She’s wearing a one-piece thing, all denim, skin tight from the hem of the tiny shorts to the deep V of the top that shows off her ample cleavage. Her arms are bare, and I notice a tattoo on her right shoulder that I’ve never seen before.
“Hey,” she says, her voice rough as she gestures for me to come inside. I raise an eyebrow at the tumbler of amber liquid in her hand, and she answers by shutting the door loudly behind me before sauntering over to the minibar and pulling out all the mini-bottles that stock it. “Vodka? Tequila? Maybe some gin?” she slurs. “I’ve already drinkin’ all the whiskey. Drunken? Whatever, isss gone.”
She winks at me, but it’s not really flirty, more bitter.
I scratch my head, not quite sure what to do with this. I think she may have beaten me in the ‘keep ‘em guessing’ game.
“So, how you doing there, babe?” I ask gently.
She raises the tumbler up in a salute. “I’m quite good, thanks.” She downs the remainder and I get a bad feeling about the rest of the evening, so I sit on the sofa and kick my feet up. We sure as hell aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
“Why don’t we order you some room service? Looks like going out isn’t happening, but you definitely need some food in your stomach.”
She weaves her way across the room to the window where the sky is rapidly darkening and the city lights are flickering to life.
I watch her carefully, trying to figure out what’s happening as she clutches the now empty tumbler in her hand, and wraps her arms around her waist protectively. Her shoulders slump and she leans her forehead against the glass.
“He’s thinking about giving it to someone else,” she says softly.
“Who’s giving what to someone else?”
“Richard,” she answers. “He’s talking about giving the company to someone else.”
Richard Gunn. I’ve only met him once, but he started their firm, Gunn Management, thirty years ago and it’s now one of the biggest, best-known firms in L.A.
“Richard—your dad?” I stand and walk toward her, stopping a couple of steps away. She doesn’t turn, but I can see her reflection in the glass. Her eyes are cast down, and her brow is furrowed.
“Yep. Good old Dad. He decided it was time to make someone the vice president of the company, and leave it to them in his will.”
Oh shit.
“He’s made it into a fucking contest, and I have to compete just like everyone else in the firm.”
Jesus. What a shitstorm. There are six other agents at the firm. Most of them have been there longer than Shannon. And most of them have at least one big-name client. We’re Shannon’s biggest clients at this point, but she’s only been at it for five years.
I put my hands on her shoulders and she stiffens, but I don’t let that stop me, because Shannon is prickly, but I know she needs comfort as much as any human being—more probably, because a lot of people are scared off by her tough girl act.
I rub the smooth skin on her bare shoulders, leaning in to speak into her ear, relishing the way her long hair brushes against my lips as I do.
“Richard is a fucker,” I murmur. “And a fool. You’re rare and beautiful, Shannon. In the midst of an industry of heartless, soulless, shells you have light, fire, this unquenchable something that sets you apart. And if your father won’t give you the business that you earn every day not only by your hard work, but by your love for him, then neither he nor that firm are worthy of you.”
She turns to face me then, her eyes glassy with emotion and whiskey.
“Fuck, Dez,” she gasps. “You’re not going to make this easy are you?”
I move my hands down her arms until I’m holding both of her hands in mine. “It can be as easy as you want it. But if I know you, you’re not going to take that route. And that’s one of the things I admire. You don’t take short cuts, you don’t try to get along, you follow your heart, every time, no matter what. You’re the most passionate person I’ve ever met.”
She leans her head against my chest and sighs, long and deep. I feel it in my gut, I feel it in my heart.
Then she lifts her face to mine. “And you’re the most genuine person I’ve ever met. And the prettiest.” She reaches up and skims her fingertips over my cheek and I swallow the lump that rises in my throat. But she drops her hand, and looks away. “I don’t feel so great,” she mutters. “I think maybe too many whiskeys.”
I watch her weave her way to the sofa where she lies down. “Just gonna’ close my eyes for a few minutes.”
I squat next to her and run my fingers through the hair along her temple. “You do that, beautiful. Just sleep. It will all seem better tomorrow. I promise.”
She mutters something unintelligible and I cover her with the blanket on the back of the couch before I quietly let myself out of the suite.
It’s a few minutes after eight when I walk into Shannon’s suite. Yes, I kept a key for myself, don’t judge me.
I tiptoe in, the room service waiter pushing the cart loaded with food behind me. I’m relieved to see she’s no longer on the sofa. Hopefully she got a decent night’s sleep. I tip the waiter and shut the door after he leaves, then I walk to the door that leads to the bedroom.
“Shannon?” I knock lightly.
“Go away,” a whiskey-baked voice rasps from the other side. I can’t help but smile. Jesus she’s a handful.
I turn the knob and enter the darkened room.
“Rise and shine, honey,” I say as I walk to the curtains and open them a touch, making sure to leave the transparent undercurtains in place.
“Nooo,” she wails. “Make it stop, please, make it stop.”
I chuckle as I sit on the edge of the bed and look down at her mass of tangled red hair. She has her face buried in the covers, and I reach out and pull the silky strands away so I can see her eyes screwed shut.
