Barbara Daly - You Call This Romance!?

Tippy also surprised him occasionally with her intelligence, which was hard to see through the smoke. “Of course not,” he said, although that possibility had been going through his mind. “If Josh leaks the news to anybody, we’ll spread the word that you ditched him for…for…somebody else,” he finished lamely.

“Who?”

“That is the question,” he admitted.

He was unnerved to see that she was gazing at him speculatively. She stubbed out her cigarette, reached for a stick of gum, chewed it vigorously, pursed her full, sweetly bruised mouth and blew a bubble, all the while gazing at him with those big blue eyes.

“I’ll give it some thought,” he said hurriedly. “While I’m thinking, I’ll move right ahead with the honeymoon plans. You just relax, calm down, don’t spend another minute worrying about it. Leave it all up to me.”

She took the gum out of her mouth and deposited it in a tissue. The big blue eyes filled with tears in a way that made her look like the on-screen Tippy again. “I really had hopes for Josh and me,” she said in a soft, wistful voice that carried not a hint of Brooklyn in it. “I thought maybe we’d fall in love for real, live happily ever after just like in the fairy tales. But Kathy won, on-screen and off, and my heart is b-b-broken.” She burst into the most beautiful sobs he’d ever heard.

FLYING DOWN THE FREEWAY in his powerful sports car, he pondered what he was going to do now. Tippy Temple had talent, looks, a frightening determination, everything it took to succeed. From that point on it was up to him, her publicist, to see that she did succeed. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to move her toward stardom. And his career would take off along with hers. Just one big star would make him among the most sought-after publicists in the film industry.

He needed that.

So he had a little challenge here. Josh Barnett, Hollywood’s latest heartthrob, had backed out, had eloped with an actress who’d already made it, figuring Kathy could do more for his screen career than Tippy could. Or maybe Josh had actually fallen in love with Kathy Simpson during the making of Kiss. It happened sometimes. Cabot growled softly. Forget love. He had to be thinking about who was going to marry Tippy.

Did the “who” really matter? Wasn’t the wedding what it was all about? Tippy saying her vows while every local television station filmed her, the video of her splashy honeymoon picked up by the national film news programs, Tippy’s declarations of happiness alongside the photographs in Variety. It was all about Tippy getting married. Who cared who the groom was?

Might as well be…

Aw, no. I don’t want to. But who else am I going to get? He thought and thought. In the old days the Hollywood studios took care of arranging marriages, dates, even children for their stars. Now the job was up to publicity agents like him. He chewed his lower lip and thought some more. Tippy was right. He couldn’t go after an endless number of groom prospects without the word getting out that her marriage was nothing more than a publicity stunt. This town fed on gossip—a low-fat, low-carb, high-energy diet. That’s why everybody was so thin.

There was only one answer, and Tippy had figured it out faster than he had. He’d already compromised his principles by dreaming up this sham marriage as a way of boosting Tippy to stardom. What would one more compromise matter?

A lot, that’s what. He wouldn’t do it.

Unless he had to.

PALM FRONDS RUSTLED in the gentle breeze, making drowsy whishing sounds. The sand gleamed golden, warming her feet as she stepped dreamily toward an ocean of everchanging green and blue, white tipped, frothy and enticing as a key-lime pie.

“Faith?”

Her loose, lacy white shirt slipped down her tanned shoulders as she neared the shore, and with an impatient gesture she flung it to the sand, longing for the touch of the sun-warmed water against her desire-heated skin. She…

“Faith Sumner!”

…walked straight into the Caribbean and drowned.

“What!” said Faith as the palm trees folded. “Oh, Mr. Wycoff! Was there something you wanted?”

“A travel agent. That’s what I wanted, Miss Sumner. Not Sleeping Beauty.”

“Why, thank you,” Faith said, feeling herself blush a little, “but I was certainly not sleeping. I was concentrating intently on the many details of Mr. and Mrs. Mulden’s trip to the Cayman Islands. There are, as you know, many details, numerous, important details to fill in.” Don’t apologize, her younger sister Hope had told her. Be assertive.

“You were obviously daydreaming,” said Mr. Wycoff, looking down his stubby nose at her, “and the Muldens are expecting you to have finalized these many, numerous, important details by five this afternoon.”

“And that’s exactly what I will have done,” said Faith. Whirling to the computer, she saw the screen saver her youngest sister Charity had custom-designed for her. Words moved across the monitor in waves: Focus, Faith. Focus, Faith. She wiggled the mouse and was thrilled to see that it was the Muldens’ file that appeared on the screen. “Hotel confirmation number,” she murmured, stabbing at the keyboard. Mr. Wycoff strode back to his private office. “Bicycle rental confirmation number. Boat trip to…”

He waited for her on the shore, his legs apart and his arms folded over his chest, his darkly tanned body massive and virile in snug black swim briefs that left no doubt that his desire equaled, even surmounted, hers. She moved toward him slowly, the saltwater sliding off her slickly oiled skin in sheets, and his gaze roamed her shamelessly, bringing a hot flush to her face and a tingling sensation between her thighs that intensified with every step. They were face to face. She reached into the waiting picnic basket and pulled out the cut-glass dish filled with luscious tropical fruit.

Fresh pineapple, dripping golden juice, slippery wedges of deliciously scented mango, long, thin slices of papaya garnished with slivers of fresh lime and mint leaves.

“A bite of pineapple,” she murmured, “to cool off those hot eyes of yours.”

“Nothing beats a great pineapple, but not now.”

Faith shrieked, leaped straight up from her chair and spun to face the man she’d just been fantasizing about on the beach.

Except they weren’t on a beach. They were in the bright white environment of Wycoff Worldwide Travel Agency—”We make your dreams come true”—in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, surrounded by the hum of telephones, computer beeps and the voices of the four other Wycoff agents and their clients.

There were a few minor differences in the man himself. For one thing, he was wearing a three-piece suit, not a small, tight black swimsuit. For another, she wouldn’t exactly describe his gaze as “hot with passion.” “Hot with annoyance” was more like it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to organize her hair, her skirt, her blue silk sweater set and her mind all at the same time as she collapsed back into her desk chair. “I guess I was, um—” Might as well use the same line on him that had more-or-less worked with Mr. Wycoff. “—was concentrating so hard on my work that I didn’t see you come in.”

He wasn’t buying it. “Annoyance” was no longer sufficient to describe his mood. He looked like a bomb on a short fuse. Except for those things, he was identical to the man on the beach—big, dark haired, tanned, more or less drop-dead gorgeous. Just looking at his scowling face was reawakening the bothersome tingle.

This was no time to tingle. It was time to focus, and focusing on him would not exactly be painful.

“Please sit down. How may I help you?”

He sat down hard in the chair beside her desk, simultaneously handing her a card he’d fished out of the breast pocket of his suit coat. “You can plan a honeymoon for my client,” he said as if he would rather be tied to a stake and surrounded by dry firewood than planning a honeymoon.