One Night with the Sexiest Man Alive (The One Book 1)

by Ainslie Paton

  Haydn made Rum a fresh drink. “Teela’s business is in Australia.”

  “And she can’t do it long distance? So what? She wouldn’t need to work, she’d be with you.”

  “That’s not something she’d ever want. To live off me. To give up her own life to vacation in mine. She’s ambitious and driven and doing really well for herself.”

  “You’ve known her a couple of nights.” Rum tossed the towel on a side table. “How can you know what she wants other than what a one-night stand is for.” He folded his arms behind his head. “Wall-to-wall sex, baby. You’ve had a dry stretch, that’s all this is.”

  Yeah maybe. Haydn went back to his lounge. No. Enough kidding himself. He could raise an eyebrow and fix a dry stretch. He hadn’t been interested in doing that for the best part of a year and the thought of replacing Teela was giving him indigestion.

  “I don’t want anything permanent. I definitely don’t want marriage. Certainly not squalling, sticky kids. I’m not dissatisfied, I’m just—”

  “Pining.”

  “I liked her a lot.”

  “Whoa, man. Where is this coming from?”

  “Teela made me happy.”

  “When were you not happy? You can buy happy. You particularly can buy a lot of happy and the rest is the right attitude.”

  He’d basically taught Rylan Rumble that little nugget of wisdom. He was a complete fraud. “I’m lonely.”

  “And you mean not the kind of lonely that another filthy weekend or a new live-in lover will solve?”

  He shook his head. Now that he’d said that out loud, he felt the weight of it. Money could buy a lot of happiness. It could buy health and friendship and well-being, but he’d never understood till now that it couldn’t stop you from feeling alone and low, even when you were filled with purpose and surrounded by people.

  “You’ve had some fantastic women in your life, what’s the deal with this one?”

  It wasn’t about Teela. She was a symbol, that’s all. A timely reminder to stay on top of his life the same way he stayed on top of his career, and not to deny that while his body enjoyed sex, his soul craved connection. “She was fun. She didn’t take any shit. She made me think about my choices, that’s all.”

  Rum laughed. “If your acting career falls over you can always become a politician. You can lie with a straight face like the bastards in Washington.”

  “I’m not lying. You don’t spend your life not believing in the one and then find the them in a weekend on the other side of the world in an apocalyptic rainstorm. That’s how lust works. Love, I don’t know how love works except what books and movies tell us.”

  “Why can’t you find love like that? Your parents did.”

  But it was fleeting and when Mom died, Dad spent the rest of his life pining for her. And here Haydn was pining for Teela. The longer they were apart the more he wanted to pick up the phone and call her. Jump on a plane and spend another weekend with her. What a disaster.

  He covered his face again. None of this made sense. If Rum looked at his internet history he’d find dog shelters and WebMD and the Mayo Clinic, because he’d gone so far as to search for success rates for vasectomy reversal, because if he wanted a long-term relationship, a deep connection with all the trimmings, then he’d have to put his best self forward and no woman he could love would want her decisions about a family taken away from her without a discussion.

  “Once I get back on set, I’ll get my head together.”

  “Your new co-star is delicious and has a freshly broken heart so there’s that kind of getting your head together to look forward to.”

  Bebe Kane was a beautiful woman he admired for her acting chops. If she was interested, hooking up was a neat solution that would last as long as they were working together. “Sounds like a plan,” he said with all the enthusiasm of a spilt drink.

  Rum held his glass out for a refill. “You know you’re fucked, don’t you?”

  He took the glass and went to the bar. Here it comes. “What did you do this time?

  “It’s not what I did.”

  “Whatever it is, can we get it over with, the waiting around is killing me.”

  “Yeah, so fucked.”

  He mixed the drink. “I’ve always appreciated the creativity, but mostly it’s my team who have to do clean-up and it’s not fair on them.”

  “Clean-up?”

  “From whatever mess you create pranking me.”

  “That. Oh shit,” Rum swung his legs to the ground and scrubbed at his hair.

