Sweet Seduction

by Camilla Stevens

  Di-Anne nodded as Saul came up and put a comforting arm around her shoulders.

  Once inside Di-Anne’s quaint little house, Patrick followed her into the living room to set Layla on the sofa. Then stood up, his arms crossed over his chest as he assessed her.

  She had been light as a feather in his arms. Now she looked like the perfect Sleeping Beauty. Despite the circumstances, Patrick had the sudden urge to lean down and kiss her to see if she woke from her spell.

  His eyes wandered over the exposed, brown skin of her shoulders and slender arms, down across the small mounds rising out of the yellow fabric covering her chest. Her legs peeking from her flared skirt were covered in dust and the one foot with the missing shoe still had smeared blood on it. Bree had already come back from the bathroom with cotton, hydrogen peroxide, and bandages to clean and wrap it with.

  The sight of her dressing the wound brought his rage back. It wasn’t just the legal mess he’d have to deal with back in Los Angeles. The sight of Layla amid all that destruction, bleeding and helpless, had stirred a primal part of him that wanted nothing more than to shield her from it all, protect her from the chaos surrounding her.

  Up until this moment, his weekend trips up to Olla, mostly to see her, had been in the spirit of fun flirtation, almost like foreplay. He’d known from the first moment he saw her pop out of the passenger side of that van that one day he’d have her, and the chase had been fun. Now he realized this game he’d been playing with her these past few weeks had nurtured feelings in him that he’d never felt for another woman.

  He had no idea what this catastrophe would result in. The thought of losing her now felt like a vice grip squeezing his heart, bleeding it dry.

  His breathing halted as her eyes blinked open toward the ceiling.

  “Layla!” Bree squeaked.

  Her eyes wandered down to the end of the couch where Bree had paused in dabbing a cotton ball on her wounded foot. Layla’s eyes blinked rapidly at the look of stunned anxiousness on Bree’s face.

  Layla didn’t say a word as her eyes wandered from person to person, obviously reading their expressions to find out if she had just dreamed it all. Patrick followed with his own eyes.

  Mario: contemplative solemness.

  Di-Anne: sympathetic concern.

  Saul: grim empathy.

  By the time she made it to Patrick the truth of what had happen was more than evident. The look of pure, unadulterated hatred she gave him told him all he needed to know.

  “You,” she seethed, struggling to sit up.

  Everyone reacted at once, urging her to lie back down, assuring her that everything would be okay, reminding her that she had suffered not only a shock but an injury as well.

  Everyone but Patrick. He was paralyzed by the look in her eyes as they stayed locked with his.

  She ignored them all.

  “Get out,” she whispered, not taking her eyes off him.

  Everyone went quiet.

  Patrick just stood there searching her eyes, seeing if there was anything underneath that layer of complete loathing.

  “Get out!” she screamed, then broke down crying, her head in her hands.

  “Perhaps it’s best if you go, son,” Saul said softly, putting a hand on his shoulder to break him out of his paralysis.

  Patrick nodded, then headed back out the door and out of her life.

  9

  Hello everybody, it’s me, Becca Valentine. In case you hadn’t noticed, yes this is me in my wedding dress…on what I thought would be my wedding day.

  Note that I said Becca Valentine, not Becca Davidson.

  And why is that? [sniff]

  Because my wedding has been cancelled! Yes, you heard that right: canceled!

  All because of one stupid, podunk bakery named Di-vine Delectables. Let me repeat that: Di-vine Delectables.

  And what happened, you may be asking? A car crashed into my wedding cake! Can you believe that? They might as well have told me that the dog ate it.

  At any rate, here I am with no cake, no wedding, and no husband.

  Let me just walk you through the multiple levels of stupidity that this bakery exercised….

  Layla’s cell phone rang, making her jump. She was curled up on her couch with a glass of wine and her laptop. She hit pause on the YouTube video and reached over to check the caller ID.

  She sighed when she saw it was Blaire. The woman had been calling multiple times a day for the past two weeks. Layla answered it. At the very least it would be a distraction.

  “Please tell me you’re not watching that stupid video on YouTube again.”

  “Okay, I’m not watching that stupid video on YouTube again,” Layla said in a monotone voice.

  There was a pause on the other end.

  “That’s it, I’m coming up to see you. We’re going nuclear with Girls' Night. I’m pulling out the big guns: nail polish; facials; and yes, All. Of. The. RomComs. I’m talking Pretty woman, Best man, Four Weddings and a—

  “Nooo,” Layla moaned.

  “Don’t you nooo me,” Blaire sassed back. “You think you’re the only one who got dinged in this mess? What makes you think I don’t need this as much as you?”

  That got Layla to quit her moaning. She’d been wallowing in self-pity so much she hadn’t bothered to think about how it had impacted others. All the couples she had been scheduled to make cakes for now had to scramble to find new bakers. Mario, Bree, and Di-Anne all were without their part-time jobs.

  Layla had a tiny bit of money left that she had brought with her when she moved to Olla, so she paid them their final paychecks out of that. All three had patently refused. Di-Anne didn’t need the money, having worked at the bakery more as a hobby than anything else. Both Bree and Mario had found other part time work easily enough. All the same, she went through Saul to get the money to them.

