She Went All the Way

by Meg Cabot

  As soon as they were gone, Lou turned around and smacked Jack in the shoulder as hard as she could.

  “Ow!” he said, though he looked amused. “What was that for?”

  “Encouraging my dad,” Lou snapped. “Can’t you see he’s got a crush on your mom?”

  “Him?” Jack rubbed the spot she’d punched. “All my mother can talk about is Frank this and Frank that. Do you know your dad makes his own spaghetti sauce? Well, I do. I even know what’s in it. The Calabrese family spaghetti sauce recipe. And I know it. I swear I’ve spent most of the past hour wishing I still had one of those guns you handed over so I could put a bullet through my head.”

  Lou, furious, paced the hallway. “Great,” she said. “Just great, Jack. Like we don’t have enough problems. Somebody’s trying to kill you, and now our parents have crushes on each other.” She froze in her tracks, and threw him a look of horror. “My God, Jack. What are we going to do if they start dating?”

  “Well,” Jack said thoughtfully. “I admit it might be hard to explain to the kids. I mean, why their mom and dad’s parents are married. Maybe if we moved to Appalachia they wouldn’t get made fun of as much in school—”

  “Can’t you, just for once, be serious?” Lou wanted to know.

  “I think,” Jack said with a perfectly straight face, “that you’re overreacting. And not just about the whole rent-a-cop thing, either. Lou, no one is going to take a hit at me here at the hotel. Too many witnesses, okay?”

  Lou opened her mouth to argue, but Jack held up a hand.

  “And so your dad and my mom like each other,” he went on. “So what? Let them have their fun. I personally can think of a few things—” He stepped towards her and wrapped both hands around her waist. “—I’d rather be doing right now than worrying about what our parents are up to. How about you?”

  She pulled away from him—or attempted to, anyway. He had a pretty good hold on her, and didn’t seem too willing to release her. And she, it had to be admitted, felt something inside of her wilt a little as she breathed in the scent of freshly showered Jack…damn him.

  “Jack,” she said, trying to hold herself as stiffly as possible as he bent his head and placed his lips alongside her neck. “I told you. This will never work.”

  “You never told me any such thing,” Jack said, keeping his mouth where it was…and causing, as she was certain he was no doubt aware, all manner of havoc where her pulse was concerned. “You said last night that you needed to sleep on it. Well, now you’ve slept on it. And if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to take up where we left off before we were so rudely interrupted by cross-country ski trips and barmaids named Martha….”

  “Jack,” Lou said weakly. Still, she was determined to stick to her earlier resolve. “You know perfectly well this is a bad idea.”

  “I think this a great idea,” Jack said against her throat. “And I have an even better one. Let’s order up a bottle of champagne, put the ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door, and take a nice, long, bubble bath together.”

  “Jack,” Lou said as his lips slid towards her jawbone. Her heartbeat was skittering like a pebble over the surface of a glass-smooth lake. Still, she refused to give in to carnal longing. That’s what had happened with Barry. And look where that had got her. “Forget it. I am not getting involved with any more actors.”

  “Good thing I’m quitting the business, then,” he said, his lips on her earlobe. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s get a dog. A golden retriever. We can name it Dakota and when ‘Entertainment Tonight’ comes to interview us about our blissfully happy relationship we can stroll down the beach and throw Frisbees to Dakota, just like John Tesh and Connie Selleca….”

  “Jack,” Lou said, her eyelids, completely against her will, closing. “We are not getting a dog together.”

  “Just one dog,” Jack whispered, his fingers slowly untucking her blouse from the waistband of the slacks she’d changed into before leaving for dinner with her father. “To start out with. To go with our beach house.”

  “We are not getting a beach house together,” Lou said, even as she felt his mouth sliding towards hers. “I told you. I am never dating an actor ag—”

  Her protest, however, was smothered against Jack’s lips. She felt herself melt in his arms. A part of her cursed her own weakness.

