by Julia London
Her eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“Just…you know, give it a quick run up and down,” Eli suggested. “Nothing fancy.”
He was serious. They were all serious. They were peering at her, actually, glancing anxiously at the rope then at her again.
“You want me to climb that rope.”
“Yeah, it must sound really strange,” Eli agreed. But then he patted her on the shoulder, leaned over so that his head was directly next to hers, and said softly, “But we really need you to climb that rope.”
CHAPTER THREE
Eli caught her arm before she could grab her melon and run, and at least got her to agree to hear what they were trying to accomplish with the audition.
Thrillseekers Anonymous, he said, was an ultrasecret, ultraexclusive, members-only sports club catering to the extremely wealthy.
The “extremely wealthy” point instantly caught her attention, and she had stopped wrestling Eli for the melon and demanded suspiciously, “Like who?”
“Like…we can’t tell you unless you get the job,” Cooper said.
That clearly disappointed her, but she did agree to come into the pavilion and sit down to listen to their spiel—a spiel they’d given so many times that they all knew it by heart.
It went something like this: Eli, Cooper, and Jack had grown up best friends on the West Texas plains. Their love for anything sporting had started then—football, baseball, basketball, rodeo—whatever sport they could play with the goal of outdoing the other two. They were still pups when it became clear that regular sports were not enough to satisfy them. They began to create elaborate, double-dog-dare tricks using rooftops, trampolines, and swimming pools. And they created a dirt-bike trail through the canyons that 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 fields.
As they grew older, their competitive spirit grew more extreme, and they became experts in white-water rafting, rock climbing, canyon jumping, kayaking, surfing, and skiing—name a sport, any sport, and they had tried it.
After college, Jack went into the Air Force so he could fly higher and learn how to do stunts in airplanes. 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.
With Jack in the Air Force, Eli and Cooper got their start working on some of the biggest action films in Hollywood. Their ability to do any stunt and their willingness to go the extra mile eventually led them to choreographing huge action sequences. Through a series of big blockbuster films, they earned a solid reputation for being fearless, unconquerable, and astoundingly safe, given what they did.
And still, with all the action in their day jobs, Eli and Cooper routinely trekked out on weekends 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 along a couple of pals who just happened to be movie stars that their outings began to be the talk around movie sets. Their reputation as tough guys grew exponentially—the more Hollywood bigs they took along on their adventures, the bigger their adventures became.
Perhaps more important, and amazingly without a lot of forethought, what Eli and Cooper proved adept at doing was keeping these jaunts out of the press. In fact, they became masters at it.
It was Cooper who came up with the idea of making a business out of their love of adventure—after all, extreme sports didn’t come cheap. And an increasing number of Hollywood moguls wanted the exclusive and exotic outings they offered, particularly if the adventure came with the guarantee of total privacy.
When Jack started making noises about getting out of the Air Force—he’d learned to fly anything with wings, and was ready to move on—they persuaded their old pal to come and join them in California. 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.
Jack was more than willing to do it—he missed his old pals, missed the extreme sports with them. But he had one condition—he wanted to bring a friend.
During his years of service, Jack had become friends with Michael, a fellow extreme-sports enthusiast. It so happened that Michael was also considering moving on from his job—he was a CIA operative who was growing weary of being out in the cold.
As Jack had explained it to Eli and Cooper, what Michael brought to the table was invaluable—the guy had a contact for just about anything anyone could imagine. He’d known arms dealers, jewel thieves, opium traders. He’d dined with Saudi kings, had lived with a Parisian diplomat, and had at least two Swiss bank accounts that Jack knew of. He was a gold mine of information and resources.
Eli and Cooper said they didn’t care about that, but could the dude ski? Repel down cliff faces? Sky surf or kite surf? Jack said he could, so a few months later, during a Lakers game one night, Thrillseekers Anonymous, or TA, as they called it, was officially born. The four of them agreed that night that no fantasy adventure was too fantastic for them. They agreed they would not fulfill fantasies that were illegal or included illicit sex or drugs, but anything else they considered on the table. Their motto became Name your fantasy and we’ll make it happen.
In the last two years, TA had grown to the point that they were scheduling adventures monthly, if not more often. Word of their business had spread beyond Hollywood, and high-tech billionaires, European royalty, and New York real estate aristocracy, among other wealthy and famous people, sought their services.
The adventures were top notch. They had surfed thirty-foot waves off the coast of Washington, had canyon jumped through the alpine mountains of Europe. They had forged new helicopter skiing in Canada, going where no skier had gone before. They had careened down some of the meanest Class V white waters in the world, had raced motorcycles across the roughest terrain in South America, had climbed the frigid mountains of Russia. Whatever the fantasy sport, they had done it.
But then something peculiar happened.
Their clients were men of power and extraordinary means. But behind every one of those men stood a woman, and over the course of a year, some of their best clients had begun to call up inquiring about the same sort of gig, usually beginning with a heartfelt apology for even asking.