  There was no way she was having that additional guilt weighing on her. But her savings were whittling down to nothing. She wasn’t sure what amount of compensation Lion Studios was sending, but if it didn’t arrive soon she’d be in trouble.

  “Okay,” she sighed. “But be forewarned, I’m going to be miserable company.”

  “So how bad has your business suffered?” Layla asked when Blaire settled down next to her on the couch later that night. They were chatting, taking a break in between Notting Hill and Love & Basketball.

  “Me? Oh don’t worry about me. I’ll recover. I just said that to get you to let me come over.”

  Layla punched Blaire lightly in the arm. “Bitch!”

  Her friend just laughed. “Please, I’m married to an investment banker. He thinks of my wedding planning business as a little hobby that he lets me indulge in, God bless him. So don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I’m more worried about you. How are you holding up?”

  “Well, let’s see, the money I had when I left Philadelphia I used to buy the bakery from Di-Anne so she could retire. Then I bought this monstrosity of a house.”

  “Don’t you dare dis this house,” Blaire scolded with outrage. “This house is beautiful.”

  Layla looked around the living room as if mentally calculating her financial mistake. She had fallen in love with the large white Victorian with the original crown molding inside and adorable gingerbread trim outside the moment she set eyes on it. At the time she had enough to buy it outright. Between the house and the bakery, she had practically used up all the money left to her when her parents had died in the plane crash two years ago.

  Fortunately, the bakery business, mostly in the form of wedding cakes, had created a nice comfortable income. Now that had disappeared.

  “What in the world was I thinking. Four bedrooms? Why in the world would I need four bedrooms?”

  “For when you finally settle down and have ten kids,” Blaire teased.

  “Yes, because my love life is flourishing here.”

  “What happened to that Patrick guy—”

  “Why didn’t you tell m
e she was a YouTube personality?” Layla said, immediately changing the topic with the first thing that came to her mind.

  Blaire gave her a hard look, then shrugged, knowing that she’d get nothing more out of Layla with regard to “that Patrick guy.”

  “Since when have you ever cared about the profession of the bride or groom?”

  “Since they have the potential to bring about unwanted publicity. I mean her stupid video about the bakery already has over ninety-thousand views!”

  “I seriously doubt Boris is one of her YouTube subscribers. She does vapid videos about makeup and Chipotle burrito bowls.”

  “All the same,” Layla said, frowning.

  Blaire leaned in closer and gave Layla a serious look. “Listen, he’s not going to find you. Certainly not because of this stupid video. She didn’t even use your name. You’re safe, you hear me?”

  “$20,000!?”

  Layla was pacing back and forth in Saul’s office in a fury. She had received the check from Lion Studios that morning along with a letter that had some legalese mumbo jumbo she didn’t understand.

  “That barely even covers the damage!” she ranted.

  Saul was looking down at the letter. “Apparently, they are going on the assumption that they’ll be required to indemnify your insurance company.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “It means they know you have insurance to cover the damage and they will have to—”

  “That’s not the point!” she interrupted. “They are the ones that did me wrong!”

  “Yes, Layla but—”

  “On top of which, what am I supposed to do with $20,000? I won’t even have an income for at least the next six months. Then after that, who even knows if I’ll get any business considering they’ve ruined my reputation?”

  “Layla, we can—”

  “My reputation!” she said, just thinking about it. “Did they even factor that in? Of course they didn’t. What do they know about the wedding business? Even if they did they probably wouldn’t even care. In fact, I bet they are down there in their big Hollywood offices laughing about how they’re screwing me over right now.”

  The thought made her royally pissed off. How dare they?

  How dare he?

  Layla knew why she was really mad. Of course the amount they were paying her was an insult. The fact that Patrick had been involved was what infuriated her.

  The day of the accident he had been a convenient target for her angst. All the conflicting emotions she had had about her bakery, the ruined wedding cake, and the feelings she knew she had for him had come to a boil so intense that it had made it difficult to even look at him without exploding.

  And yet, that was exactly what she had done.

  Of course she hadn’t heard from him since. She’d made it clear long before she had insisted he “get out,” that she wasn’t interested; no matter what her heart was now telling her.

  Now he was giving it right back to her.

  “We have to do something Saul,” she continued. “We can’t let him—them get away with it.”

  She cast a quick glance in his direction to see if he had caught her slip up. His look told her that he wasn’t born yesterday. He knew full well why she was so angry.

  “Are you done ranting?” he asked with a patient smile. “Just so you know, if I was actually acting as your real attorney and not a friend, that little tantrum of yours would have cost you $100.”

  “I’m sorry Saul, it’s just—

  “I know. Do you think I’m blind, sweetheart?”

  Her eyes shot up at him.

  “Don’t even bother denying it. You’re hurt. I get it. You feel that Patrick did you wrong. But feelings have no place in the law. It makes you sloppy.”

  “But—”

  Saul put a silencing hand up in the air. “That isn’t to say that you don’t deserve a hell of a lot more than this piddly sum they gave you.”

