Still So Hot!

by Serena Bell

  “Can you tell me this? Do you think it was me? Do you really think I would do that to her?”

  “I—I’m—there’s no excuse. I misjudged you, I leaped to conclusions. I’m sorry. I did think it was you.”

  This was harder than she’d thought. She had to face up to the part of her that had been so willing to believe the worst of him.

  “Why?”

  Because she’d watched, powerless, as her teenaged sister’s boyfriends had made Julie cry, month after month, year after year. Because Brett had strung women together like beads on a cheap necklace. And yet, not because of either of those things.

  She’d been willing to think the worst of Steve because at some point she’d chosen to believe that men were jerks until proven otherwise.

  “I screwed up,” she said.

  He made a sound at the other end of the phone. It might have been exasperation, because she wasn’t answering the question he was asking. He wanted to know about the chain of events that had led her and Haven to indict him.

  “Look, it’s not an excuse,” she said. “I’m not defending my leap to judgment at all. But just so you know what’s out there—Haven told me you posted stuff to Razzle all the time. That a celebrity you’d posted had gotten sexually assaulted, and that you were—not sorry.”

  “Christ,” he said. “Wow. Okay, so, yeah, it’s true that I posted a couple of photos, when I first started taking pictures. Just a couple. And a woman did claim that she’d been assaulted because of me. But it wasn’t true. It turned out she’d made up the story to get attention. You can look it up. There was a whole piece about it in one of the entertainment weeklies.” She heard him draw a deep breath. “It is really a total jungle out there. Once you’re on the web, nothing ever goes away, not even the versions that aren’t true. And by the way? I never post to those sites these days. I mean, I can totally see that it’s an awful idea to give away celebrity locations. I just try to get good photos.”

  She was rapidly searching via the Google site as he spoke, and there it was, the whole story, complete with the fact that Steve had been cleared of all wrongdoing. Her chest tightened for him, for all the anger he must have faced down, and the times he’d lost his temper in the wake of it. She wouldn’t have done any better. None of them would have.

  “I’m sorry you went through that,” she said, “and I’m really, really sorry I rushed to judgment about you.”

  There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. He wasn’t quite ready to forgive her, and she understood that.

  He sighed. “But there’s more, right? I mean, it wasn’t just that you’d heard that story from Haven. There was something specific that made you think I was doing wrong by Celine. What happened?”

  She told him, about the email and all the tweets from @Tomorrowsnews, although she didn’t identify Morrow by name. She hated the videographer’s guts, but she didn’t want Steve to go to jail for his murder.

  She told him about that one terribly intimate, incriminating tweet.

  “It’s true,” he said thoughtfully. “The whimpering is the sexiest thing.”

  “It’s probably true of a lot of women. It was a lucky guess. And if he was wrong, only a few people would know, right?” It had been clever, the work of a guy who probably wrote fiction in his spare time and knew the power of a telling detail.

  “I need to talk to her. Can you help me?”

  She took a deep breath. “I do have this one idea.”

  “I thought you might. Does it require me to forgive you? Because I’m still pissed.”

  “No,” she said. “Stay pissed. As long as you need to. But it does require a little public humiliation. How are you with that?”

  “Totally fine. Especially if it involves public humiliation for you, too.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Tell me what I need to do.”

  19

  NEW YORK HAD changed while Brett was away in the Caribbean. It was darker and colder, louder and smellier. The buildings blocked out the sky in a way he hadn’t noticed in a long time. He’d left the relative warmth of the subway, and an icy breeze knifed up the narrow street and penetrated his thin quilted jacket. Ten days ago he’d been in paradise, but now he was cast out. To make things worse, he’d been summoned to account for himself and meet with his new boss at the network.

  That didn’t bode well, but he couldn’t care in the way he thought he should. He could think about only the steady beat of absence in his head and his heart. Elisa.

  So much had gone wrong, and it was a deep, fixed misery. He wanted her not just in his frustrated, aching cock but in his gut, his chest, his fingertips for God’s sake. There were more hollow empty spaces in his body than he’d known existed. He kept seeing her face when she’d said, “I couldn’t ever trust you.”

  What could you say to that?

  The building where the network’s offices were housed stuck into the gray sky like a clean glass spike. He loved the way a building like that in New York could exist right across the street from arches and gargoyles and old stone, the two of them challenging each other over the hurrying pedestrians.

  He slipped through the spike’s revolving doors, ran the gauntlet of lobby security, then took a high-speed elevator to the twenty-ninth floor. Brett’s new boss, Hank Ormond, met him just inside the network’s bulletproof glass doors, offering him a cup of coffee and shaking his hand. Ormond was an ex-football player, square edged and chiseled, like a dark-haired Howie Long. Brett had done a lot of research on Ormond before taking the job. Everyone liked him, and he was known for being tough but fair.

  Ormond gestured to a chair at the enormous, glossy-topped conference table and took a seat beside Brett. Ormond’s big frame made his chair look spindly and inadequate. Brett felt spindly and inadequate, too.

