A Hundred Ways to Break Up (Let's Make This Thing Happen 2)

by Adams, PJ

  Also from PJ Adams:

  Backstage Pass (Let's Make This Thing Happen 1)

  "Tonight on stage, Ray Sandler was all those old fantasies come back to life. Emily Rivers soaked up his every move and she felt alive again for the first time in what felt like years. She never thought he would actually notice her, though."

  Emily is a successful woman in the tail end of a failing marriage. Ray is the reformed wild boy of rock, back on stage again for the first time in years. As a teenager Emily had Ray's posters all over her bedroom wall so when she gets backstage tickets it's as if her dreams have come true. Actually meeting him is an unexpected highlight of the evening, but that's as far as it could ever go. They come from such different worlds: what could an international star ever see in a grounded, curvy woman like Emily?

  A story of secret romance in the world of the super-rich, an international celebrity and his unlikely BBW love. Steamy and passionate and full of the twists and turns familiar to readers of PJ Adams' work, including the bestsellers Winner Takes All and Black Widow.

  Backstage Pass is available from: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and other Amazon stores.

  Contents

  A Hundred Ways to Break Up

  Afters: about the author, and hot samples from other books

  Credits and copyright information

  Join the Polly J Adams mailing list and get future releases for $0.99.

  A Hundred Ways to Break Up

  Let’s Make This Thing Happen 2

  PJ Adams

  If there are ninety-nine ways to get together,

  There’s a hundred ways to break up

  Ray Sandler

  1

  “It works, you know. Those shades really disguise you. You could pass almost anywhere unrecognized in those.”

  “Really?”

  Emily loved that about him. The layer of innocence and naivety that undercut the worldly rock-star cool. The fact that she could say almost anything and his starting point was always to believe her. That said a lot about someone, and not just that he was a sucker for bad jokes at his expense.

  She raised an eyebrow, and he got it. She was joking. The Ray-bans, the scuffed leather jacket and black jeans... there was no disguising that this was Ray Sandler standing before her, former frontman of the Angry Cans. Those Ray-bans could never disguise a face that had featured on the cover of almost every glossy magazine in the world, particularly when he’d often been wearing shades in the photographs.

  He stood, slightly awkward, under a verandah draped with flowering clematis. I’ll get the car to pick you up at the station and drop you round at L’Auberge’s back entrance, he’d said. I’ll meet you there. We’ll be discreet.

  Someone like Ray Sandler could never really do discreet. Not like Emily Rivers could: her whole life consisted of doing discreet.

  Up until now, at least.

  She took the initiative, stepped forward, put a hand to his chest and tipped her head up. Even now, a stab of insecurity stole over her: what if he didn’t dip his head forward to meet her kiss? What if she’d got it wrong?

  He dipped his head.

  His lips were firm, the contact brief, but with an impact that lingered. He kisses like chili. An utterly random thought, but it was the first analogy that came to mind: the way his touch lingered, the afterburn.

  He was studying her, smiling.

  Still so many pinch-me moments: she knew by now that this was more than just a groupie thing, or a casual fling, but still – this was Ray Sandler! She could still close her eyes and see those Angry Cans posters on her bedroom wall, from when she was a teenager.

  “Shall we go in?”

  He was still smiling. Smug bastard.

  She peered towards the restaurant in what she hoped was a vaguely dismissive way. “I guess,” she said, and allowed him to take place his hand on the small of her back and guide her inside.

  §

  So where does someone as instantly recognizable as Ray Sandler go to be discreet?

  On the face of it, a Michelin-starred restaurant by the Thames wasn’t the first place Emily would have suggested. But then she hadn’t known that L’Auberge had an entire suite of private dining rooms they didn’t publicize, and an alternative back entrance approached by its own private road that fed into a car park separate from the main one.

  She’d never done this before. All this sneaking around and hiding away from public view seemed pretty cloak and dagger. It forced you into a strange mind-set, a new way of thinking.

  “You know this can’t work, don’t you?” she said, studying him closely across the table. “I’m married. You’re married. You’re just about to relaunch your career. You have an album coming out. The press will be all over you. Social media, too. You’re public property. This can never work.”

  Their private dining room was just off one of the main restaurant areas, its only protection a narrow arch and a quirk in the architecture that cut them off from public view. It gave the sense of still being part of the restaurant, while simultaneously being removed and secluded. Even as they were hidden away, it had the feeling of being normal. If eating in this kind of place could ever be considered normal.

  Their table was by a wide window, with views out over a narrow strip of manicured grass to the river, the scene lit with golden evening sunlight. Swans bobbed on the water, as if anchored in position for their decorative effect. Pleasure boats drifted past, and sometimes children would wave.

  “You like it?” asked Ray, that smile still pulling at his mouth.

  “It’s all so...” She couldn’t find the word. Quaint. English.

  “Rock’n’roll?”

  They laughed.

