Bram shot to his feet and planted a cool kiss on her cheek. “Rory, it’s great to see you. You look beautiful, as always. Did you enjoy your lunch?”
“Very much. I can’t believe the two of you are sitting at the same table without a loaded weapon.”
“Mine’s in my purse,” Georgie said with a Scooter grin.
Bram curled his hand around Georgie’s shoulder. “Water under the bridge. We made peace a long time ago.”
“Really?” Rory slipped her purse higher on her arm and gave Bram a long, hard stare. “Take care of Georgie. This town has a limited supply of nice people, and we can’t afford to lose one of them.” With a nod, she turned away and headed across the patio.
Bram’s smooth smile faded. He glared down at Georgie. “When did you and Rory get to be such good buddies?”
“We’re not.”
Without excusing himself, he headed across the patio after Rory.
Being with Bram was as draining as ever, and Georgie welcomed having a few minutes to recharge. The dessert arrived. Her stomach rebelled. She averted her eyes and thought about the day her father had given her the pilot script for Skip and Scooter. She’d had no idea her life was about to change forever.
The show’s silly premise had been perfect sitcom fare. Scooter Brown was a spunky fourteen-year-old orphan who showed up at the luxurious Scofield mansion on Chicago’s posh North Shore. Scooter was trying to stay out of foster care by locating a stepsister who’d once worked there, but the stepsister had long since disappeared. With no place to go, Scooter had hidden out at the mansion only to be discovered by stuffy, fifteen-year-old Skip, the heir to the Scofield fortune. He, along with the servants, became unwillingly involved in a plot to hide her from the Scofield adults.
No one had expected the show to last more than a season, but the cast had exceptional chemistry, and the show’s writing staff had come up with inventive plots. More important, they’d managed to deepen the core characters beyond their initial stereotypes.
Georgie gave Bram a vicious smile. “Finished sucking up to Rory?”
“I went out to buy cigarettes.”
“Sure you did.”
“To buy cigarettes and suck up. I like to multitask. Is our lunch from hell finally over?”
“Before it even began.”
Bram insisted on waiting inside with her until the valet brought her car. She braced herself, and, sure enough, as soon as they hit the sidewalk, the jackals surrounded them. Bram slipped a supposedly protective arm around her shoulders—she wanted to bite it off—held up his hand, and gave the cameras his dazzling smile. “Just a couple of old friends getting together for lunch,” he said over their shouts. “Don’t make anything more out of it.”
“You guys are supposed to hate each other.”
“Have you buried the hatchet?”
“Are you dating?”
“Georgie, have you talked to Lance? Does he know you’re seeing Bram?”
Bram assumed an unhappy expression she knew was totally phony. “Give us a break, guys. It’s only lunch. And don’t pay any attention to those rumors about a Skip and Scooter reunion show. It’s not going to happen.”
Reunion show?
The paps went nuts.
“Is there a script?”
“Has the rest of the cast signed on?”
“When are you going to shoot?”
Bram muscled her through the crowd to her car. She tried to slam his fingers in the door, but he was too quick. As she pulled away, she made herself smile and wave to the cameras, but the moment she was out of sight, she let out a scream.
There was no reunion show, rumored or otherwise. Bram had made it up to punish her.
Chapter 3
On Saturday morning Georgie parked her car just off Temescal Canyon Road, sliding in behind a dusty blue Bentley and a red Benz Roadster. With the paparazzi still asleep from last night’s club action, she didn’t have any unwelcome escorts. “You’re late!” Sasha said as Georgie got out. “Too busy smooching it up with Bramwell Shepard?”
“Yeah, that’s what I was doing, all right.” Georgie slammed the car door.
Sasha laughed. She looked incredible as always, tall and willowy in a white L.A.M.B. hoodie and gray pants. She’d pulled her straight brunette hair into a ponytail and shaded her face with a pink visor.
“Ignore Sasha.” April, the oldest and only truly sane member of her inner friendship circle, wore a black T-shirt from her husband’s last tour. “She just drove up thirty seconds ago.”