  But another, much larger part of her reveled in the feel of Jack’s long, hard body against hers…the fiery brand of his tongue as it met hers…the tantalizing feel of his fingers as they traveled up under her blouse, until first one, and then another of his thumbs dipped, with infinite gentleness, beneath the lacy cups of her bra….

  She moaned, softly, against his mouth. She couldn’t help it. She could feel that now familiar hardness in the front of the charcoal wool trousers he’d put on for dinner, pressing urgently against her.

  “What do you say?” Jack tore his lips from hers long enough to ask. As they’d kissed, he’d backed her slowly up against the hallway wall. Now he had her pinned there, with both his hands under her blouse, cupped over her swollen, straining breasts, while his need, rigid and imperative, throbbed against her belly. “A little Dom Perignon and Mr. Bubble to forget your troubles?”

  It would have been so easy to say yes. So easy to let herself go limp in his arms, let him do whatever it was he wanted, what she knew he could do so well.

  And she would have said yes. To her everlasting shame, she would have said yes, screamed it, even….

  …if right at that moment the elevator doors hadn’t slid open to reveal none other than Melanie Dupre, carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses, and wearing only a negligee, a pair of feathered mules, and a determined expression.

  The determined expression vanished, however, when she noticed them. Suddenly, Melanie started screaming, loudly enough, Lou was convinced, to wake the dead all the way over in Canada…perhaps even all the way down to Mexico.

  “You liar!” she shrieked, pointing at Jack with one talonous nail. “You damned liar! You told me there wasn’t anyone else. You told me you just wanted to try being single for a while. And the whole time—the whole time—you were messing around with her?”

  The look of horror on Melanie’s face as she said the word her was all Lou needed to catapult her out of the haze into which she’d sunk at the first touch of Jack’s lips to her skin. Tensing, she shoved him away from her, causing several of the buttons on her blouse to go flying off. She didn’t care. All she could think was, Must get away from here, and fast.

  Jack was holding up both hands to protect himself, as if Melanie were a slowly approaching cobra or fragrance- sample sprayer in a department store.

  “Mel,” he said, in a voice Lou supposed he was trying to keep low and soothing. “Listen to me. The other night, when I said I wanted to try being single for a while, I meant it. I really did. But then, as you know, I went through a near-death experience. And that can really make you reorganize your priorities, you know? And that’s when I realized that maybe I haven’t quite given monogamy a fair shake—”

  “You,” Melanie shrieked, “want to be monogamous with her? With her and not me?”

  Glass exploded against the wall behind Jack’s head as Melanie heaved one of the champagne flutes she’d been carrying.

  Fortunately by that time Lou had managed to dig the card key to her room out of her purse. She wasn’t sure it was fair, exactly, to leave Jack alone with this raving lunatic. On the other hand, she wasn’t the one who’d been stupid enough to have an affair with Melanie Dupre—or give Officer Juarez the night off.

  A second eruption of glass decided her on the matter. She was getting out of the line of fire—especially since Melanie seemed to be blaming Lou for Jack’s decision to break up with her. Inserting her card key into her door lock, she waited breathlessly for the electronic light to turn green, while Melanie shrieked, “Do you have any idea how humiliating it’s going to be when it gets out that you’ve left me for a screenwrit
er? I mean, my God, she doesn’t even have a SAG card!”

  The light turned green. Lou pushed on the door with all her might. It swung open, and she hurried inside, then slammed the door shut behind her and threw the deadbolt into place, just in case.

  She was just turning to reach for the phone to dial security when she realized she was not alone in the room. No, there was a man sitting on her bed. A man in a cashmere sweater, suede jacket, and jeans. A man who looked disturbingly familiar. A man who turned out to be….

  “Hi, Lou,” Bruno di Blase, aka Barry Kimmel, said to her.

  25

  Lou stared at him in complete bewilderment. What was Barry doing here, in Anchorage? Barry, who had, just a few nights ago, eloped with Greta Woolston, and was supposed to be on his honeymoon with her?

  “Uh,” Barry said. “Lou. Your, um, shirt is kind of—”

  Lou looked down and realized that her blouse, where the buttons had popped open, was hanging wide open. Her white bra was out there for anyone to see.

