by Meg Cabot
He opened the front door and instantly sucked in his breath as the frigid cold hit him in the face.
“Lou, what are you doing?” he demanded. “It’s freezing out there. Get back in bed.”
She glanced at him. Her hair was tousled and wild from having gone to bed with it wet, and all she had on beneath the comforter was another one of Donald’s shirts and the long johns she’d worn the night before. Her feet were tucked into a pair of enormous men’s workboots, at least five sizes too large for her, and the cold had turned the tip of her nose pink, like a rabbit’s.
And Jack was convinced that he had never seen a more beautiful woman in his life.
“Call me crazy,” she said, pointing off into the distance. “But does that look like a road to you?”
21
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Jack said bitterly, his breath coming out in little white puffs like steam from a train engine.
“Look.” Lou had worked up a nice healthy sweat, and she actually felt fairly comfortable as they chugged along. “I told you. If we don’t run into civilization by dusk, we can turn around and head back.”
“So a pack of wolves can attack us in the dark and dismember our corpses,” Jack said. “Good plan. Do you have to go so fast? I never learned cross-country. I only know how to downhill.”
Lou glanced over her shoulder at him. He looked, as always, impossibly handsome. Even the stocking cap and wool scarf he’d borrowed from Donald, which might have looked ridiculous on a lesser man, looked hot on him. Rolling her eyes in disgust—she knew exactly how stupid she looked in her own borrowed gear—Lou threw some shoulder into her ski poles.
“Didn’t you ever own a Nordic Track?” she asked. She liked the shoosh-shoosh-shoosh of their skis against the crisp white snow. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she was afraid armed men were going to come roaring up at any moment and blast holes through them both, she might almost have been enjoying herself.
And why not? She couldn’t explain what had happened when she and Jack had made love, why their bodies had seemed so well-suited to one another, and how he had managed to send her into ecstasies of pleasure she’d never before known existed, let alone what had happened after—Jack’s inexplicable invitation for her to move in with him, surely a result of far too many endorphins on the brain.
But she had to admit, even though she couldn’t explain it, she had liked it. A lot.
“No, I never owned a Nordic Track,” Jack growled. “Who do I look like to you, Suzanne Somers?”
She wrinkled her nose at him thoughtfully. “Maybe,” she said. “But she does the Thighmaster, not Nordic Track. I don’t think her butt is quite as nicely contoured as yours, though.”
“You leave my butt,” Jack said, “out of this.”
Lou just laughed and shot ahead a few yards. It wasn’t exactly easy going, and she’d had reservations about their traveling on the road she’d discovered…a fairly wide one, and one that, when it wasn’t covered with three feet of snow, was probably pretty well traveled. The two of them, shooshing along that road, would be sitting ducks if Jack’s friends with the guns happened to get hold of another helicopter.
So they were sticking to the side of the road, where they had the overhang of the branches from the pine trees on either side of the road to protect them from view. The ground wasn’t nearly as level as it would have been if they’d been skiing down the center line, but at least they didn’t have to worry about aerial assaults.
Jack had been against appropriating the skis, which they’d found in one of Donald’s closets, along with two sets of ski boots that, though big on Lou and small on Jack, had fit both well enough for the short term. He hadn’t even wanted to try the road, to see if it led to a town or perhaps a highway, where they might flag down a car or a trucker with a CB.
“Why can’t we just stay here?” he’d wanted to know.
“Because people are probably worried about us,” Lou had explained. “I’m sure everybody thinks we’re dead. Who knows what kind of story Sam cooked up for them about what happened to us?”
“What makes you think Sam’s told them anything at all?” Jack had wanted to know. “Who’s to say he even survived that first night?”
“You told me you thought his little friends on the snowmobiles would have picked him up,” Lou had said, her eyes suddenly wide with concern. “Don’t you think they did?”