“I overslept,” Sasha said. “Young people do that.”
April was in her early fifties, with beautiful bold features, a dramatic square-jawed face, and a glow that spoke of well-earned contentment. She’d been Georgie’s stylist for years, but even more important, she was a dear friend. April tossed her streaky blond hair and gave Sasha a sweet smile. “I slept like a dream. But then I had hot sex last night.”
Sasha frowned. “Yeah, well, I’d have had hot sex, too, if I was married to Jack Patriot.”
“But you’re not, now are you?” April said smugly.
Three decades earlier, April had been a famous rock-and-roll groupie, but her notorious days were long behind her. She was now the wife of legendary rocker Jack Patriot as well as the mother of a famous NFL quarterback and a recent grandmother. She no longer worked as a stylist, except as a favor to Georgie.
Georgie tucked her hair behind her ears and slipped on a ball cap. She pulled a backpack heavy with water bottles from her car. She was the only one of them who didn’t mind wearing a pack, so she carried all the water, a calorie-burner they’d been trying to talk her out of since she’d gotten so thin, but she refused to cave.
Sometimes she wondered how women who didn’t have girlfriends coped with life. In her own life, these were the friends who never let her down, even though they were so frequently separated by geography, making these Saturday-morning hikes a rarity. Sasha lived in Chicago. April lived in L.A. but spent as much time as she could at the family farm in Tennessee. Meg Koranda, the baby of the group, was off on another of her journeys. None of them were exactly sure where.
Sasha led them toward the trailhead. She held back from her normal killer pace so Georgie, who used to be their leader, could keep up. “Tell us exactly what happened with Bram,” she said.
“Honestly, Georgie, what were you thinking?” April frowned.
“It was an accident.” Georgie yanked on her backpack. “On my part anyway. Totally premeditated on his.” She told them about her plan to start serial dating, then explained what had happened at The Ivy. She avoided mentioning her marriage proposal to Trevor, not because she didn’t trust them—unlike Lance, these women would never betray her—but because she didn’t want her closest friends to know she was even more pathetic than they realized. By the time they reached the open ridge above the canyon, she was gasping for breath.
The last of the morning chill had burned off, and they could see the coastline from Santa Monica Bay to Malibu. They stopped for a moment to take off their jackets and tie the sleeves around their waists. Sasha pulled out two candy bars and offered one to Georgie, trying to be casual about it, but Georgie declined. “I ate this morning. Honest.”
“A spoonful of yogurt,” April said.
“A whole carton. It’s getting better. Really.”
They didn’t believe her.
“Well, I’m starved,” Sasha said.
As she bit into her candy bar, neither Georgie nor April pointed out that Sasha Holiday, the founder of Holiday Healthy Eating, might want to munch on a piece of fruit or a Holiday Power Bar instead of a Milky Way. Sasha was a secret junk-food junkie, something only they knew. Not that it showed on her body.
Sasha tucked the wrapper into the bodice of her white top where it made a lump under the stretchy fabric. “Let’s think this through. Maybe seeing Bram isn’t such a bad idea. For sure it’ll distract everybody from talking about Lance and St. Jade.”
She took a bite. “Plus, Bram Shepard is still the hottest bad boy in town.”
Georgie hated hearing anything even remotely complimentary about Bram. “He’s not hot at the box office,” she said. “And I’m lucky his drug dealer didn’t show up while we were eating.”
Sasha stuck the candy bar between her teeth and slipped behind Georgie so she could unzip the backpack and pull out their water bottles. “Trev told me Bram hasn’t done drugs in years.”
“Trev’s gullible.” Georgie twisted off the top of her bottle. “No more talk about Bram, okay? I’m not letting him spoil my morning.” He’d spoiled enough, she thought.
They spent the next two miles hiking on a fire road that wound through the sycamore, live oak, and bay. Georgie relished the feeling of privacy. They reached a shallow creek bed. Sasha leaned over to stretch her legs. “I have the best idea. Let’s all go to Vegas next weekend.”
April knelt next to the water. “That town isn’t good for me. And Jack and I have plans.”