  “I’m not going to sugarcoat this. The guys upstairs are not happy. You’re not even on the air yet, and you’re a distraction. They were afraid of this from the beginning, and I talked them into taking a chance on you. They wanted the older guy, the established guy, the family guy. I said, no, you could handle this.”

  “I can handle this.”

  “A news anchor’s biggest job is to be trustworthy. Dependable. You have to avoid not only outright scandal but even the scent of scandal. This job is 99 percent image. We talked about that in the interview. You said—I quote—‘Happy to be a pretty face.’”

  He’d meant it, too.

  In St. Barts, on the balcony, he’d told Elisa the same thing. I’m more the glitz guy.

  And she’d said, You put yourself down a lot, you know that?... What’s that about?

  What was that about?

  He wasn’t that guy. He brimmed self-confidence. Oozed it. Always had. He knew he was good-looking. He knew women loved him. He knew he was the best guy for this anchor job. Ormond had seen it, too. Authoritative, easy on the eyes...

  But not just that.

  Right?

  Not just a pretty face.

  Elisa thought he was more. And she wanted him to believe it, too.

  Ormond was watching him, waiting.

  “I have a question for you. About the reporting.”

  “What reporting?”

  “How much I’ll be doing.”

  “You know we have a team for that. You need to focus on how you come across. That’s your job.”

  “It’s nonnegotiable? If I work here, I won’t be shaping coverage?”

  “We’ve got a great reporting staff. Some networks want more investigative work from their anchors. That’s not our model. We could throw you a bone every now and again...”

  Like a dog, he thought. Like a show dog.

  Glitz. Substance.

  If you were my client—

  He had no
t let Elisa finish that sentence because he didn’t want to be psychoanalyzed. He hadn’t wanted to hear her talk about self-esteem or tell him that the reason he dated women like it was going out of style was that he didn’t think highly enough of himself.

  But it was true, wasn’t it? That, in the end, he hadn’t gone after the NPR and the New York Times jobs.

  “Jordan?” Ormond’s face was creased with concern. “I’m trying to be as straight with you here as I can. I’m telling you exactly what we want from you. We need a pretty face, and we need you squeaky clean behind the ears. Can you do that? Because we need to know right now. This is officially a zero-tolerance situation. One wrong move and you’re out.”

  Being a pretty face no longer seemed enough, and it was because of Elisa’s faith in him; her persistent, relentless need to push him to live up to standards he hadn’t dared to hold himself to.

  If you were my client—

  He didn’t want to be her client. But he no longer hated the way she made him doubt. Far from it. He loved that about her, that she wouldn’t let him settle.

  And not just that. He loved everything about her, her auburn hair and light brown eyes, wide mouth, luminous skin, life-changing smile. Her rolling on the floor with laughter over something he’d said during a Scrabble game. Her quick sense of humor, her mile-deep stubborn streak. She was such a hard-ass. God, he loved that about her, the way she’d light into him and keep him honest.

  He loved her.

  Maybe he’d never convince her of that, but he would die trying. And in the meantime he was going to show her that he knew his own worth, because that was the best way to prove he knew hers.

  He took a deep breath. “I can’t do it, Ormond. It’s not me.”

  Ormond scowled. “How hard is it, Jordan? Keep it in your pants.”

  “No, not that part. The pretty face. I don’t want to be that guy. I want a job that uses my reporting chops. Something with some investigative teeth.”

  Ormond’s face darkened. “That’s not how we do it around here,” he said.

  “That’s not how you’ve done it in the past. I respect that. But I’d like you to give this way a chance.”

  “You’re not in a position to bargain with us right now. Given we had some doubts to begin with. Given that you’ve already managed to get the network bad publicity.”

  “No,” Brett agreed. “I’m not in a position to bargain.”

  He kept all hint of threat out of his voice. This wasn’t meant to be an ultimatum, even though he knew in his heart that he would walk away. Not from their low expectations of him but from his own. He could do better, and he owed it to Elisa—

  No, he owed it to himself.

  “If you can’t give me serious reporting time, I won’t work here.”

  Ormond regarded him levelly. “Jordan, I’m telling you I can’t. And you’re telling me that means you’re out? No contract, no network anchor job.”

  Brett nodded.

  “That’s your final answer?”

  Elisa had sometimes said that to him when they were playing Scrabble, because he liked to keep his fingers on the tiles for a minute after he played them, to see if he could spot something better. She used to say it just like a game show host, all drama. Leaning in, narrowing her eyes.

  The memory made him smile, and Ormond looked at him like he was stark raving mad.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s my final answer.”

  * * *

  ELISA AND STEVE sat side by side on her couch, his laptop resting on the coffee table in front of them, watching Morrow’s footage. Elisa was surprised by how much there was. Morrow had been everywhere, a stealthy, constant presence. In the airport. In the resort lobby. At the pool, the camera steady on Elisa’s and Brett’s serious faces as they conversed over Celine’s sleeping form. In the bar, Morrow had captured every last nuance of Brett’s drinks with Celine and all the unsubtle sexual chemistry of Celine and Steve’s performance. Morrow had continued to roll the camera long after Celine’s fall, capturing the moment when Brett had shoved Steve, the fury on Brett’s face, and the matching shock on Steve’s and Elisa’s. The camera had followed them out of the bar, the footage snapping to blue when they were no longer visible.