  Layla settled back down in her seat, somewhat assuaged. “So what should I do?”

  “Give ‘em hell, sweetheart. Give ‘em hell.”

  10

  “Two Million Dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Patrick looked out the window behind Spencer Simon’s desk with a laconic smile. Let the founder and president of Lion Studios rant; he was used to tuning the man out before getting down to business. Besides, the panoramic view of the studio grounds with the Hollywood Hills behind them was quite pleasant today despite the lingering haze of smog.

  “Who does this bitch think she is? Her insurance is already covering most of the damage.”

  That drew his attention back to the man. He saw James Davidson, the other, much older senior attorney for Lion Studios, take note of the Patrick’s hardening jawline and subtly shake his head in a warning. Patrick ignored him.

  “Are you going to rant all morning or did you actually call us up here to help you find a solution to this?”

  Spencer squinted the bulging eyes in his frog face. “What?”

  “Unless of course you want to pay out the two million dollars, which is frankly a hell of a lot fairer than the $20,000 you originally offered her.”

  “Fair? Fair? What the fuck do I care about fair?”

  “You understand how these things work, Patrick,” James said in a more reasonable tone, heading Spencer off before he went into another tirade. “We go as low as we think they’ll take.”

  “Well, that worked out well for you, didn’t it?”

  James gave him a warning look that he again ignored.

  “Perhaps if I hadn’t been carted off to Miami to deal with Rebecca Flores and her latest meltdown, I could have given you a bit more information to work with.”

  “Perhaps we thought you were getting a bit too…personally involved in the case?” James said.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Patrick asked, looking the older man, his friend and mentor, directly in the eye. James had been with Lion Studios since its inception 15 years ago. Prior to that he’d been a stellar agent to several well known headliners. He had a suave, patrician air complete with silver hair and light blue eyes that could be warm and friendly or calculatingly icy. Right now they were quickly downshifting into the latter.

  “Don’t be coy Patrick. It’s me you’re dealing with. You have driven up there every Friday, and don’t tell me it was to take tours at the local vineyards. We have several reports of you interacting with Ms. Brown in something beyond a professional capacity.”

  “What your partner here is trying to say is, we know you’re screwing the girl,” Spencer summed up.

  “First of all, who I’m screwing is none of your business. Second of all, even if I was it does not detract from my ethical obligations. But since we’re on the topic of my ‘professional capacity’ with the woman,” he shot Spencer a hard look, “I could have told you how incredibly stubborn she is. There was no way she was going to be low-balled on this. I could have also told you she would most likely be seeking out the help of the local town lawyer who just happens to have not only graduated from Harvard but was formerly a senior partner in the L.A. branch of Douglas & Foster.

  “We could have probably ended this fiasco and you’d be out maybe one or two hundred thousand dollars tops. Now you’ve opened the litigation floodgates.”

  “Well, it seems as if you do know her quite well, Patrick,” James said, leaning back in his chair to give him an assessing look. He shifted his eyes to Spencer.

  There was an unspoken, pre-arranged agreement in that look and Patrick waited for the hammer to fall.

  “Since you’re so friendly with Ms. Brown, and even better, her attorney Mr. Weinstein, we’re sending you up with a settlement offer.”

  Patrick waited a beat, looking between the two of them. “Why me?”

  “We’d like this, as you referred to it, fiasco over with” James said, smoothing down the pants of his $2000 dollar navy pinstripe suit. “Frankly, the publicity has been bad enough
with Kevin Day”—he rolled his eyes—“making such a fuss in order to cover his own ass. He’s not doing us any favors. So, the fewer loose ends we have to tie up, come release date, the better. Especially loose ends that just happen to be attractive, independent, small business owners in quaint little towns. And you just so happen to be friendly with the locals,” he said amicably.

  Patrick fell back into his chair and looked back and forth between the two men.

  “So you think I’ll have some pull because I have some familiarity with the parties involved.”

  “Well, I certainly hope so, Patrick. Otherwise what was the point of all those weekend getaways?” James said with an unamused smile.

  Patrick turned his attention back to the picture beyond the window. His heart skipped a beat at the idea of seeing Layla again. Certainly, he would have preferred better circumstances, but anything that would put him in the same room as her again was not something he would be turning down. Even if she still hated him with the same passion she’d had when she told him to leave.

  “How much are we offering this time? And don’t even think of sending me up there with another pathetic shit-show of a figure,” he said in a warning tone.

  “No more than $500,000,” said James.

  “And we expect you to work your way up to that, if you get my drift,” Spencer clarified. “To be blunt, I will not be a happy camper if I find myself actually writing a check for that amount.”

  Patrick gave Spencer a placid smile. “Perfectly.”

  Layla twisted her fingers in nervousness. It had been almost three weeks since she had last seen Patrick and now he was coming up to Olla again. She was with Saul in his little law office which was composed of the small waiting area with exactly two chairs, his office which had a nice sized desk and two comfortable chairs for clients and a tiny conference room, with a table that seated four people.

  “I can’t sit here waiting,” she said, getting up from one of the chairs across from where he sat behind his desk, cool as a cucumber.