by Nancy Warren
“Some Australian woman named Bridget who’s a champion diver and sex goddess and strips on the side?”
He shook his head, still shaken by silent chuckles. “That bloody stupid magazine I read on the plane. I think it was sex tip number three. Stay in the moment. It seemed so damned silly to me that anyone wouldn’t be in the moment that the notion stuck.”
Somewhat mollified, she made a mental note to start reading more women’s magazine articles—usually she concentrated on the ads.
“It’s a pretty good tip,” she admitted. It had certainly worked for her. “Maybe we should write a letter to the magazine.”
“Does everything in your life have to revolve around the media?”
She thought about it, then slanted a look up at him through her lashes. “Well, it is my job. I always think in terms of exposure for my clients.”
There was more than the usual ruddiness about his cheeks. “You may want to expose yourself for a silly women’s magazine, but I’m not going to.”
It was her turn to laugh. “Don’t worry. This will stay our little secret.”
Besides, he’d be exposed enough in the ads they’d already booked for a national campaign. But that was work, and work was banished until Monday. She leaned over and kissed him.
“I think I should practice that again,” she told him.
The sexy glint was back in his eyes. “Practice what?”
“Staying in the moment.”
“You expect me to provide you with another ‘moment’?”
She reached behind her to the canvas pouch, which she saw was well stocked. She handed him a small square pouch.
“Yep,” she said.
He laughed. “I was thinking the same thing myself.”
She was still smiling when she awoke the next morning and lazily replayed all the events of the night before. Her body felt pliant, satiated, and earthy. It might be a cliché, but she had to admit she’d never known sex could be like that, so intimate and tender and yet raunchy and fun. While she scooped her toiletry case from her sports bag and headed into the bathroom to freshen up, she thought about that amazing night. Steve was the kind of man a woman could wait years for, the kind she’d stopped believing existed, the kind who . . . her fantasy dissolved as she recalled one particular detail from the night before.
When she came out, he was gone, but she heard him call out, “What do you like in your coffee?”
“You are bringing me coffee in bed?” He kept getting more perfect. Except for that one thing.
When he strode in, naked and holding two mugs of coffee, passing her the one with milk, taking his own black she noted, he said, “You’ve got the furrow back.” He climbed back into bed and waited.
She glanced up at his sleepy, sexy face, the shadow of morning stubble only adding to his appeal. “You don’t want to get married,” she said, voicing the thought that had stopped her foolish fantasies cold.
Now it was his turn to furrow. “Not at the moment, no.”
“Just haven’t found the right girl?”
It was strange, to say the least, to have this conversation while naked and still in the blissful morning-after state, but it seemed important to know. Not that she wanted to marry him or anything, but she felt she ought to understand a little more about the man who’d spent a good part of the night inside her body. He scratched his head using both hands, which made his sun-kissed hair stick out in adorable tufts.
“In order to answer that, I have to tell you a bit of my life story. Sure you want to hear it?”
“Yes. I’d love to.”
She sensed he was uncomfortable talking about himself, which made her all the more determined to hear the story. He reached out and idly began to play with the ends of her hair, but she could tell he’d as good as left the room. He was looking inward and it was obvious he didn’t like what he saw. Even without knowing what he was about to say, she put her barely sipped coffee aside and put her arms around him.
“When I was a teenager, my mum got sick.” He paused for a moment. “Cancer.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. Thanks. She died.” Not knowing what to say, she bit her lip and listened. “I’ve got younger brothers and sisters that I had to help look after.”
“What about your father?”
His eyes, usually so wonderfully expressive, were blank. “He couldn’t handle it. He left when Mum’s hair all fell out from the chemotherapy.”
She wanted to cry for that poor boy who’d lost so much so young. “How old were you?”
“Sixteen. I was lucky enough to get taken on to apprentice as a steelworker. My uncle and aunt took us in, but it was a hard go for a bit. They were furious. Said I should continue in school, but as young as I was, I knew there wasn’t enough money. And Dad had buggered off and never bothered to send anything.”
He’d had to leave school early to help support his family. Now the philosophy book she’d seen on his table made sense. He must be on a path of self-education.
“Anyway. I’m in no hurry to settle down.” It wasn’t much of an answer, and she found herself sorting through what he’d told her to find the answer to her question.
“You mean you don’t want to get married because you feel like you’ve already raised a family and now you want to live your own life?”
He shrugged and looked uncomfortable. “I s’-pose.”
Well, she hadn’t let him pry into her head at uncomfortably intimate moments to let him get away with this kind of evasion. Obviously, it wasn’t fear of family commitments that was stopping him. What then? He wouldn’t meet her gaze, kept glancing off into the corner furtively, almost as if he were guilty of something. Guilty. That’s when it hit her.
“It’s your father, isn’t it?”
“What about him?” He said the words with a belligerent edge. Bingo.
“You’re afraid you’re like him, aren’t you?”
“You don’t know—”
“You’re afraid you’ll walk out on a woman when she needs you most. That you’ve got some deeply defective gene inside you that—”
“All right.” She jumped at the force of his words. He threw off the covers, got out of bed, and stomped toward the door leading out of the bedroom.