  “You forgot.” He slapped the bar top. “Christ. I’m waiting to find out you had all my clothes given to charity, and you forgot.”

  Rum laughed. “I couldn’t have organized a better prank if I paid a team of hustlers to come up with something.”

  “You forgetting doesn’t count,” Haydn said, standing over Rum with his drink. He shouldn’t be annoyed not to be pranked, except he’d done all that wondering when the other shoe was going to drop for nothing.

  Rum took hold of the glass. “But you finally falling in love in a weekend with a woman who lives halfway across the world and doesn’t want you.”

  “No,” Haydn said, shaking his head. “No.” God, fucking, damn. He’d fallen in love with a woman who lived halfway across the world and wouldn’t want him and he didn’t know how to beg.

  Rum took a sip and smacked his lips together. “Best prank ever.”

  FIFTEEN

  The worst decision Teela ever made wasn’t the one where instead of finding a new office space to rent, she took out a massive loan and bought the building her office was in. It wasn’t becoming a landlord as well as being able to renovate the way she wanted.

  The worst decision wasn’t merging with a corporate training company to expand her offerings to clients, or hiring four new conference producers and her own video production team.

  It was agreeing to pick up a chicken and avocado sandwich and spend the weekend with the Sexiest Man Alive.

  While in meetings with bank managers and lawyers and job candidates and new clients, she thought about Haydn.

  When she signed deeds and contracts and conference onboarding paperwork, she ran through memories of him.

  She thought about him at the gym and working late, when she bought the bread-maker she’d probably never use, and painfully, when she lay in bed at night and couldn’t sleep. On those nights she used her vibrator and thought about him in very specific detail. Corded forearms and expressive hands, narrow hips and strong thighs, hauntingly pale eyes and lips made to kiss. She made herself come picturing him looking up at her from between her legs or down at her as he angled his thrusts to make her gasp.

  She hadn’t heard a single word from him. Not that she’d expected to. There was no lack of clarity about that. He wasn’t looking over his shoulder at her. He was walking the red carpet with his dad as his date, at the Academy Awards and speaking at the United Nations about his refugee aid anti-piracy project.

  Three months after that one-night stand weekend should’ve been long enough to have mourned and gotten past it. Even if that weekend was epically romantic.

  Apparently not.

  She’d had one date in all that time, only because it seemed like the right thing to do, to ground herself, come back to earth and get on with her life, because even if Haydn arrived at her door with another sandwich and professed undying love she, one, wouldn’t believe him and, two . . .

  Yeah, what was two?

  Didn’t matter. It was forever never happening. They had very different outlooks and futures. His was to casually bed-hop his way through life while making magic on screen and hers was to build her empire so one day she could lie in bed and not have to get up at 6 a.m. six days to go to the office.

  Not that she had to. She wanted to. She was equal parts scared she’d taken on too much and excited about making it all work.

  That’s the way she’d felt about her one date too. Steve was an old flame
from uni and they’d had a lot in common then and more now. He’d been a sweetheart who’d snuck out and filled her old clunker of a car with petrol when they were ambitious and poor students, and a generous lover who’d had more experience and helped her begin to understand what she liked in bed.

  She’d been so delighted to hear from him she was hard pressed to recall why they’d drifted apart. Until she went on the date and remembered that as lovely as Steve was, older, wiser, sexier, the pilot light on whatever spark she’d had for him had long gone out and simply couldn’t be relit.

  Fortunately, he felt the same, which was both a tragedy and a comedy. After a trial kiss that was perfectly pleasant and pleasantly bland, they’d agreed to keep it at friends and to do a better job of staying in touch.

  She blamed Haydn for that. He’d elevated her sense of what attraction could feel like and ruined her for ordinary relationships. Just as well she was too busy for one.

  “It’s ridiculous, “she told Evie over Vietnamese, late one night. “Haydn is an impossible standard to live up to. As soon as Steve hugged me hello I knew it wasn’t going to go any further than a good catch-up. The rest of the date was both of us desperately trying to be something more to each other than old friends who were once lovers.”