  “We recorded the album here,” he said. “Well, not here. The studio’s in a converted narrow-boat, just along the tow-path. Twelve days, flat out. A track a day. Now that was rock’n’roll. Then five months and counting on the mix, detail freak that I am.”

  That smile totally transformed his face. She loved it. His comment reminded her of that first night, after the surprise comeback gig at the Roxette. He’d rocked the place, but then afterwards he’d been so insecure about his performance, about the new songs, about how the fans would react. Record an entire album inside two weeks and then spend months obsessing over fine-tuning was exactly that mix.

  “I ate here all the time while we were recording,” he said. “This place was like our works canteen.”

  She laughed. She couldn’t help herself: he said that kind of thing without any sense of irony. Half the time he was joking, but the other half... this was a world he took for granted. She could easily believe that L’Auberge, one of the finest restaurants in the country, was just a handy place for a sandwich on breaks from work for him.

  Time to get back to the point. “This is never going to work.”

  “Are you always like this?”

  He was sitting with his elbows on the table, hands clasped, chin resting on his knuckles. She’d pissed him off. She could tell she had.

  “Like what?” Trying not to sound too defensive.

  “So utterly fucking beautiful. The light coming in that window. The way it catches your hair. Your eyes. Takes my breath away.”

  That was so not what she had expected.

  “Wine?” He nudged the leather-bound wine list towards her. When they’d come in, the maître d’ had said this was only the summary list and that the sommelier was on hand to provide tailored recommendations from the cellar if Emily chose – he had addressed only her; Ray must have heard this all before on all those lunch breaks from work.

  “
You choose.”

  He ordered a Pouilly-Fuissé. The bottle came almost immediately, and Emily tasted it. Delicate with a hint of oak – if asked, she’d have said it tasted like a Chardonnay, but the best Chardonnay she’d ever had.

  “The spinach and sorrel soup is stunning,” he said. “They serve it with two soft-poached quail’s eggs floating in it. It’s the best soup you’ll ever taste.”

  ‘Works canteen’ indeed. This had never been simply a convenient place for a sandwich for him. He’d brought her here to wow her.

  It was one of those moments. A moment when she caught herself just looking at him. Not because he was Ray Sandler, her fantasy poster-boy from ten or more years ago. Not because now in his mid-thirties those pin-up good looks had matured and transformed in much the same way his voice had: taken on a tough maturity, a grittiness. Not because he was stinking rich and worldly and was using all that to impress her.

  Because he gave a shit.

  Because he could say things like how utterly fucking beautiful she was and she knew that – no matter what she thought – in his eyes, at least, she was.

  “Was that a ‘yes’ to the soup?” That smile again.

  She nodded. She didn’t trust words.

  He raised a forefinger and a waitress appeared. “The soup, please,” he said. “And I’ll have the tournedos de cabillaud. Thank you.” He directed the smile at the waitress. He treated the staff like real people, something she always admired. Not like Thom, who barely gave waiting staff a glance, let alone a ‘thank you’ or a ‘please’.

  That wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t do that: comparing Ray with Thom. Apart from anything, it really screwed with her mind.

  “We’re married,” she said, remembering the point Ray had deflected her from minutes before.

  He smiled, and said, “If only.”

  “Bastard. That’s not what I meant.”

  And he had the gall to look hurt.

  He reached across the table and put a hand on hers. “Sorry,” he said. Then: “Relax. We’re here. Enjoy. We can do all the worrying later.”

  He raised his glass and the cut crystal scattered shards of sunlight. “Sláinte.”

  He was right. They’d managed to slip away, find some time together. She shouldn’t be spoiling it with worrying about the future or the risks. She raised her glass, said, “Cheers,” and took another sip. The wine really was exquisite. She remembered the look on Ray’s face when they’d shared a bottle of cheap red at the Roxette. That must have been like a coffee lover drinking cheap instant.

  He broke his own advice almost instantly. “So what did you tell him? About tonight?”

  She shrugged. Looked away. Didn’t he know that talking about her husband was never going to be an aphrodisiac?

  “What did you tell her? Róisín.” The wife to whom he was still ‘technically’ married, as he’d put it.

  He didn’t look away, she’d give him that.

  “I haven’t spoken to her in weeks,” he said. “She goes through Mo for anything financial, or business-related. We’ve lived separate lives for years, but she’s still part of the infrastructure, part of Ray Sandler Incorporated. Nothing more than that, though. What about you? You and Thom?”

  “You really know how to woo a girl.” She knew she was showing double standards: she’d been the one to raise their marriages, after all. This was how she was around Ray: her mind would skip from one thing to another, always looking for threads to pull, as if she had to keep knocking herself back down every time her heart soared.

  She’d been looking down at her glass, but now she looked up into those dark eyes. All she had to do was glance away for the spell to be broken and her insecurities to come flooding in. But when she met that look... “Kiss me,” she said.

  She leaned forward, but made him do all the work: made him half-stand, lean forward with his thighs pressing against the table, stretch towards her until he could finally press those firm lips against hers. More lingering this time, a tentative pressing of tongue against her lips, against her teeth. A hand briefly at the back of her head, pulling her hard into his kiss, and then releasing, pulling away, sitting again.