Sasha snorted. “Naked plans.”
April grinned, and Georgie smiled with her, but inside she felt the familiar pain of betrayal. Once, she’d been as certain of Lance’s love as April was of Jack Patriot’s. Then Lance had met Jade Gentry, and everything had changed.
Lance and Jade had been filming a movie together in Ecuador. Lance had played a dashing soldier of fortune and Jade was a nerdy archaeologist, definitely a stretch, considering her exotic beauty. During Lance’s early phone calls, he’d told Georgie how Jade was so absorbed in her work as a professional do-gooder that she seldom fraternized with the crew and that she spent so much time on the phone advocating for her pet causes, she didn’t always have her lines memorized.
But gradually the stories had stopped. And Georgie hadn’t noticed.
She turned to Sasha. “A trip to Vegas sounds just right. Count me in.” She imagined photos of Georgie York and her glamorous friend whooping it up in Sin City. If she followed the trip with a few months of serial dating as she’d originally planned, maybe the stories of “Georgie’s Unending Heartbreak” would finally give way to “Georgie’s Wild Nights.”
Sasha began to sing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Georgie made herself do a little dance. It was a good idea. A great idea. Exactly what she needed.
What do you mean you had to go back to Chicago?” Georgie hissed into her cell phone six days later. She was at a table in the Bellagio’s Le Cirque restaurant where Sasha was supposed to be meeting her to kick off their Vegas weekend.
Sasha sounded harried instead of her normal sarcastic self. “I left three messages. Why didn’t you call me back?”
Because Georgie had accidentally left her cell in her suitcase and only retrieved it on her way to the restaurant.
“We had a fire in the warehouse,” Sasha went on. “I had to get back right away.”
“Is everybody okay?”
“Yes, but there’s a lot of damage. Georgie, I know the Vegas trip was my idea. I’d never have stood you up like this if—”
“Don’t be silly. I’ll be fine.” Sasha was cool in a crisis, but she also wasn’t the tough nut she pretended to be. “Take care of yourself, and call me when you know more. Promise.”
“I will.”
After Georgie hung up, she gazed around the hotel’s jewel-like dining room with its silk-tented ceiling and view of Lake Bellagio. Several of the diners were openly staring at her, and she realized she was once again alone at a table for two. She left a hundred-dollar bill by her water goblet and slipped out into the casino through the restaurant’s star-studded entry. She kept her head down as she walked past the Monopoly slot machines.
“I swear, you’re stalking me.”
She whipped around and saw Bram Shepard standing outside Circo, the sister restaurant to the one she’d just fled. He was predictably gorgeous in jeans and a pinstriped dress shirt with white French cuffs, a mix of casual and elegant that should have looked awful, but didn’t. The casino lighting had turned his lavender eyes into mercury. He was like one of the Seven Wonders of the World—except he’d been tarnished by too much acid rain.
“This is so not an accident,” she said.
“As a matter of fact, it is.”
“Yeah, right.” She moved quickly, trying to get away before anyone spotted them, but he fell into step next to her. “I had a benefit,” he said.
“I don’t care. Go away.”
“It was a corporate shindig. I got twenty-five thousand dollars for spending two hours at the company cocktail party mingling with the guests.”
“Not exactly a benefit.”
“A benefit for me.”
“It figures.” She knew a dozen C-list celebrities who made a living like this, but not one of them admitted it.
She walked still faster, but it was too late. They were already attracting attention, no big surprise, since last week’s lunch date was splashed all over this week’s tabloids. She’d wanted positive stories she could control, and there was nothing controllable or positive about Bram Shepard.
They passed a circular bar with a rock band grinding out a Nickelback cover. She couldn’t get away now, so she plastered on a smile. It was time she let him know her pushover days were behind her. “Let me guess,” she said as they wound through the machines. “You’re heading for the bedroom of an aging corporate mogul’s third wife. She’s paying you for extra services.”
“Want to come along? Imagine how much she’d cough up to get it on with both of us.”