  Evie sent a tweet and looked up. “I always liked Steve. But I’d hurt you if you tried to get serious about him again.”

  “Why would you say that? He’s—”

  “Lovely. I know. But lovely isn’t enough, Tee.”

  “You could fall in love with lovely.” It should be more than enough. Why wasn’t it enough? “I did once.”

  Eyes back on her phone, Evie said, “That wasn’t love. That was being nineteen and new at everything and finding someone great to share that with.”

  Lightning bolt to the head. Understanding floods into the cracks. But you couldn’t fall in love in a weekend, could you?

  “You know, for someone who Tweets and Instas for a living, you are exceptionally wise,” Teela said.

  “That’s how I can tweet and Insta for a living, you corporate savage.” Evie said, adding a shower of hearts to a photo of one of her brothers holding a guitar and posting it.

  Teela took the last coconut prawn. “I’m not in love with Haydn, it’s just that—”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake.” Evie said. Did she want the last prawn, it’d been sitting here for ages? “You daydream about him all the time.” Ah, not about the prawn. “You make yourself come in the shower with his voice in your head. You talked about him for days when he spoke at the UN about his aid anti-piracy project. You secretly watched the Academy Awards and you were upset for him when he didn’t win.”

  “He was robbed.”

  “Pharrell Jefferson’s performance was outstanding. Haydn was gracious and genuine about his win. You could see how excited he was for Pharrell, and that’s why you’re in love with him.”

  If Evie had wanted that last prawn, she’d have wrestled for it. There was no point in Teela pretending she wasn’t in love with Haydn. “I don’t even know what it means to be in love with someone who isn’t real.”

  “How much more real do you want him to be? He’s larger-than-life real.”

  “He was real to me for a weekend. He’s not now. He’s not someone I can call or message or have a relationship with.” She pointed at a near-empty food container. “That cold bok choy is real. The prawn tails. The ice cream in the freezer. I can touch them, smell them, cry all over them. Haydn Delany is pixels on a screen. He might as well be a figment of my imagination.”

  “You start messaging a bunch of bok choy, we have a problem.”

  Teela sighed. “You know what I mean.”

  Evie sighed back in perfect imitation plus some. “All I hear are rationalizations.”

  “I don’t imagine his voice in my head in the shower. He is not worth a slipping accident.”

  Evie wagged her brows. “Just the bedroom then?”

  Not getting into that.

  “It doesn’t matter if I did have a way to communicate with him. He doesn’t want what I want. I want a relationship with someone who isn’t threatened by my ambition. Something beyond the physical and bigger than friendship. I want to be in love and loved in return. I want a commitment and maybe one day a family. There is nothing on that list of things that Haydn wants and plenty of things in his life I don’t, like long-range camera lenses and needing disguises and the fame game. Plus the whole we don’t live in the same hemispheres thing is a total drag.”

  “It’s a lot.” Evie said, going to the kitchen for the ice cream.

  “Maybe now that I’ve admitted I’m in love with someone who won’t ever love me back, I can stop torturing myself and just grieve, eat more bok choy and move on.”

  From the kitchen Evie waved a serving spoon, “Good luck with that.”

  If she wasn’t serving dessert it would’ve been much easier to kick her out.

  It wasn’t luck Teela needed, it was time. Once enough time had passed, she’d stop feeling as if she’d lost something important that she couldn’t ever find again.

  At the fourteen-week mark, Sophie stopped making sad cow eyes at her. It seemed like a turning point, because if Sophie had given up on Teela living some modern fairytale then things were back to normal.

  Until they weren’t.

  Friday afternoon, ten minutes before she was due to interview a candidate for a marketing position, Sophie appeared in the doorway of Teela’s newly renovated office, eyes big as golf balls, mouth open in a silent scream.

  “Are you okay?” Teela said.