  And most shockingly, Morrow had stayed on the beach after their conversation, because he’d captured every interaction that she and Brett had had from that point on, almost until they closed the door of Brett’s room to make love. There was very little audio, at least very little that would be usable, but Elisa was a matchmaker, and she could read everything in body language, including Steve and Celine’s genuine affection for each other and Celine’s own single-mindedness. Only Brett was a mystery to Elisa, his expression often bland as he watched events unfold.

  Steve clicked again on the frame where he sat on the beach with his arm wrapped around Celine, holding her close. He leaned forward, staring at the screen.

  “You okay?” Elisa asked.

  “I’m in love with her.”

  She smiled at him. He had a crooked smile, brilliantly white teeth, dark skin and long, thin eyebrows that kept his face from being movie-star handsome. From a physical perspective, he and Celine were the perfect opposites-attract couple. They would have made a beautiful marketing photo for Rendezvous, angel light and devil dark. The thought hardly stung.

  “I was in love with her almost from the very beginning.” Steve said it so quietly and simply that it hurt to hear it.

  He touched the spot on the screen where Celine’s hair was frozen as it blew in the wind. “It’s hard to exactly explain what it is about her. She’s got this—this glow, like she’s lit from within. I can’t take my eyes off her.” He said it almost apologetically. “And I had fun with her. The karaoke, the beach, paddleboarding, the sex, everything. It’s been a tough couple of years for me. I think I’d gotten kind of bitter, and she snapped me out of it. I felt—purified. Is that crazy? Totally peaceful and clean. Makes no sense. I know.”

  Elisa’s eyes prickled. There was an odd, sweet buoyancy in her chest, the feeling she got when she heard about someone falling head over heels or meeting a long-lost loved one. The feeling brought with it the threat of a certain kind of tears, the kind that went with being human and getting a chance to witness unadulterated happiness.

  Steve had also showed Elisa prints of his still photos, and they were spread out on the glass-topped table, shot after shot of Celine, laughing, frowning, pouting, framed by the ocean, the beautiful St. Barts’s flowers, the white-and-red buildings, the blue sky. Steve and Celine were a love story, and she’d been too busy with her own woes to revel in it. Some matchmaker she was.

  “I don’t know if she feels the same way,” he admitted. “I know I’m not the only guy who wants to date her. I should probably just get in line.” He shoved his fingers through his hair, raking it off his forehead.

  “No. You shouldn’t.” Elisa clicked on a single frame, right out of the middle of Steve and Celine’s performance. “Look at her.”

  There it was, on Celine’s face, that same brief glimpse of perfect happiness. She did look like she’d been lit from within, and it wasn’t a look Elisa had seen Celine wear very many times. Her joy was because of Steve. How funny that was, that the thing that attracted him to her was the intensity with which she was attracted to him. Elisa had felt it, too, with Brett—

  She wasn’t going to think about that.

  “She is an actress,” he pointed out.

  “She wasn’t acting.”

  “How do you know?”

  She pressed her palm into her denim-clad thigh, biting her bottom lip. “Because I saw her face when she thought you’d written those tweets.”

  “She was really upset?”

  “She was devastated.”

  He looked back at the frame on
the screen, and she watched his smile creep back, lighting him up. “I want her to look at me like that again. Preferably at least once a day—for the foreseeable future.” He sighed. “Possibly for the rest of my life.”

  She must have signaled her doubt somehow, because he said quickly, “I know you can’t promise me that. That part’s my job. But I’m game to give this a shot.”

  She smiled at him and patted his arm. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “What about you and Brett?”

  Startled, she met his probing gaze, then had to look away. “What about us?”

  “You guys are together, right?”

  God, the last thing she wanted to do right now was talk about her and Brett. “There wasn’t ever anything between us. Not really.”

  “Seriously?” Steve stared at her for a moment. And then he leaned forward and began clicking through video frames. “Tell me you don’t see it.”

  She looked, unwillingly. He’d stopped on a frame in which she and Brett were ascending the stairs from the beach. Where the hell had Morrow stood to capture that footage? He was a better stealth videographer than she had guessed. Creep.

  In this particular frame, she and Brett held hands, and she gazed ahead up the stairs, more or less toward the camera. But Brett wasn’t looking at the camera. Brett was staring at her. She had seen him eye her many times that weekend with a dark, covetous look that had set her hair on fire. This was different. This—

  “You see?” Steve demanded.

  There it was, that reaction she couldn’t hide. The thrill of knowing, of seeing, that people could feel that way about each other, that amid everything bad that went on in the world, there was this kind of transcendence. She could deny herself, and she could lie to herself, but in her matchmaker’s heart, she knew the look in Brett’s eyes when she saw it.

  “You see?”

  She couldn’t take her eyes off the still. He was looking at her like she was important, like she was necessary, like she was everything.