Jack had said “Sure,” but Lou hadn’t sensed that he’d cared either way. Well, Sam had been going to shoot them, so that was somewhat understandable. Still, Sam had been a father, after all. What was going to happen to his poor kids if he froze to death?
In typical star fashion, Jack seemed concerned only about those things that affected him directly. Although when it had come to figuring out how to reimburse Donald for his unknowing hospitality, Jack had swung to the other end of the spectrum, caring, Lou felt, far too much.
“Write him a check for a thousand,” Jack had said.
Lou, who had pulled out her checkbook, since neither she nor Jack was carrying a lot of cash, paused with her pen poised on the amount line.
“A thousand dollars?” she’d echoed, her eyebrows raised very high. “Jack, all we did was eat a couple of his steaks and mess up his sheets a little. I was thinking three hundred would be more than enough.”
“Spare me your midwestern frugality.”
“I’m from Long Island,” Lou had reminded him.
“We used his toothbrush,” Jack had remonstrated with her. “And we’re about to steal his skis.”
“We’ll send the skis back,” Lou had said, “when we reach civilization.”
“A thousand bucks,” Jack had said. At her bewildered look, he had added, “I’m good for it, I swear.”
Which only bewildered her more. Jack couldn’t be less concerned about a human life, but he wanted to make sure a man he had never met was more than adequately compensated for any inconvenience Jack had caused him.
On the other hand, Donald had never tried to kill them. That in itself, Lou decided, was worth a grand. Certainly very few of his neighbors had been as accommodating.
Jack brought her out of these reflections by catching up to her now and, for a few heartbeats, anyway, falling into step—or shoosh—beside her, and asking, “This is all going into your next screenplay, isn’t it?” he asked.
She looked at him. The sun, which had put in such a dazzling appearance earlier in the day, had quickly disappeared behind another bank of clouds. But these clouds, at least, were white, and did not look as if they intended, at any point, to drop buckets of snow on them.
Sun or no sun, however, Jack Townsend looked fine. Jack Townsend always looked fine. She found herself worrying about how she looked—she hadn’t, after all, really bothered with makeup, except for some lip gloss. How in the hell was she supposed to compete with Jack’s past loves, none of whom had even needed makeup to enhance the natural beauty they’d all been born with?
Then she shook herself. What was she thinking? She wasn’t going to compete with any of Jack’s past loves, because there was nothing going on between her and Jack. That boink fest the night before had been a fluke, a result of having been in one another’s company far too long. That was all. She wasn’t going to date another actor. She wasn’t. She was going to find a nice veterinarian or school teacher or something.
And certainly she wasn’t going to let herself fall for Jack Townsend. She knew how he operated only too well, thanks to Vicky. Sure, last night he was rambling about the two of them moving in together. But what about in another month, or maybe two, when he was throwing her out again? No, thanks. Lou Calabrese was not about to let Jack Townsend break her heart.
“For your information,” Lou said, gripping her ski poles very tightly, “I am out of the screenwriting business.”
Jack glanced at her sharply. “What?”
“You heard me,” Lou said. “I’m not writing any more screenplays
. Copkiller IV is my last.”
“Really?” Jack, to her fury, didn’t sound very convinced. In fact, his Really? sounded suspiciously polite. “Retiring before thirty, are you?”
“Not retiring,” Lou said, ducking beneath a particularly low-hanging, snow-covered branch. “Just not writing for the screen anymore.”
“I see.” Jack ducked, too. “And just what are you going to write, then? Commercial jingles?”
“Ha-ha,” Lou said sarcastically. “If you must know, I am thinking about writing a novel.”
“A novel,” Jack said.
Encouraged by the fact that he had not broken out into peals of uproarious laughter, Lou said, “Yes. A novel. In fact, I’ve already started it.”
“I see,” Jack said again. Then his glance fell upon the computer case she had slung across her shoulders. “Now I understand your determination to hang onto that thing.”