  Sophie leaned on the doorjamb. “You know how I said our favorite sexiest man was on location looking all ripped and lickable.” She fanned herself and Teela almost laughed. Sophie had been an angel keeping the whole my boss had a dirty weekend with Haydn Delany thing on the lowdown and not making it a hot gossip item in the office.

  Until now.

  Teela closed her eyes and waved her hand to indicate the door. She didn’t need anyone overhearing this.

  Sophie closed the office door and blocked it with her body. “I was wrong.”

  “Gossip magazines. Who can you trust?”

  “Oh, that’s. Yes. Maybe, but the thing is. He’s here.”

  Teela looked down at her desk where the job candidate’s résumé was lurking. She’d thought she was interviewing a Peta, not a Peter. “Why are you doing that spread-eagle thing on the door?”

  “I don’t want you to rush out there unprepared.”

  “Okay.” She shifted a folder and there it was. “I’m prepared. Do I have a food stain somewhere?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I most certainly don’t. You’ve barricaded me in my own office because,” she looked at the résumé, definitely Peta, “there’s something unusual about the job candidate you want me to know.”

  Sophie shook her head. “Oh, forget that. I’m rescheduling. They’re going home in a ride share.” She stepped away from the door. “He’s here,” she said in a hushed tone.

  The blood drained from Teela’s face. Her throat closed up and her lungs seized. She scrunched the résumé in her fist. “That’s not possible.”

  “I know,” Sophie said. “It’s unreal.”

  “Haydn is in the office?”

  “Haydn is in the office,” Sophie repeated. “He wants to see you.” She laughed and rolled her eyes up. “Obviously.”

  Oh God. “He doesn’t have an appointment and Peta does.”

  Sophie threw her hands up. “Are you kidding me?”

  Teela tried to smooth out the résumé, pressing it down on her desk. “He can’t just show up, again, and expect me to drop everything and make time for him.”

  “Get over yourself. He so can.”

  She looked up. “Sophie.”

  “Sorry,” Sophie shrugged, “but this is a big moment and I’m not letting you blow it because you’re terrified.”

  “I’m not terri
fied.”

  Sophie’s brows shot up under her fringe. “You look like you might faint.”

  “Nothing good can come of this.” Really, the best thing to do would be to have Sophie send him away. She could write a note. Sorry, busy. Don’t come back because I’ll never get over you.

  “Maybe he just wants to say hi,” Sophie said.

  What was the flying time from Hawaii? Ten, eleven hours. “Do you think he just wants to say hi?”

  “I think he wants to throw up. He’s kind of pale under his tan, and sweaty like he’s eaten a bad oyster.”

  “Okay.” Teela swallowed a lump of nervous terror. She hadn’t been this worried about signing the loan for the building that could bankrupt her if things went wrong. She stood and yanked her dress into place. “He’s just dropped in to say hi, even when he’s supposed to be in the Kalalau Valley shooting a movie, and it’s fine, totally fine. I can’t feel my feet.”

  “I put him in the new conference room but it’s all glass so I’m going out there to stop people gawking at him, and I already confiscated all phones until this crisis is over.”

  “Good idea.”

  Sophie pumped her fist. “Get out there and win.”

  “What?” Win? There wasn’t any way to win in a one-night stand with the Sexiest Man Alive if you didn’t leave it at one night.

  Sophie flung the door open. “I mean break a leg.”

  Break a leg? She might, the way they were wobbling. Every eye was on her as she walked from her office to the conference room where Sophie stood, back to the glass, glaring at anyone who dared look over. Haydn stood at the window looking out at the same grotty alley that’d always been there.

  He turned when she opened the door and looking at his handsome face almost made her stagger. She didn’t let him get a word out. She’d missed him. She’d mourned for the lost opportunity of them and he couldn’t just show up looking for a fun time again out of nowhere.

  “You waltzed in here without an appointment assuming I’d have time to see you. That’s incredibly poor form.”

  He grinned and her legs nearly went out from under her. “Aw hell, yeah, it is. I know better, but I had to take the chance.”