The wives and girlfriends of these men were just as attracted to the privacy TA offered as were their mates. But they didn’t want extreme adventures—they wanted extreme social events. They wanted someone to organize an Antarctic cruise for fifty of their closest friends, or arrange an anniversary party on a remote island and give it a Gilligan’s Island theme. They wanted someone to organize a girls’ week out, which would include someplace very cool—floating down the Amazon River in luxury, for example. But most of all, they wanted the privacy.
At first, the guys balked. They rarely attended social events, and usually only when one of them happened to have a girlfriend, which was a hit-and-miss sort of thing, given the nature of their business. They certainly didn’t do social events, and the first time they received a call requesting one, they had been collectively insulted. They specialized in dangerous, breathtaking, thrilling trips into the wilds of the world—not tea parties.
But the requests kept popping up, and they began to realize if they didn’t go with the flow on this, they might start losing some valuable clients.
And then this happened—this being the wedding of the century, of course.
What made this different from the previous requests was that the two stars involved—Vincent Vittorio and Olivia Dagwood—wanted their wedding to occur at the end of an extreme sports trip. Sort of a hybrid, Vince explained to them.
Specifically, they wanted to return to the remote mountains on the border of Colorado and New Mexico, where they had filmed the epic movie The Dane. Vince had done some extensive training for that film, and his idea w
as that he and Olivia and a couple of TA guys would all go canyoning, which involved riding waterfalls and rappelling down rock faces or jumping in alpine pools so that they could slide down a water chute to the next foaming pool, only to climb out and up the next rock and do it again.
At the end of their jaunt, Vince proposed that they would hike up to a pristine and beautiful little dale at the top of the San Juan Mountain range. The dale was only a quarter of a mile up from the Piedra Lodge, the luxury summer resort where they had resided during the filming of The Dane. In that tiny dale was an old miner’s cabin that had been converted into a plush honeymoon cabin. It was, Vince said sheepishly, the setting Olivia wanted—between towering mountains covered with summer alpine wildflowers and spruce trees.
And he was willing to pay them a shitload of dough for what Olivia wanted.
The request had been an agonizing development for TA. They didn’t want to lose out on the chance to go canyoning—the four of them had bemoaned the fact they didn’t have the time to do it before The Dane wrapped. They did not, however, want anything to do with a wedding. Even one tacked on to canyoning.
But Vincent Vittorio was one of their best clients. He was a short guy, had a bit of a Napoleon complex, and was constantly trying to prove his mettle through extreme sports. In his zeal, he had brought TA some of their most lucrative contracts. Worse, not one of them could deny the lure of the money Vince was willing to pay them. They had quickly determined they could book an entire year’s worth of expenses against what they would make off this one event.
At first, the guys had tried to find a way out by searching for some hole in the logistics of doing a wedding there, but really the logistics weren’t that difficult—the spot was remote, and the nearest airport, a two-hour drive, was only a regional one. A single two-lane road led up to the old mining sites, and even that was closed for most of the year. As a result, no one was up there save cattle, elk, and the occasional bear. It would be a cinch to keep the event private. Moreover, the lodge and honeymoon cabin were available at the time they wanted it.
No matter how they looked at it, they couldn’t find a really good reason to say no. It was just that none of them wanted to be involved in a wedding, because none of them knew how to be involved in a wedding.
They needed, Jack said then, a wedding planner. He convinced them that with a wedding planner, the rest of them had to merely show up.
But hire a wedding planner? Let a female into their inner sanctum? It seemed impossible, inconceivable, and a really bad idea. Much argument and discussion and—after a trip to the store for a case of beer and some ribs—even more argument had ensued, until the four men resolved the issue by taking a vote.
It was three to one, Eli voting against.
He had his reasons.
They all knew his reasons. It had been only a year since he’d been jilted at the altar in another big to-do. Yep, Eli McCain had been left standing holding the proverbial bag while the rest of the world read about it in the tabloids. The last thing he wanted or needed was a wedding in his life.
Nevertheless he was voted down—they would hire a wedding planner. But they agreed they would hire an unknown planner who didn’t have a public relations office so the press wouldn’t get wind of it. And as the wedding itself would require some hiking and lifting and various other physical activities (the dale was beautiful, but it was awfully remote at eleven thousand feet), they would need a wedding planner who could at least climb trees and rocks. Thus, the idea for the audition was born.
At that point, the guys had tackled the even harder issue of who among them would lead this expedition into virgin territory. No one stepped up. All of them said, “Not me, pal.” Several bawdy and impolite things were said about weddings and marriage in general. They had at last decided which of them would lead—from the canyoning all the way to through the wedding—in their usual customary fashion.
In a cruel and ironic twist of fate, Eli lost his round of rock, paper, scissors.
Personally, he didn’t think there could possibly be a worse choice than him. As Cooper explained everything, just watching Marnie’s eyes light up at the very mention of wedding plans and exotic locales made his stomach churn. What was it with women and fancy weddings? If Eli ever contemplated marriage again, which he’d never do, he’d run off to Vegas or something.
“So what do you think, Marnie?” Cooper asked after the spiel.