  How did he do that? All the doubts, all the uncertainties, swept away in a moment. Her heart was thumping, her breathing fast and shallow. Her skin must be flushed a deep scarlet.

  She looked away, looked back, and that smile was tugging at his mouth again, his eyes drinking her in.

  “Bastard,” she said softly, and his smile broadened.

  2

  “I told him I was out with a group from work, then stopping over at a friend’s place.”

  Him. For some reason she found it difficult to refer to her husband by his name in front of Ray. Her friend Marcia had caught her out recently saying she was ‘still’ married to Thom, and that said it all. She hadn’t made any plans to leave him, but she had clearly already been thinking of her marriage as a finite thing. And yet... here, now, it was easier to think of him as a him, not Thom.

  “Will he call your friend to check?”

  She didn’t like this. It was too calculating. Ray sounded like an old hand at this kind of thing.

  She took another spoonful of her soup. He’d been right: it was sublime, and it went perfectly with the wine – had he steered her towards both deliberately?

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Really. Marcia’s been telling me to dump him for ages.” She’d tried to turn it into a joke, but that didn’t quite work. She put a hand on his. “It’s okay.”

  He nodded. “I just don’t want you hurt,” he said, and looked away, out of the window, in a brief show of vulnerability.

  When he looked back Emily pointed to his plate and said, “I don’t know if you’re one of these people who think it’s awful bad manners to share, but really... that looks so good!”

  He laughed, then broke away a section from a perfect round disc of cod, swept it through the thin, frothy sauce and held it across the table for her in what was almost a mirror of their earlier kiss: holding the fork so she had to lean forward, stretch, until he placed the fish gently in her open mouth.

  The cod was firm at first, but then suddenly it just dissolved in a delicate flood of flavors, of fish, butter, parsley, a little dill. If she’d chosen, she would never have gone for something as commonplace as cod in a restaurant like L’Auberge, but this was sensational.

  He was watching her, waiting for a response.

  She was still leaning forward. She smiled, and said, “You were just hoping for a peek down my top, weren’t you?”

  His gaze dropped to her cleavage – unavoidable after a comment like that – and then back to meet her look. “Where have you been?” he said, almost to himself, and then he looked away again, turning his head with a visible effort.

  She looked at his profile, uncertainly. Something had just happened, but she didn’t know what.

  An instant.

  A moment when behavior said more than words ever could.

  A tension. A yearning need. A...

  She didn’t know.

  She looked down into her lap.

  She’d never felt so drawn to another person as she did right then.

  She looked back up, and those dark eyes had fixed on her again. “It’s all moved very quickly, hasn’t it?” she said. It was only a matter of days since that comeback show at the Roxette. Technically, this was their first real date.

  “My world moves at a very different pace,” said Ray. At first that sounded an arrogant thing to say: him telling her It’s all about me. But she knew what he meant. She’d only had glimpses of his world, but that had been enough to see that it was very different to hers, and part of that was that everything was bigger, faster, more urgent.

  “Do you ever wish it hadn’t happened for you?” she asked. “That you could walk down a street without anyone noticing you. Live in an ordinary house on an ordinary street.”

  He raised an eyebrow and let his gaze roam around the
ir private dining room. Then: “Hell, no,” he said, and laughed. “Believe me: you very quickly get used to all this, and it’s really not bad.”

  §

  She shouldn’t have checked her phone. Whatever she found would only make her worry. Silence and she’d wonder what Thom was doing, what he was thinking. Or if there were messages...

  How’s it going? :)

  That was the first one. How could he sound so unlike himself in a mere three words and a smiley? It sounded forced: when was the last time Thom had asked her how her evening was going? When had he last shown the slightest interest? And when had he started using smileys? He was a man who punctuated and spell-checked all his messages. All of it: too much forced effort.

  There was another one sent just over an hour later:

  You’re quiet tonight. Not even anything on Facebook. Having fun? x

  There was a missed call, too. What was he after? Perhaps she should just log on to Facebook and check in from L’Auberge, tag Ray as her companion, and be done with it.

  Damn it. Why was Thom suddenly paying attention? Why was he checking her on Facebook? She didn’t like it. Didn’t like how it put her on edge, how it made her feel seedy when she was being so thoroughly spoilt.

  Just then, Ray came back, waving his own phone apologetically. “Sorry,” he said. “Just Mo. Says a reporter’s been asking about the new material.”

  “That’s good, surely? You’re going to need the publicity when the album comes out, aren’t you?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Me and the press don’t always get on. I don’t like all that. The album’s not ready yet, and when it is Mo will handle the publicity and it will be at our own pace. I just want to focus on the music, getting it right.”

  “Has anyone ever said you can be a real diva sometimes?”

  He laughed. “Most people wouldn’t dare,” he said. “They wouldn’t want to offend me, precious diva that I am.”

  §