“Sit for a minute.” Elisa’s words penetrated through his fog. He was lucky she couldn’t read minds.
Her seat and the one beside it were empty—the other occupant must have been in the restroom. She slid in, and he sat beside her, hyperaware of the thinness of her blouse. He could see the hint of her skin beneath the translucent fabric.
“So, what?” she demanded. “You picked her up somewhere? And—”
“The drugstore,” he admitted, before he could stop himself.
“You picked her up at a drugstore?”
She said it like he was dirt. She’d always been like this, judgmental about his conquests.
“She had one of those red baskets, and it was full of sample bottles. I said, ‘Going on a trip?’ and she looked up at me, smiled and said, ‘Yeah. Wanna come?’”
And all right, he’d panicked. He’d looked at her pretty round face and her soft blond hair and her big breasts and he’d thought, In two weeks, it’s all over for me. No more women, no more conquests. He’d promised the network where he’d just been hired on to be a news anchor that he’d be squeaky clean. Network anchors didn’t chase tail. He’d barely beaten out his competition for this job, and his new boss had informed him that the other guy’s advantage had lain squarely in the fact that he was older, more distinguished and well established as a husband, father and grandfather. The kind of guy you wanted to believe when he told you the news.
Brett, on the other hand—
Well, Elisa’s unspoken assessment of him had probably been accurate. Women were his drug of choice and his downfall.
The truth was, standing in the drugstore, contemplating the vaguely familiar goddess in front of him, he wasn’t sure he could do it. He wasn’t sure he could be Mr. Squeaky-Clean Guy. Mr. Face of the News. Mr. Trust Me.
Pretty boy. Big man. Handsome, groomed, in control. That was who he’d been among his brothers—Zach had been the smart one, Pete the athletic one, and Brett was the good-looking one. It was what he’d traded on, with women, in his work, his whole life. Now he was here, on the brink of the anchor job, and if he couldn’t do it...
Where did that leave him? If he couldn’t be “the face of NYCN News”...
Screw that. Failure wasn’t an option. He’d been prepping for an opportunity like this one his whole life, and he wasn’t going to let anything get in his way.
Standing there in the drugstore, he had told himself that he’d accept this one invitation. Have a last hurrah, a crazy weekend with this very willing blonde bombshell. Then, he knew—he knew—he could do what the network needed him to do. He’d be ready to take on the world.
Elisa hadn’t expected to hear that Celine had been the pickup artist. She shook her head. “And you said yes?”
“I said, ‘I know you, don’t I?’”
“Smooth.”
He couldn’t tell if she was admiring or mocking, but good sense dictated the latter. “It wasn’t a pickup line. I didn’t need a pickup line. She’d already invited me to the Caribbean. Although I didn’t know yet that it was the Caribbean.”
“God!” she burst out. “You’re—”
But whatever she’d been about to say about him, she stopped.
He swallowed the urge to defend himself. He owed her nothing. He’d accepted a pretty woman’s invitation to fly on the spur of the moment to the Caribbean for a good time. It wasn’t his fault that the woman had neglected to mention she was in the middle of a dating workshop.
He’d had it all backward in the drugstore, of course. The window for a last fling, for getting women out of his system, had long since passed. He was already in the hot seat, already under scrutiny. Celine hadn’t been an opportunity; she’d been a test. He’d had the chance to start his new life as Mr. Trust Me, and he’d screwed it up.
But maybe it wasn’t too late. He’d made a mistake, but he could still right the ship and chart a new course. “Look. I’m outta here. I’ll take the next flight back.”
Elisa scowled. “You can’t do that.”
God, she was as bossy as ever. “I sure can.”
She glanced around, lowered her voice. “Who saw you together?”
“What?”
“Who saw you guys together? In the airport. I’ve had a videographer following her around, but were there also paparazzi there? Are there photos?”
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“So you know what that means, right? Every entertainment magazine and show in the city’ll have a piece on Celine and her new man—”
He couldn’t help himself. He winced.
“Yes, that’s you.” She quirked her fingertips into quotation marks. “Celine Carr’s ‘New Man.’ That’s what you get for messing around with a celebrity. Finally found a woman you couldn’t just slip into and out of unnoticed, huh?”
“Hey.”
“Truth hurts?”
She was vicious. And he liked it. He liked her, eyes flashing, his old friend. He’d rather have her bitching at him than not talking to him any day. He’d missed her.
A thought came to him, unbidden. She’d be amazing in bed. The type who’d bite his shoulder and rake his back and yell when she came.
Not that it was an option. With that look on her face, it would be a cold day in hell before she’d have a civil conversation with him, let alone tangle with him in the naughty, uncensored way he envisioned.
And, really, could he blame her? He’d screwed things up royally back when he’d had his chance at her. He’d signed away his rights for all eternity.
Not to mention that, less than five minutes ago, he’d sworn off serial seduction. Hell, he’d sworn off women.
“If you leave now, they’ll have a field day. They’ll make mincemeat out of you, and Celine will come across as pathetic. You don’t want that.”
“So what’s your point? I should stick around?”
“I’m saying that, if I were you, I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to run off. There are more decorous ways to do it.”
Decorous. Such an Elisa word.
“Let us get there, take some footage and photos of Celine doing her thing, make it clear that she’s shopping around, not committed to you—then you split. Much less humiliating for both of you.”
He could detect the hope and desperation behind her attempt at convincing him. She meant, Much less humiliating for me.
Her seatmate had returned from the bathroom and hovered expectantly over them. Time to go.
Well, okay, then. He could make this less humiliating for her. It would be a kind of penance, a chance to get back in her good graces. Not, he chastised his cock and all the other body parts clamoring for a piece of the situation, those good graces. But—
There was a chance, a small chance, he could make