“Thanks for thinking of me, but unlike you, I’m still filthy rich, so I haven’t been reduced to selling myself.”
“Who are you kidding? I saw you in Pretty People. You sold yourself to make that bomb.”
She’d tried to convince her father the movie was a mistake, but he refused to listen. Failure was starting to cling to her like bad perfume.
“You should sue whoever did your costumes for that film.” He winked at a cute Asian blackjack dealer. “They’d have done better to capitalize on your legs instead of your bust.”
“While you’re pointing out my flaws, don’t forget my pop eyes and my rubber mouth and—”
“You don’t have pop eyes. And a rubber mouth hasn’t exactly hurt Julia Roberts.”
But Georgie wasn’t Julia Roberts.
His eyes slid over her. She was tall, but he was still half a head taller. “Nice look tonight, by the way. It almost hides how scrawny you are. April must still be styling you.”
“She is.” Although Georgie had chosen this V-neck sheath, which was printed in a black-and-white Jackson Pollock–splatter paint pattern. It hung straight from her shoulders, and the black leather belt slung low around the hips gave it a flapper feel. She’d arranged her hair in long, spiky pieces around her face and accessorized with a pair of chunky bangles.
He checked out a leggy blonde who was openly staring at him. “So tell me…Is the hunt still on, or have you found a guy stupid enough to marry you?”
“Dozens. Fortunately, I came to my senses in time. It’s amazing what a little electric shock therapy will do for you. You should try it.”
He thumped her once between the shoulder blades. “I’ll say this for you, Scoot. You still know how to get yourself in those embarrassing little jams. Walking in on your tender scene with Trev was the best time I’ve had in months.”
“Which only shows how sad your narrow little life really is.”
They’d reached the crowded lobby. Its gorgeously gaudy ceiling of Dale Chihuly glass flowers didn’t mesh well with the rest of the decor but was beautiful nonetheless. The buzz began immediately, and people stopped what they were doing to ogle them. Georgie plastered on her biggest smile. One woman lifted her cell phone to snap a picture. Great. This was just great.
“Let’s get out of here.” Bram grabbed her arm and pushed her through the crowd. The next thing she knew, they were in an elevator that smelled of Jo Malone’s Tuberose. He slid a key card into a slot on
the panel and punched in a floor. Their reflections stared back at her from the mirrored walls—Skip and Scooter all grown up. For the barest fraction of a second, she wondered who was watching the twins while Mom and Dad had a night on the town.
The elevator began to move. She reached around him and pressed the button for the thirtieth floor.
“It’s not even eleven o’clock,” he said. “Let’s have some fun first.”
“Good idea. I’ll get my Tazer.”
“Still as prickly as ever. You’re all shiny package, Georgie, but there’s no present inside. I’ll bet you never even let Lance the Loser see you naked.”
She pressed her hands to her cheeks. “I was supposed to take off my clothes? Why didn’t somebody tell me?”
He rested his shoulder against the elevator wall, crossed his ankles, and gave her his expert bone-melting once-over. “You know what I wish. I wish I’d nailed Jade Gentry when I had the chance. That woman is pure sex.”
His comment should have devastated her, but this was Bram, so her fighting instincts kicked in. “You never had a chance with St. Jade. She picks all her men from the A-list, and Lance’s last film grossed eighty-seven million.”
“Lucky bastard. Dude can’t act for shit.”
“As opposed to your incredible box-office record. I have to admit, though…you’re looking good.” She patted her purse. “Don’t let me walk off without the name of your fabulous plastic surgeon.”
He uncrossed his ankles. “Jade called me a few years back, but I was so out of it I never called her back. That’s the real way drugs screw up your brain, but nobody ever warns kids about shit like that.” The doors opened on the twenty-eighth floor. He grabbed her elbow. “Party time. Let’s go.”
“Let’s not.”
He dragged her out. “Come on. I’m bored.”
“Not my problem.” She tried to dig her heels into the thick carpet that ran down the middle of the opulent hallway.
His grip tightened. “You must have forgotten what I overheard at Trev’s house, or you’d realize you’re basically my slave.”