Lou blushed. That’s because when Jack had, earlier that day, offered to carry it for her, she had refused to let him, remembering all too clearly the way he’d mishandled it the last time he’d gotten his hands on it.
“Yes,” was all she said now, however.
“And may I ask,” Jack inquired, “what this novel is about?”
“Oh,” Lou said, feeling the familiar warmth she always experienced when someone asked about her work. “Well, it’s about a woman who is betrayed by her first love but finds redemption through…”
She broke off, mortified. Good Lord, she couldn’t tell Jack the plot of her book! He might think it was about him! Which it most certainly wasn’t. She’d come up with the plot for it well before she’d ever slept with Jack.
And besides, the character in her book was going to find love again in the arms of a good man. That was most certainly not Jack. Jack wasn’t good. He was far from good. He was, in fact, a very, very bad man. A good man would never have been able to make Lou feel as she’d felt the night before in bed with him, as if the top of her skull was going to blow out, just like Mount St. Helen’s. There wasn’t a grain of good in Jack.
Or was there? Because he had, after all, made her that dinner. And hadn’t he, both nights they’d spent together, exhibited a very atypically male propensity to cuddle?
In point of fact, she didn’t really know anything bad about Jack. Except, of course, what he’d done to Vicky. And the fact that someone wanted him dead.
“Finds redemption through what?” Jack wanted to know.
“Oh,” Lou said, knowing she was turning a fiery red and hoping he didn’t notice. “Through her work with the poor.”
Jack blinked at her. “You’re kidding me, right?” he asked. “A Lou Calabrese joint, and it doesn’t have any explosions in it?”
She managed a smile. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Then, in an effort to change the subject, she asked brightly, “How about you? What’s the next Jack Townsend venture?”
He frowned. Even frowning, of course, he was still delectably handsome. It seemed perfectly incredible to her that just twelve hours ago, those impressively chiseled features had been buried between her—
“Direct,” he said.
It was her turn to blink. “I beg your pardon?”
“I want to direct,” he repeated. Then he groaned. “Oh, God. Everybody says that, I know. But I directed a film last year—I doubt you saw it, it wasn’t very widely released. Anyway, it made me realize how much power directors have. I mean, I’m not saying you’re right about that thing you mentioned last night—about me being a wind-up toy that just walks in front of the camera and says lines someone else has written—”
Lou winced. “Look, about that. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, you did,” he said without rancor. “But that’s okay, because in a way, you’re right. There’s more to it, of course. I mean, than just saying the line. Or at least, there should be, if the person saying it knows what he’s doing. Anyway, this directing thing. I really enjoyed it. And since I’ve, you know, worked at both ends of the camera now, I think I’d be a good director. A kind of actors’ director. Not a megalomaniac fuck like Tim Lord.”
Lou was so surprised to hear this that she nearly broke a ski on a rock she hadn’t noticed sticking out of the snow. Jack, however, reached out in the nick of time and righted her.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, laughing. “It’s just…megalomaniac fuck. Is that really how you guys think about him? Tim Lord? I mean, he won best director last year—”
“I know he did,” Jack said. “He deserved it, considering what he had to work with. Not your script, which was, as you know, perfect. But he had Greta and Barry to deal with. That had to have been like directing two pieces of particle board—”
Lou was laughing so hard that she nearly tripped again, but Jack, who still had a hand on her arm, tightened his grip and kept her upright.
“Oh, God,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes with the tip of her glove. “Particle board. And you’re wrong, I did see it.”
Jack still hadn’t let go of her arm. “Saw what?”
“Hamlet,” Lou said. “The movie you directed. It was good.”
His handsome face brightened. “Really? You thought so? I—”
But he never got a chance to finish. That’s because, from just above the treetops, came a new sound, a whomp-whomp-whomp that seemed to reverberate not just from the air, but inside Lou’s chest, as well.
