft, Cal’s voice had a rough quality that strummed a cord in her chest.
“He asked…Grace out.” It was a lie, he’d asked her out.
But, imagining it was Grace made the story easier to tell. “They went on a date, and he told her that if she did…certain things…he’d take her to prom.”
Cal growled.
“He recorded her.”
“Fucker.”
“Put it online the next day.”
“Jesus.”
“He and his friends had all done the same thing. Dated girls they thought were ‘easy targets’ and then created this site called Things Girls Will Do for Prom Dates.”
He rolled toward her, stroking her shoulder. “Assholes.”
“Yeah, well.” Her throat was thick when she swallowed. “They weren’t so stupid as to use faces, but still…” It was after that incident, after Becca had been fooled and used by Kevyn, that she realized how Grace—her sweet, trusting, and incredibly naive sister—would never be safe from the machinations of a certain kind of man and vowed to protect her from the Kevyn Wasinskis of the world.
Becca cleared her throat. “Grace showed me the next day, and I created a virus that infected any computer that downloaded the video.”
His hand stilled. There was admiration in his voice when he said, “Of course you did.”
“Unfortunately, Grace has dated the same kind of loser ever since. So, I look out for her.”
Becca’s fears had indeed come to fruition, and although the story she’d just shared wasn’t the complete truth, this was the closest she’d ever come to revealing everything.
Becca had tears in her eyes, but she didn’t care. She stroked the stubble on Cal’s cheek—not so high maintenance after all and definitely super, fucking sexy—and realized that Calum Price was the first man she’d trusted enough to share even a bit of the truth.
The gravity of her pseudo-confession overwhelmed her, and Becca needed to create a little levity. “There is a third reason I want Grace to win the contest,” Becca said, her voice still thick with emotion.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Because I don’t want anyone else going on a date with you…to fucking Paris.” She wanted it to sound light and joking, but it came out sounding much more choked up than she’d intended.
He didn’t respond, only curled his arms around her shoulders and held her tightly. Becca lay there, feeling safe and cared for, the sound of Cal’s heart beating softly against her cheek.
Cal said something—it was so soft she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly—but she thought it was something about her being the only one he wanted to go to Paris with.
And even though Becca was no longer that naive teenager and she knew that whatever was happening between her and Calum couldn’t last, in that moment, she let herself believe him.
…
Calum was thankful for the canopy suspended over the event stage blocking out the late-afternoon sun. The sky above was cloudless, the wind almost non-existent, and after spending the morning on the water for surf lessons, Cal was feeling the effects of the sun. From the stifled yawns and the red noses that even makeup couldn’t mask, the contestants were feeling it, too.
But, as Eddie reminded them all, the show must go on.
Though Cal wasn’t thinking of the “show.” He was thinking of the conversation he’d had with Becca last night. How was this contest any different from what her sister had endured in high school?
He’d asked her that question last night. “Surely you see the similarity. Women all vying to go on a date with me. Not because they like me, but for the sake of the date. Allowing themselves to be taken advantage of.”
“Sure, there’s a similarity,” Becca had replied slowly. “But there are also big differences. The most glaring is that all your potential dates chose to be here. They weren’t tricked, and they aren’t being humiliated and laughed at. They have their own agendas, whether it’s five minutes of fame or the hope of getting a modeling or acting gig afterwards. They have all done it willingly.”
“You forgot to mention the girls might actually want to date me,” he’d joked. “I am part of the prize pack, don’t forget.”
“How can I forget that you’re going to Paris for five days with someone else?” Becca had flopped dejected onto her back, trying to make light of it, but he’d been able to see it bothered her.
It bothered him, too.
“Grace really likes you, you know.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Nope. Apparently, she thinks you’re super hot, super nice and she’d super like to go to Paris with you.”
“That’s very sweet.”
“Yeah, well, she’s very sweet. Which is why I am, without doubt, the worst sister in the world.”
Now, sitting across from the remaining six women in the contest, Cal felt the disconnect of where he was—sitting on a stage, waiting for the
next contest to start—and where he wanted to be. With Becca.
He focused on Grace, who sat primly on her stool, smiling that shy smile, wearing the same flower she’d worn every day, pulling her hair back on one side. Even though the sisters did not resemble each other, the sight of Grace brought Becca to mind.
Or, she’s just always on your mind.
“Okay, people,” Eddie’s assistant, Jeanette, called. “We’re going live in ten…nine…”
The crowd hummed, and Kevyn appeared, climbing the steps up to the stage. “Hey, everybody! Welcome back to the second challenge on the third day of competition here at Playground of Paradise Bay Resort…”
Cal smiled at the women—as instructed from the earlier briefing—while he waited for Kevyn to finish his spiel.
“…all these women are hoping to win a date with Mr. Sexy, Mr. Physically Fit, Mr. Calum Price!”
Kill me now.
Cal pushed himself to his feet and waved.
“All right, folks. Who’s in the mood for fun?” Kevyn shouted.
The crowd clapped appreciatively.
“Who’s in the mood for something a little daring?”
Whoops and whistles joined the applause.
Kevyn dropped his voice an octave. “Who’s in the mood for something a little…naughty?”
Catcalls, whistles, cheers.
“For this challenge, we’re going to get all three. This challenge is called ‘Sext Me if You Can.’ Calum is going to choose random slips of paper from this bowl, all texts to you.” He pointed to the contestants. “You ladies need to write sexy texts in response. Remember, we will bleep out bad language and body parts, so be sexy, but be subtle.”
More whoops and whistles.
“Now, here’s how the contest works. All of the texts will show up on this screen.” Keyvn pointed to the massive screen behind the stage. “And Cal has to try to guess who sent which text. If Cal guesses correctly, that contestant is eliminated from the rest of the challenge. The only thing that will save them is if the viewers watching live choose that particular text as their favorite.”
Kevyn waited for the applause to die down. He tossed his hair and then addressed the women. “Are you ready, ladies?”
Bachelor Games (Tropical Temptation) Page 11