Still So Hot!

Brett shot a glance Elisa’s way as she edged back toward her seat. The panic was gone, but she wasn’t making grateful Bambi eyes at him, either. She looked pissed. He guessed he shouldn’t be surprised. She was probably as bewildered by his intrusion into her boot camp weekend as he was to find that his old friend was a third wheel on his Caribbean getaway.

“Hey.” He touched her arm, trying to soften her. “I meant what I said. Why don’t you and Celine take the two seats in first class? I’ll take yours. I’m sure you guys have some talking to do.”

“There weren’t two in first class when I tried to book.”

“Last-minute cancellation. Or Celine’s persuasive power.” He shrugged. “Take the seats, okay?”

Elisa gave a tight nod. Man, she was pretty. He’d forgotten. Or made himself forget. She had hair the exact color of gingerbread and hazel eyes and the smoothest skin, like a porcelain doll. He still remembered the feel of that skin pressed against his cheek, under his lips. He craved it, nights when he was tired and weak. That and the weight of her breast in his hand, her nipple hard against his fingertips, her needy noises tracing a straight line to his cock.

He was getting hard thinking about it, and that meant less blood to the brain, which couldn’t be good in a screwed-up situation like this one. Concentrate, man, he commanded himself.

“Let me get my stuff,” Elisa said. “Celine, you head up front. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Celine went obediently, and Elisa practically shoved the guy in the hoodie out of her way. She bent down to retrieve something from her seat. Yeah, that was a good view of her, too.

“What the hell, man?”

For the briefest of instants, he thought it was the voice inside his head chiding him for ogling her ass, but then he realized it was the paparazzo snarling at him. Brett shrugged. “I’m sure you’ve got extras.”

“I’m trying to do my job! You might not like it, but it’s what I do, and those were my photos you smashed.”

Brett could see the guy was one heartbeat from planting a hand in the middle of Brett’s chest and shoving. Let him try. Brett had enough aimless anger at the moment to flatten him into next week.

“Gentlemen, I need you to return to your seats,” repeated the male flight attendant. “Unless you need a personal escort?” He nodded toward the sky marshal.

The paparazzo harrumphed like an angsty teenager and slunk away. The flight attendant and sky marshal eased against the seats to let him pass.

Brett headed toward the back of the plane. He met Elisa in the aisle, where she’d just finished hoisting out her carry-on. The top few buttons of her ruffled white blouse were undone revealing the delicate thrust of her collarbone and, below that, the swell of her phenomenal breasts. A wicked taunt—the ones that got away. Over the past two years, he’d managed to mostly block the memories of kissing her and touching her. Mostly, that is, except in his dreams. He dreamed about Elisa confoundingly often—languid, dirty, wet dreams. But this was real, because she wasn’t slowly peeling off her clothes and looking at him with heat in her eyes, and she wasn’t taking slow steps toward him, which was what always happened in the dreams.

“Sit for a minute.” Elisa’s words penetrated through his fog. He was lucky she couldn’t read minds.

Her seat and the one beside it were empty—the other occupant must have been in the restroom. She slid in, and he sat beside her, hyperaware of the thinness of her blouse. He could see the hint of her skin beneath the translucent fabric.

“So, what?” she demanded. “You picked her up somewhere? And—”

“The drugstore,” he admitted, before he could stop himself.

“You picked her up at a drugstore?”

She said it like he was dirt. She’d always been like this, judgmental about his conquests.

“She had one of those red baskets, and it was full of sample bottles. I said, ‘Going on a trip?’ and she looked up at me, smiled and said, ‘Yeah. Wanna come?’”

And all right, he’d panicked. He’d looked at her pretty round face and her soft blond hair and her big breasts and he’d thought, In two weeks, it’s all over for me. No more women, no more conquests. He’d promised the network where he’d just been hired on to be a news anchor that he’d be squeaky clean. Network anchors didn’t chase tail. He’d barely beaten out his competition for this job, and his new boss had informed him that the other guy’s advantage had lain squarely in the fact that he was older, more distinguished and well established as a husband, father and grandfather. The kind of guy you wanted to believe when he told you the news.

Brett, on the other hand—

Well, Elisa’s unspoken assessment of him had probably been accurate. Women were his drug of choice and his downfall.

The truth was, standing in the drugstore, contemplating the vaguely familiar goddess in front of him, he wasn’t sure he could do it. He wasn’t sure he could be Mr. Squeaky-Clean Guy. Mr. Face of the News. Mr. Trust Me.

Pretty boy. Big man. Handsome, groomed, in control. That was who he’d been among his brothers—Zach had been the smart one, Pete the athletic one, and Brett was the good-looking one. It was what he’d traded on, with women, in his work, his whole life. Now he was here, on the brink of the anchor job, and if he couldn’t do it...

Where did that leave him? If he couldn’t be “the face of NYCN News”...

Screw that. Failure wasn’t an option. He’d been prepping for an opportunity like this one his whole life, and he wasn’t going to let anything get in his way.

Standing there in the drugstore, he had told himself that he’d accept this one invitation. Have a last hurrah, a crazy weekend with this very willing blonde bombshell. Then, he knew—he knew—he could do what the network needed him to do. He’d be ready to take on the world.

Elisa hadn’t expected to hear that Celine had been the pickup artist. She shook her head. “And you said yes?”

“I said, ‘I know you, don’t I?’”

“Smooth.”

He couldn’t tell if she was admiring or mocking, but good sense dictated the latter. “It wasn’t a pickup line. I didn’t need a pickup line. She’d already invited me to the Caribbean. Although I didn’t know yet that it was the Caribbean.”

“God!” she burst out. “You’re—”

But whatever she’d been about to say about him, she stopped.

He swallowed the urge to defend himself. He owed her nothing. He’d accepted a pretty woman’s invitation to fly on the spur of the moment to the Caribbean for a good time. It wasn’t his fault that the woman had neglected to mention she was in the middle of a dating workshop.

He’d had it all backward in the drugstore, of course. The window for a last fling, for getting women out of his system, had long since passed. He was already in the hot seat, already under scrutiny. Celine hadn’t been an opportunity; she’d been a test. He’d had the chance to start his new life as Mr. Trust Me, and he’d screwed it up.

But maybe it wasn’t too late. He’d made a mistake, but he could still right the ship and chart a new course. “Look. I’m outta here. I’ll take the next flight back.”

Elisa scowled. “You can’t do that.”

God, she was as bossy as ever. “I sure can.”

She glanced around, lowered her voice. “Who saw you together?”

“What?”

“Who saw you guys together? In the airport. I’ve had a videographer following her around, but were there also paparazzi there? Are there photos?”

He shrugged. “Yeah.”

“So you know what that means, right? Every entertainment magazine and show in the city’ll have a piece on Celine and her new man—”

He couldn’t help himself. He winced.

“Yes, that’s you.” She quirked her fingertips into quotation marks. “Celine Carr’s ‘New Man.’ That’s what you get for messing around with a celebrity. Finally found a woman you couldn’t just slip into and out of unnoticed, huh?”

“Hey.”

“Truth hurts?”