  “Barry,” she said, spinning around and reaching for the terrycloth hotel robe she’d left on a chair after she’d showered. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh,” Barry said, blinking a little. “I slipped some guy at the desk a fifty to give me one of those card keys. You know. To your room.”

  “No,” Lou said, as she put on the voluminous robe, then tied its sash securely around her waist. “I don’t mean here in my room. I mean here in Anchorage.”

  Barry’s face, always so smoothly handsome, looked almost impossibly so when he was incredulous about something, which he evidently was just then.

  “Lou!” he said, standing up. “How can you even ask that? I thought you were dead. Of course I came!”

  It took Lou a minute to digest this. “Barry,” she said slowly. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but we broke up. Remember?”

  “And because of that, I’m not allowed to worry about you?” he asked. “I mean, Lou, you were out there—” He gestured towards the large picture glass window that, when it wasn’t dark out, had a view of the Alaskan mountain range.“—stranded in the frozen tundra—”

  “Woods,” Lou corrected him.

  He regarded her with his sleepy brown eyes. Barry had always moved through life looking perpetually drowsy, as if he were just waiting for the right woman to come along and wake him up. Lou, obviously, had not been that woman. But it didn’t look as if it was Greta, either, since Barry still seemed fairly droopy-eyed.

  “Whatever,” Barry said. “I mean, come on, Lou. Of course I had to come. I know we had our differences towards the end there, but whatever else happens, you’ll always be my best girl.”

  “Really.” Lou glanced at his left hand. It was noticeably bereft of the glint of gold. She said, “Barry, aren’t you supposed to be on your honeymoon right now?”

  Barry looked offended. He’d had a way of doing that, of looking pained whenever she’d pointed out his transgressions, as if her mention of them was somehow worse than his having committed them.

  “Do you really think I could enjoy myself,” he asked, “knowing that you were in moral danger?”

  Lou coughed. “I think you mean mortal.” Though, under the circumstances, his version fit as well.

  “Whatever,” Barry said. “As soon as I heard, I took the first flight I could find out here.”

  “Really?” Lou said. “Well, wasn’t that nice of you.” This was weird. More than weird. Unreal, was what it was. She and Barry had not parted on friendly terms. So what was he doing here, really? “And Greta? Did she come, too?” Lou glanced at the door to the bathroom. “She isn’t hiding in the shower, is she? I told you before, Barry, no three-ways.”

  Barry’s darkly handsome face clouded over. He looked, once again, resentful of her for having brought up such an indelicate subject.

  “Lou,” he said. “Please. Don’t cheapen the moment. Of course Greta isn’t in your shower. She didn’t come with me.” He did not elaborate on this, but his tone was brooding enough to set off a few warning bells in Lou’s head: Uh-oh. Trouble in paradise.

  “Lou,” Barry said, with what she called his melting look, the one that he’d given Greta in Hindenburg, just before the two of them had swung down to safety from the doomed airship—a look Cosmo had suggested could turn a glacier into tap water. “I am more glad than I can say that it turns out you’re all right.”

  More alarm bells sounded in Lou’s head. As if Barry’s mere presence wasn’t enough to arouse her suspicions, the almost unprecedented fact that he had actually parted with a fifty in order to establish this contact, Barry being one of the most tightfisted people she had ever met, coupled with the fact that he claimed he was glad to see her, pretty much convinced her that either he was trying out a new personality—something Barry did with a fair amount of regularity—or had suffered a debilitating head injury.

  “Barry,” Lou said, cautiously. “Did something heavy fall on you recently?”

  Barry knit his perfectly waxed brows. “What?”

  “Never mind,” Lou said. Barry, it was strangely good to see, was still Barry. He, like the rest of Hollywood, would never change. There was something reassuring about this. “Look, Barry, it’s nice of you to cut your honeymoon short to come and see me like this, but I’ve really had a long day, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to hit the sack.”

  Barry put on his crestfallen expression.