“That’s your answer,” he threw over his shoulder. “I don’t ever want to get married in case I turn out to be a shit like my old man.”
“But you’ve already proven you’re not.”
He was standing, staring out of the open bedroom door into the outer room, and she had a good idea he was thinking about walking through it. Naked or not, she jumped out of bed and threw her arms around him from behind, pressing her breasts to his back and hugging all of him she could reach. She kissed him between his shoulder blades.
“You’re a good man.”
“Just don’t get any dreamy-eyed fantasies about me,” he said gruffly.
Too late, she thought, but wisely kept that one to herself. “Okay, I won’t. Now come back to bed.”
He turned and she could see the bleakness still lurking at the back of his eyes, but he made a fair attempt at a return to his earlier mood.
“You’re all done now with thinking?”
She nodded. “All done.”
He walked her backwards to the bed and as he did so, he kissed her long and hard, and she was pleased to note his erection returned to all its former glory—also long and hard. But when they got back to bed somehow a deeper awareness had followed them. He made love to her as though he were desperate. And she gave him every bit of herself. Including her heart.
“So,” she said, as they lay sated and lazy in bed, her index finger idly tracing the muscles of his chest, “do you have an agent?”
His chest went up and down as a laugh/cough hybrid shook him. “What would I want with an agent?”
“An agent looks after your interests, so you get paid a fair rate.”
“Have you seen how much I’m getting paid?
Even with overtime that would be about a year’s wages at home.”
“Yes. I’ve seen your contract. And Jen’s a good person, she wouldn’t cheat you. What you’re being paid is fair. But you should still have someone looking after your interests.”
He scratched his chest where she’d been idly pulling at the hair there. She must have tickled him. Too bad, she was having fun.
“I’d have to pay an agent, right?”
“Yes, of course. They’d take a percentage of your earnings.”
“So I’m going to pay some California shark a portion of my wages so he can tell me I’m getting good money? No, thank you. Let the agent parade around in his bathing cossy and wink at cameras if he wants the money.”
He was so cute she had to stop and kiss him. Which, naturally, led to more kissing and soon kissing wasn’t enough and after missing breakfast they were in serious danger of missing lunch.
“Let’s order room service,” she said.
“It’s a terrible price,” he informed her.
“I know.” She grinned at him. “We’ll eat in bed.”
“Now you’re talking.”
They might be eating naked in bed, with hotel pillows piled behind them, but still she wasn’t finished with a subject that could be to Steve’s benefit.
“So, let’s say your commercials and magazine ads are amazingly well received and Crane’s success in the States is due partly to you as the spokesman.”
He grinned at her. “Let’s.”
“Now we want you for more commercials. In fact, we want to bind you to an exclusive contract. That means you can’t work for anyone else.”
“Thanks, I know what exclusive means.”
Okay. Sore point there. Interesting. “Right. I get a bit pedantic sometimes.” She paused, but he didn’t seem to have any trouble with pedantic, either, so she went on. “If Crane wants an arrangement like that, and I’m not saying it will happen but it could”—especially, she thought, if he steamed up the screen on every commercial the way he’d come across on the video recorder when he’d winked at her—“then what would you do?”
“I’d go home. I’m not staying here forever, you know. I’ve got my proper job to get back to. We should be called back in another month or so.”
Her mouth dropped open at the notion that he might give up a seriously cushy deal right here to go back to hammering steel or whatever he did, until he got laid off again.
“You have got to be kidding.”
He shrugged. “This isn’t a proper job. It’s a holiday. Good money, travel, staying in a swanky place,” he glanced her way, “and spending time with a sexy California girl.”
A small pang smote her heart, but she stifled it. Of course he was going home. Who was she kidding? She’d somehow managed to do an end run around the fairy tale and she, the ugly stepsister, had crammed her oversized clodhopper into a dainty slipper. Naturally, it couldn’t last. Handsome fairy-tale princes might play footsie with stepsisters, but it was Cinderella they married. Some as yet unknown antipodean Cinderella was going to spend her life with Steve Jackson, and she’d be nothing but a memory. A shoe that never really fit. Oh, well, she reminded herself, she had now. And he had called her sexy.
“Steve,” she said, keeping her voice calm and business-casual with an effort, when she wanted to throw herself on his spectacular chest and beg him to love her, “do you have any idea of the kind of money we’d be talking? If you become a fresh face and you can move product, a lot of companies are going to want to talk to you. You should have an agent simply to protect your interests.”
“I’m sure everything you’re saying is real smart, and I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me, but I’m not a fresh face. I’m a bloke who builds bridges.”
“Okay,” she said softly. “Pass the lox and cream cheese.” She knew a couple of reputable agents who would be a good fit with Steve. She wasn’t giving up. For his own good.
Chapter 10
“I can’t do this,” Steve said to Lise, knocking away the hands of the man currently attempting to rub baby oil into his biceps—and knocking them none too gently.