“Shit,” Jack said and pulled her hard into the nearby brush. Knocked off balance, Lou fell, but fortunately—for her, anyway; not so much for Jack—she landed across his midriff, causing him to let out an oof that quickly turned to an ack as the helicopter blades stirred piles of snow from the branches above them and sent it raining down on them in hard clumps.
“Maybe it isn’t them,” Lou shouted, to be heard over the sound of the chopper.
“You want to break cover and find out?” Jack shouted back.
Well, no. Not really. Lou didn’t relish scrambling out from the underbrush only to be sprayed with machinegun fire, or whatever. So she lay where she was in Jack’s arms—not exactly an uncomfortable position—waiting to see if the helicopter would land, as there was plenty of room for a landing on the road, or move on.
Five of the longest heartbeats Lou could ever remember later, the helicopter moved on, heading in the direction they’d just come from. Through the branches above them, she caught a glimpse of it as it departed. It was a white eight-seater, with a big red cross painted on its underbelly.
“Did you see that?” Lou shouted, turning to pound Jack in the chest with a fist. “It was an air rescue chopper! They were looking for us!”
“Well, how was I to know?” Jack demanded, throwing up an arm to fend off her blows. “I wasn’t exactly going to stick around to find out.”
Muttering, Lou climbed to her feet and started looking for her skis. One of them had slid several yards down the road.
“We could be on our way back,” she said, to no one in particular. “Right now, we could be on our way back to the hotel, and our own toothbrushes, and fresh underwear, and real coffee, not instant.”
“Hey,” Jack said, limping after her. One of his own skis had come off, as well. “We haven’t had it so bad. I mean, you seemed to like the creamed spinach, if I’m not mistaken.”
Lou, reaching her ski, which had slid all the way around a bend in the road, turned towards him, her hands going to her hips.
“Yeah, I liked the creamed spinach,” she said. “But guess what? I could have had creamed spinach back in Anchorage, thanks very much.”
“No, you couldn’t,” Jack said. “Because back in Anchorage, you weren’t interested in having creamed spinach with me. It’s only since you’ve gotten to know me out here that you’ve developed a taste for creamed spinach.”
“Let’s get this straight right now,” Lou said, raising a gloved finger. “I have always liked creamed spinach. I just never gave it much o
f a chance—”
“—until you were stranded with it out here,” Jack finished for her, impatiently. “See, that’s exactly what I meant.”
“Well, maybe,” Lou said, “that’s because creamed spinach was too busy screwing his brains out with girls named Greta, and Melanie, and Winona—”
It was Jack’s turn to raise a finger. “Hey,” he said. “I never laid a hand on Winona. She’s not my type.”
“Oh, why?” Lou wanted to know. “Because she can read?”
A look of annoyance temporarily creased Jack’s features. He did not, however, look one iota less appealing.
“Come on, Lou,” he said. “You know that’s just….”
She didn’t interrupt him. His voice just trailed off. She couldn’t figure out why, at first. Then she realized that he was staring very intently at something behind her. Thinking it was more of Sam’s friends, she spun around, fast….
And saw herself staring at a ramshackle building just off the side of the road, with a large neon sign out front that said, in blinking blue and red, Bud’s Bar.
22
Bud himself wasn’t tending bar when Jack cautiously pushed open the door and peered inside. Instead, a slightly haggard dishwater blonde was wiping down some glasses, a cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth. She shot a glance at Jack as she felt the cold air he was letting in.
“We’re closed,” she snarled at him. “Come back in half an hour.”
Jack could not quite believe what he was seeing. It was an honest-to-God bar, with a jukebox and pool table, an oversized TV in the back, neon Coors and Strohs signs in the windows, an aged blow-up figure of Spuds MacKenzie hanging from the ceiling, and a long, shining bar, against which twenty or so stools had been shoved.
It looked, to Jack, like heaven.
“Do you have a phone I could use?” Jack asked. “I’ll only be a minute.”
The blonde pointed wordlessly at a pay phone on the wall beside the jukebox.
“Make it quick,” she said.