  “Lou,” he said. “I was really hoping…I mean, I really need to talk to you. I know you’re busy, and everything, but…well…we never talk anymore.”

  Lou sank onto the bed. “Barry,” she said, “that’s because you left me for another woman. Remember?”

  “See, that’s just it.” Barry looked behind him, found a chair, and pulled it towards the end of the bed where Lou sat. “I mean, just because I’m with someone else now, that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring for you, Lou.”

  “Really,” she said without inflection. Inwardly, of course, her mind was racing. What, she wondered, was going on here? People said bad things happened in threes, but this was getting ridiculous. First Barry dumps her for Greta Woolston, then she gets shot at by strangers in the Alaskan wilderness, then Barry decides he wants her back? Too weird. Unless….

  Unless they were all connected. It couldn’t be…it wasn’t possible that Barry was behind the attacks on Jack. Why would Barry want Jack dead? To take over the role of Pete Logan? It was true that since Hindenburg, Barry had been having trouble finding scripts that he felt suited his new superstar image. But to resort to murder to get his hands on the perfect role? That just wasn’t like Barry. It would have required way too much effort…not to mention money.

  No. Her writer’s imagination was overreacting again. She needed to calm down. She needed to get a grip. She needed to…

  …get Barry Kimmel’s hand off her knee. Because that’s where he’d put it, suddenly.

  “Of course I still care, Lou,” Barry said. “We were together, what, ten years? You think I can just turn my affections on and off, like a faucet? No. It doesn’t work that way. I will always care for you, Lou. Always.”

  He had on his sincere face. He’d worn this expression in the scene in Hindenburg where Greta’s character had questioned him about his intentions. He’d also, Lou remembered, worn it frequently in front of highway patrol officers, whenever he got pulled over on the freeway for speeding.

  “Barry,” Lou said in a hard voice, not falling for his sincere face any more than she’d fallen for his melting look. “What do you want?”

  Sincere face disappeared to be replaced by an expression Lou liked to call who me?

  “Want?” Barry echoed. “Lou, I already told you that. I wanted to make sure you were okay. That’s all.” He shook his head, looking bewildered. “I don’t understand where all of this hostility is coming from.”

  “Gosh, Barry,” Lou said. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because for ten years, you
told me you weren’t ready to commit, that you needed to get to know yourself before you could fully get to know another. And then I find out from ‘Access Freaking Hollywood’ that you and Greta Woolston got hitched in a quickie ceremony in the Elvis Chapel—”

  “It wasn’t,” Barry said, offended again, “the Elvis Chapel. It was the Hindenburg Room at the Trump Casino, and—”

  “Whatever, Barry,” Lou said. “I don’t want to fight. I just—”

  “Neither do I,” Barry said earnestly. “Because in spite of our past differences, Lou, you’re still one of my favorite people of all time. You don’t know how much I wished you could have been at the wedding. You were the only thing missing, really.”

  “Uh,” Lou said, reluctant to point out the obvious, but fearing he really didn’t get it. “Because you dumped me to marry someone else, Barry. Remember?”

  Barry made a face. But even with his features squinched up with distaste, Barry Kimmel—Bruno di Blase to the rest of the world—was one of the handsomest men alive.

  One of them. The other one, as Lou could hear only too well, was still getting his fifteen-million-dollar ass kicked by a size two model/actress in the hallway outside.

  “So it didn’t work romantically between us,” Barry said, in the exact same tone he might have said I prefer pepperoni on my pizza. “You’re still like a sister to me. Which is another reason why I had to come to Alaska personally to see you, Lou.”

  Barry cleared his throat, and Lou realized, with a sinking heart, that he was getting ready to make a speech. His last speech—the one about her having grown so hard and cynical that he hardly recognized her anymore as the sweet girl with whom he’d moved out west—was still ringing in her ears, and that had been delivered weeks ago. She wondered what she could possibly have done to deserve further punishment.

  “I had an idea,” Barry said grandly, as if announcing something highly unusual. Which, considering that it was Barry, was actually true: he was not a man prone to many ideas.

  “An idea,” Lou said.