Serena Bell - Still So Hot!

The redhead looked doubtful.

“My cell number is on the card. Text me and tell me what happens.”

The flight attendant hesitated. “You sure?”

“Positive.” Elisa would be willing to bet a thousand dollars they’d be lovers within a week. If the woman took her advice.

That was a big if. People were shockingly bad at doing what was best for them.

Like Celine, who had apparently acquired a traveling companion somewhere between yesterday afternoon—when Elisa had helped Celine pack her suitcase—and this morning when she’d boarded a plane for the boot camp weekend. What had she been thinking?

Papers and pens still shuffled across the galley, voices ringing out with questions for the actress.

“Is it true they’re going to kill off Jonah?”

“Celine, will you have dinner with me?”

A voice rose from among the others. “Celine, who’s the new guy? Hey, new guy—can you move in a little closer to Celine for me?”

All motion stopped, and there was an instant of total silence. Everyone turned to look at the person who’d asked that, a man whose face was mostly veiled by a black hoodie. And then they turned to look at Brett, leaning against the wall behind Celine.

Elisa opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Brett pushed off the wall, took a threatening step forward and said, “Put that thing away.”

Hoodie guy’s mouth slowly tipped up into a smile, and he raised his hand. He had something clutched there, and for a brief, heart-stopping second, Elisa actually thought it might be a gun. Then she saw what it was and wished she’d been right in the first place.

Camera. Big camera. Real camera.

Paparazzo.

His smile got bigger as he began shooting, the shutter whirring as it squeezed off shot after shot of Brett and Celine.

* * *

THE LOOK ON Elisa’s face, pure panic, spurred Brett to action. He slid past her, jostling other passengers out of the way, and lunged at the photographer, yanking the camera out of the guy’s hands.

“That’s personal property!” The guy grabbed for it, but Brett turned his back and ran his hands over the camera’s casing, probing for the slot where the memory card lived. He found its catch, withdrew the card, dropped it to the floor and ground it into the carpet. The cheap plastic splintered. He closed the slot and handed the camera back to the photographer.

“Here’s your personal property.”

“What’s going on?”

It was the male flight attendant, followed by a well-built guy in a business suit. Sky marshal, Brett would wager. Most of the other passengers had dispersed at the sight of this new authority. The flight attendant glared at both Brett and the hooded paparazzo.

“Nothing’s going on.” Brett looked around at the remaining passengers, daring them to disagree.

No one spoke up. His good luck—paparazzi were so loathsome that fear of the crazy man in the aisle paled in comparison.

The guy in the hoodie hadn’t spoken.

“I’m going to need all of you to return to your seats, please,” the flight attendant said sternly.

Brett shot a glance Elisa’s way as she edged back toward her seat. The panic was gone, but she wasn’t making grateful Bambi eyes at him, either. She looked pissed. He guessed he shouldn’t be surprised. She was probably as bewildered by his intrusion into her boot camp weekend as he was to find that his old friend was a third wheel on his Caribbean getaway.

“Hey.” He touched her arm, trying to soften her. “I meant what I said. Why don’t you and Celine take the two seats in first class? I’ll take yours. I’m sure you guys have some talking to do.”

“There weren’t two in first class when I tried to book.”

“Last-minute cancellation. Or Celine’s persuasive power.” He shrugged. “Take the seats, okay?”

Elisa gave a tight nod. Man, she was pretty. He’d forgotten. Or made himself forget. She had hair the exact color of gingerbread and hazel eyes and the smoothest skin, like a porcelain doll. He still remembered the feel of that skin pressed against his cheek, under his lips. He craved it, nights when he was tired and weak. That and the weight of her breast in his hand, her nipple hard against his fingertips, her needy noises tracing a straight line to his cock.

He was getting hard thinking about it, and that meant less blood to the brain, which couldn’t be good in a screwed-up situation like this one. Concentrate, man, he commanded himself.

“Let me get my stuff,” Elisa said. “Celine, you head up front. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Celine went obediently, and Elisa practically shoved the guy in the hoodie out of her way. She bent down to retrieve something from her seat. Yeah, that was a good view of her, too.

“What the hell, man?”

For the briefest of instants, he thought it was the voice inside his head chiding him for ogling her ass, but then he realized it was the paparazzo snarling at him. Brett shrugged. “I’m sure you’ve got extras.”

“I’m trying to do my job! You might not like it, but it’s what I do, and those were my photos you smashed.”

Brett could see the guy was one heartbeat from planting a hand in the middle of Brett’s chest and shoving. Let him try. Brett had enough aimless anger at the moment to flatten him into next week.

“Gentlemen, I need you to return to your seats,” repeated the male flight attendant. “Unless you need a personal escort?” He nodded toward the sky marshal.

The paparazzo harrumphed like an angsty teenager and slunk away. The flight attendant and sky marshal eased against the seats to let him pass.

Brett headed toward the back of the plane. He met Elisa in the aisle, where she’d just finished hoisting out her carry-on. The top few buttons of her ruffled white blouse were undone revealing the delicate thrust of her collarbone and, below that, the swell of her phenomenal breasts. A wicked taunt—the ones that got away. Over the past two years, he’d managed to mostly block the memories of kissing her and touching her. Mostly, that is, except in his dreams. He dreamed about Elisa confoundingly often—languid, dirty, wet dreams. But this was real, because she wasn’t slowly peeling off her clothes and looking at him with heat in her eyes, and she wasn’t taking slow steps toward him, which was what always happened in the dreams.

“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.