It was clear what Marnie thought—she beamed like a ray of pure sunshine, the light coming right out of her maple eyes. “Are you kidding? A wedding in the mountains? I can’t think of a more romantic setting!”
“I guess it’s romantic,” Cooper said with a shrug, “but it’s not easy. It involves a lot of physical stuff. And we can’t afford to have a team member who isn’t in shape and can’t pull her own weight, you know what I mean?”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s why we need you to climb that rope.”
Marnie’s beaming smile faded a little. “Well…okay. Sure.” She didn’t sound very sure, but she put aside her bag, her melon, and her red hat nonetheless. “I’m not exactly dressed for it,” she said, looking down at her black slacks.
“That’s why I said to dress in banging-around clothes,” Eli explained.
She gave him a brief, withering look. “I didn’t realize ‘banging around’ meant rope climbing.” She walked past him to the edge of the pavilion and stared at the rope. “Just up and down once, right?”
“Right,” Coop said.
With a small sigh, she headed for the rope. The guys followed her. She stopped at the rope, rubbed her hands on her black slacks, then rubbed them together as she eyed the thing. Eli stepped up to spot her. “It’s easy,” he said. “Watch me.” He jumped up on the rope, quickly scaled to the top, then just as quickly lowered himself to the ground.
Marnie frowned.
“Marnie…have you ever climbed a rope?” he asked carefully.
“Of course I have climbed a rope,” she said. “Granted, it’s been a few years, like maybe twenty-five, but hey, I’ve climbed one. I can do this.”
Okay, then, it was clear they weren’t going to find a wedding planner who could climb a rope. And honestly, Eli felt a little sorry for her. She seemed so…so spunky and so desperate to get this job. She definitely got extra points for being the only one of the four women they had talked to who’d made it to the rope.
“Listen,” he said, “if you can’t get all the way up, don’t worry about it. We’re not going to cut you for failing the rope climb. It’s just so we can get a feel for your strength.”
“You might want to stand back,” she said, ignoring him, and with a grunt, she launched herself at the rope, jumping up and grabbing on about halfway up.
And there she hung, clinging desperately to it, her legs wrapped tightly around it, her hands white-knuckled in their grip as the rope swung lazily.
Eli winced when she didn’t move for a long moment. “Just use your legs and inch your way up,” he suggested.
“Right,” she said brightly. But she didn’t move.
“It’s okay, let go,” Eli said, putting his hand on the rope.
“No! I can do it,” she gasped, trying to shake his hand off with a wiggle of her hips. “I just have to pull…” She made a very strange sound and managed to get one hand above the other.
For a moment, he thought she was going to make it. But then she began to whimper.
“Let go, let go,” Eli urged her, grabbing her rope and peeling her fingers from it, began to peel her fingers from it, one by one. When she was in danger of falling, she let go and landed off balance, knocking into him. Eli grabbed her shoulders and straightened her up.
A frown creased her brow as she pushed some loose hair behind her ears. “You made me lose my grip!”
“Actually,” he said with a hint of a smile, “you were gripping the hemp out of that sucker.”
“I was?”
He nod
ded.
Marnie sighed. “That bad, huh?”
Worse. It was horrible. No upper-body strength at all. Marnie groaned, but Eli said, “Hey, it wasn’t too bad,” and patted her kindly on the shoulder. “I thought it was great. A for effort.”
Marnie smiled gratefully, and Eli noticed with some surprise just how warm that smile of hers was.
“Well,” Coop said, shaking his head as he sauntered up to them, “I guess we can try running.”
They escorted Marnie through the garden and around a stand of trees to a small, half-mile track Vincent kept to stay in shape. She exclaimed her surprise when she saw it, and exclaimed even louder when Michael told her they wanted to get a feel for her endurance. “If you could just run around the track a couple times,” he said, making a circular motion with his hand. “Maybe four. That’s all we need.”
Marnie looked down at her white silk blouse. “I wish I’d known to wear something a little sportier.”
“I said ‘banging around’,” Eli objected again.
She flashed him a look that said she thought he was clearly a moron and walked to the starting line. She paused, fixed her hat and her hair, and pulled her shirttails out of her pants. “Do I have to be fast?” she asked.
“Nah,” Michael said easily. “Just run.” And the four of them lined up behind her, watched as she started to jog…well, bounce, really…around the track.
“Gotta say, this one is a definite improvement over the last one,” Coop said with a grin.
“Not bad, not bad,” Michael added, smiling appreciatively, too, as they watched a very nice ass bounce as she ran by. “But she runs like a girl.”
“This is the dumbest idea we’ve ever come up with,” Eli snorted. Not that he wasn’t appreciating the package bouncing around the track along with the guys. “We’re making a wedding planner run around a track. Do you know how stupid that is?”
“Shut up,” Jack said. “I’m enjoying the show.”
Marnie made it around one and a half times before she had to stop and put her hands on her knees to get some air. When the guys joined her, she apologized between gulps of air, and admitted to being very amazed that her trips to the gym hadn’t yielded a better performance.