“Hey,” I whisper. “You need to get up and eat something. You’ll feel a lot better once you do.”
She cracks one eye open, then jerks upright, clutching the bedcovers to her chest.
“Oh my God, Dez, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Bringing you breakfast.”
She stares at me and I can see the confusion on her face. It makes me want to beat the shit out of every man she’s ever known, because it’s obvious that the mere idea of someone taking care of her is so foreign she doesn’t even know what to say.
“How did you get in?”
I scratch my head, because this is a little awkward. “I checked you in. They offered two keys, and I uh, took them up on it.”
Then she does the craziest most unexpected thing. Instead of ripping me a new one—which I deserve for violating her privacy—she busts out laughing. It’s like a jolt to my heart, and I tingle from head to toe for just a moment.
“I have to hand it to you, when you put your mind to something you really go all in.”
I grin at her, relieved that she’s finding it humorous instead of getting angry. It’s a step in the right direction.
“Come to the other room, I’ve got all kinds of food waiting for you. We’ll have you all fixed up before our ten o’clock event.”
She smiles, but the laughter leaves her eyes. “Thank you, Dez,” she says. “Thanks for being here for me. Last night was…” She sighs.
“I know, babe. I know.”
She just looks at me and nods, her face sad and defeated. Richard Gunn is an asshole of the highest order. He’s been given this amazing human for a daughter, and she’s followed him into the business he’s passionate about, and all he can do is throw her devotion back in her face. I don’t get mad often, but I’ve been fuming about Shannon’s old man all night.
“I’ll see you in a minute,” I tell her as I leave the room, shutting the door behind me. Then I work on setting up the best fucking breakfast Shannon’s ever eaten, because no matter what her father does, I want Shannon to know that she’s incredibly valuable, and I’m going to make it my persona
l mission to show that to her every day.
Shannon
My father is a big, brash man. He talks loud, he lives loud, and it didn’t take me long when I was a child to figure out that if I wanted him to notice me I had to live loud too.
Fast forward a few years and most of my childhood was spent trying to jump higher, run faster, swim farther, than anyone around me. I was the one who would leap off the top of the play structure at school, cliff dive at the quarry pond in the summer, and drag race my grandfather’s 1975 Mustang down Main Street on Saturday nights. By the time I was seventeen I realized that I got a high from doing those things that couldn’t be duplicated by alcohol or drugs, or even sex. The pure adrenaline that came from thrill seeking was what floated my boat.
So, after getting the most recent crappy news from my father, I know that I need a pick-me-up. Our first event in New York goes smoothly, and then we’re on to Boston. I spend our free afternoon there checking out the launch site at Mount Greylock. Then I call up our pilot and tell him my plans. He isn’t surprised. I left my paragliding gear in his plane after all.
The one thing I don’t count on is Dez seeing me walking out of the hotel in my flight suit.
“Hey,” he says as he comes jogging after me in the lobby. “You going to change some oil on a car?” He winks, but little does he know that I actually can change a car’s oil. Nothing other than that though.
“Ha ha. Very funny.”
“Well, you have to admit, the whole coveralls look isn’t really typical you.”
“Agreed,” I say, starting to walk toward the front doors again.
He strides alongside me, not seeming to have anything else pressing at this particular moment.
“So? What’s it for? The outfit.”
“Paragliding,” I quip, dropping my sunglasses on my face as we step outside and the Uber I called for rolls up in perfect time.
Dez’s eyes widen for a moment. “Like jumping off of a mountain and floating down kind of paragliding?”
“Yep, that’s exactly the one.”
He grabs my wrist, eyes worried. “You do that a lot?”
“A fair amount, yes. If you’re wondering if I’ve done it enough to be good, the answer is also yes.”
He’s holding me with only the tips of his fingers, but they’re burning into my skin like branding irons. Almost as hot as his eyes when he locks gazes with me.
“Take me along,” he says.
I blink at him. “What?”
“Take me along.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to see it. Maybe I even want to do it with you. But no matter
what I don’t want you jumping off the top of a mountain by yourself.”
The breeze from Boston Harbor is stiff, and I have to scrape my hair out of
my face as it whips around me.
“Dez, I do this stuff all the time. Alone and with other people. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is to me,” he says.
The Uber driver honks, and gestures for me to get in. Dez takes over then, opening the back door to the car. I climb in, and he follows, something I suspected could happen, but didn’t really think would.
“You’re really going to come with me?”
“I really am,” he says.
“Well, I hope you like heights because we have to fly to get there.”
“I like anywhere I can go with you.” He grins, and I can’t help the pitter-patter of my stupid, stupid heart. But I won’t let him know what he’s doing to me, because that would only encourage him. So I roll my eyes and sit back in the car, all too aware as he scoots in next to me, that Dez Takimoto is wedging his way into things—my life, my attentions, my heart.
We arrive at Mount Greylock a few hours later, and as Dez lugs my gear out of the rental car we took after landing at the small airstrip nearby, I look at the softly rolling terrain covered in trees that are just beginning to turn colors. There should be some beautiful scenery for the ride down.