She smirked as though she thought this was all a great joke, him in boardies you’d need sunglasses to look at and with some Bruce putting his hands all over him. He’d had a better day the time a bit of scaffolding had fallen on his head and left him with a broken hard hat and a concussion. At least he’d kept his pants on and still felt like a man at the end of the day. He might not have known which man he was, but once the headache abated, all his wits had returned.
Two weeks of reading nauseating scripts for radio adverts, of practicing for TV, and the only reason he hadn’t bolted for home was that at the end of every day, Lise was his. But today was the worst. Today he was half-naked, his hair had something sprayed on it that smelled like his sister when she was going out, they were rubbing oil on his body to make him look wet, and there was a makeup woman eyeing him in a way that made him extremely uncomfortable. They were in the dressing room of a studio where they were shooting ads for magazines.
It turned out they weren’t even going to snap the photos near the sea. They’d put the sea in later, with a computer, Lise had told him. He was less than pleased. He might be able to pretend he was having a great day of sun and surf on one of Crane’s boards if he was actually standing in the sun with the ocean at his back, but he was being asked to pretend. The whole thing was fake. Big round lights and silver umbrellas to mimic the sun, a pile of sand trucked in from somewhere to create a beach, baby oil instead of ocean water, and an enormous fan that he suspected was going to be the sea breeze. The fellow with the baby oil looked as exasperated as Steve felt.
“Look,” he said, waving his oily hands about, “I really need to—”
“Could we have a minute?” Lise asked in that calm way she had, as though this sort of thing happened every day. Maybe to her it did.
“We’re shooting in fifteen minutes,” baby oil boy said. “You know how Sebastian is about his schedule.”
“Sebastian?” Steve was pretty sure he wouldn’t trust anyone named Sebastian.
“The photographer,” Lise explained.
“Great. Why couldn’t they find a pretty girl to take photos? I’ve got to prance around in shorts in front of a guy named Sebastian?”
Lise looked at him for a long moment as though trying to work something out. How to get him off the job and on the next plane to Sydney, he hoped. She was very much the working woman today, with a skirt that was longer than he liked, and a white top that looked like a man’s shirt. She glanced at her watch and took a step closer.
“This shoot is important, Steve. I really need you to work with us.”
“I know, but it’s bloody hard when I’ve got to play pretend all the time.”
She took another step closer and smiled, not the wonderful open smile she offered him in their intimate times, but the business, everything-is going- to-be-all-right-if-you-do-as-I-say smile he wasn’t so keen on.
“I don’t want you to think about the photographer, or the makeup people.”
“What about these damn shorts then?”
Her lips quivered, but she shook her head solemnly. “Not them, either. We’ve talked about this, and we’ve practiced,” she reminded him.
Well, they’d practiced mostly at his hotel or her apartment when she’d been a lot closer to naked and sex had always ended up a part of the session.
“You need to imagine you’re catching a wave and the feeling’s exhilarating, the wind’s whipping through your hair, and you’re hanging onto the crest and ready to ride it right into the finish. Just like we practiced.”
She picked up the bottle of baby oil and poured some into her hand. As she rubbed it into his shoulders he relaxed a little, but only a little.
He said, “When we practiced, I didn’t smell like babies and girls.”
“Forget it. Concentrate on the surf scene I just described. You were fantast
ic when it was just the two of us.”
He shifted a little and admitted, “When we were practicing, I wasn’t thinking about surfing.”
“You weren’t?” Her hand stalled in mid-circle so he felt only her fingers—four delicate touches on his shoulder.
“But you had the fiercest look of concentration on your face; I felt the ride you were taking.”
“I wasn’t thinking about riding a surfboard,” he told her grumpily. “I was thinking about riding you.”
She made a tiny sound behind him and it seemed as though she moved closer. “Riding me?”
“That’s right. I thought about riding you, cresting the wave, taking it all the way into the beach. I can do it when I’m looking at you half-naked, and know we’re going to end up all over each other, but I don’t think it’s going to work when I’m looking at a bloke named Sebastian.” He could see his words were having an effect on her, and in spite of his disgruntlement, he began to stir as he felt her fingers go back to rubbing the oil into his body.
“All right. Whatever works.”
“You naked works.”
“When you smell this baby oil,” she said softly, “don’t think about babies. Think about how it’s going to feel when I rub oil all over you.” Her movements changed from efficient to sensual. “When you finish here, we’re heading straight for your hotel, with this oil, and I will rub it all over you.”
He was glad the boarder shorts were so baggy because his focus was coming back as sharply as she could wish. But he didn’t want her thinking he was a complete pushover. “Not enough,” he said, turning. Her eyes widened slightly as he looked down at her, so prim and proper, but for her glistening oil-drenched hands. “I need to be able to see you in order to keep my mind focused.”
“All right.” She nodded slowly. “I’ll stand behind the photographer for the whole session so you can see me.”
“Still not enough,” he said, liking the way her eyes were starting to smolder.
Her nipples were probably jumping to attention too, but who could tell with that ridiculous shirt. He stared at her chest, and smiled. No one could tell what was under there, no one but him.
