Serena Bell - Still So Hot!

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 this better for her. Or at least less worse. And if he did, maybe they could be friends again. Because seeing her had reminded him of how much fun it had been to be friends with her in college and for the three years afterwards when they’d buddied around New York. How sometimes it had felt like the two of them against the world. Blowing off studying to eat pizza on the roof of the library, verbally dismembering their common enemies behind closed doors, stealing the Buddha statue from the religion department and installing it as guardian over the condom jar in the health center. She’d been funny, sharp, energetic, but kind, too, jollying him out of bad moods and dragging him on hikes in the New England mountains as an antidote to sophomore slumps and senior stress.

She was not the kind of friend who came along every day. There were eight million other people living in New York City, but no one played Scrabble with the focus or intensity that Elisa applied to the game. And of the other 7,999,999 New Yorkers, he had yet to find one who liked to deliberately pick bad DVDs and do her own Mystery Science Theater 3000, dissecting and mocking the films with glee. And no one had ever laughed at him with the utter abandon that Elisa had employed the day she’d taught him to Rollerblade, hoisting him up off the ground and then falling down beside him, breathless with hysteria.

You didn’t get second chances too many times in life.

“Okay,” he said. “Fine. We’ll do it your way.”

3

ELISA COLLAPSED INTO the cushy first-class seat. “Okay. I think I talked Brett into not taking the next flight back.”

There was silence from beside her, and she turned to discover that Celine was not awed and grateful, but confused. “He wanted to take the next flight back?”

Oh, man. She’d blown that. Why hadn’t it occurred to her that Celine might still think a romance could develop between her and Brett? Brett always did manage to inspire unreasonable expectations in women. She of all people should know that. “He said the situation was too weird for him. You didn’t mean to mislead him. It’s just that he thought he was getting a special weekend with you.”

“But you said now he’s staying?” There was a sweet, hopeful note in Celine’s voice. No wonder this woman got her heart publicly broken a minimum of five times a year. She had no hard-candy shell, only the melty center.

“Well, no—not staying. Just, I—” There was no diplomatic way to say this. “I thought it would be embarrassing for you if he left now, whereas if he stayed, we could make it look like you sent him away on your own terms. You guys can put on a nice show of having a destination date, and then you can decide you’re not interested and move on. Everyone looks good.”