“They call this a mountain?” Dez asks as he joins me on the large grassy area that surrounds the summit with its memorial tower.
“It’s the highest point in Massachusetts,” I tell him. “What are you? A mountain connoisseur?”
“I’m from the Rockies, babe, this doesn’t qualify as foothills where I grew up.”
Santa Fe. I remember that now. Dez grew up in the high desert, near the Santa Fe ski resort.
“What’s it like there?” I ask as we walk toward the field where there’s a nice wind coming from just the right direction for my takeoff.
“It’s quirky, and beautiful in this really stark way. When I feel like my head is too cluttered to function I can go there and it’s as if everything sort of disperses. The sun is so brilliant and the sky is so blue that it makes you feel brighter and clearer.”
“You love it,” I say, amazed at how attached he seems to be to a place. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way about somewhere. Sadly, I’ve also never felt that way about someone either.
“I do, and it doesn’t hurt that my parents are there.”
He sets my things down in the middle of the field about fifty yards from the edge of the precipice.
“So you’re close to them?”
He smiles. “Yeah. They’re crazy, my folks. But the best kind of crazy. They’re full of love and life, and they’ve been together for over thirty years. That’s pretty fucking impressive these days.”
It is. And it’s also pretty impressive that they have a son as talented as Dez who actually likes them. I love my father, but I have to admit that I often don’t like him.
“My dad’s a photographer,” he continues, watching me as I unpack my gear. “He’d love to get some shots of this—the paragliding.”
“Did he take tons of pictures of you when you were growing up?”
He helps me unfold the silk parachute, walking backwards as we stretch it out to its full size.
“So many. I was on the cover of three or four different magazines when I was growing up just because I was his favorite model.”
I try to imagine what that must be like, to be so loved by your parent that they’d make you the centerpiece of not only their home life but their career as well. I was never the centerpiece of my father’s personal life, but I had thought I could be a central feature of his professional one. Now it’s been made crushingly clear that isn’t for sure either.
Dez must be able to read my thoughts on my face. “Hey,” he says, squinting at me across the expanse of silk. “No thinking about Richard Gunn or Gunn Management today, okay? You’re out here to do something you love, let go and do it.”
I give him a smile. “Good advice.”
“Plus, I want you focused on the task at hand so you don’t kill yourself.”
I laugh. “Do I make you nervous doing this stuff?”
His expression sobers. “A little, yeah.”
“That’s sweet, Dez. I didn’t know you cared.” I bat my eyelashes at him being silly.
But he doesn’t joke back. “I need you to be safe. That’s all.”
My chest feels heavy when I see the expression on his face. He’s somber and genuine, and I have to fight the urge to flee as fast as I can. Not only do I not have time to be involved with Dez, I don’t have the headspace or the heartspace either. For twenty-seven years I’ve been focused on gaining my father’s love, and now, for some reason that I can’t understand, he’s pulled it back even further. So I’ll have to work harder. Be better. Make him prouder. Because if I lose this fight, I will have lost myself.
Dez
That first moment—when Shannon’s parachute leaves the ground and she’s jerked up into the air, my heart skips a beat. She’s so small against the backdrop of sky and clouds, and while I might joke about the size of this mountain, we’re over three thousand feet high. But as the current carries her out beyond the precipice so she’s floating in mid-air, and the parachute billows out, firm against
the stiffening winds, I realize that she’s free. She’s free of gravity, free of worries, and free of whatever it is that goes on between her and her father.
I wonder as I watch her tilting the ends of her chute back and forth to ride the currents, if doing something like this might be the only time that Shannon’s free, and that makes me hurt for her and yearn to make it better at the same time. I’ve watched Blaze deal with the fallout of his unfinished business with his father for years, I can’t stand the thought that Shannon might go through some of that same pain.
I walk closer to the edge of the drop I’m on and watch as she drifts further, slowly floating back down to the earth three thousand feet below me. I can see that she’s skilled at directing the chute and riding the currents as several times she pops back up, gaining altitude instead of losing it, but eventually she’s heading towards the empty field that sits about a mile to the south of where I am, so I walk back to the rental car and go to pick her up.
“Whoo!” she yells as she touches down on terra firma and gains her balance. She quickly unlatches the chute and then pulls her helmet off, releasing her long, red tresses that blow in the breeze, coiling silky strands around her neck and face. It takes all of my willpower not to grab that hair and use it to pull her to me—onto me, into me, through me. I breathe deep, trying to stave off the want that envelops me whenever she’s near.
“Did you see that banking turn I did when I first shifted to face the south?”
She’s glowing, and there’s a wildness to her that captivates me. But I know that like all wild things, the trick is to entice, not imprison. The moment that I try to tie her down is the moment she’ll flee and I’ll lose my chance for good.
“I saw when you drifted so close to that tree I thought for sure you were going to snag your chute on it and I’d have to call the fire department to bring a ladder truck out.”
She starts folding up her chute and I pick up the loose end to help.
Racing to Rhapsody: A Rhapsody Novel Page 4
