Читать книгу What If He’s the One - Kathy Jay - Страница 10

“Madly busy” summed up Maggie’s first day in Boston, which was just as well because it took her mind off Alex. Far from clearing things up and proving that they were both entirely different people at different places in their lives, meeting him again had given her an uneasy feeling that he wasn’t out of her system. She could fight it all she liked, but she’d been craving a little bit of Alex’s amazing sexual energy ever since he’d arranged her upgrade on the plane. That was ridiculous. She needed to focus on making him look great. Not that it would be a stretch. He was altogether too dreamy.

At noon she met Hannah, the photographer, at her converted warehouse studio, which was the base for the city shoot. After they’d discussed the brief, she put together the outfits, took Polaroid photos of them, and left everything ready on hanging rails.

She spent the rest of the day dashing around Boston picking up last-minute bits and bobs. Finally, she had a meeting with Natalie, the make-up artist, for a coffee and a quick chat about the looks she and Hannah were aiming for.

Anchored in a leather tub chair in a downtown coffee shop Maggie fought the buzz in her head planted there by Alex. The low hum of chatter filled her ears, and fresh aromas of newly ground beans swirled in the air. Normally she loved the smell, but she felt queasy. The prospect of working with the Wells brothers had turned into a witch’s brew of craziness that had set her nerves jangling.

“The magazine wants something dark and mysterious in keeping with the actors’ TV characters.” She took a quick sip of her decaf skinny latte. It tasted yuck, like she’d been chewing copper pennies. “It needs to be subtle,” she advised, setting down her cup and pushing it away. “Nothing too over-the-top.”

“Aw,” the make-up artist objected. “Let’s make ’em real spooky.”

“If you mean a trickle of fake blood dribbling from the corner of Alex Wells’ mouth, then no, I’m afraid not.” Maggie and Natalie laughed. “Pale and interesting is good, though. I have to warn you, it might be a bit of a challenge. I’ve met them already and they were both looking very tanned.”

Natalie was bursting with curiosity. “So what are they like? Have you worked with them before? I can’t wait.”

“I – um. No, I haven’t worked with them.” Natalie was so sweet and friendly that Maggie was tempted to tell her everything – all about how she knew Alex in a previous life.

Before he became famous.

Before she got a career as a fashion stylist.

Before she came to the conclusion that falling in love was much too risky, and that if she wanted a happy family, she was going to have to go it alone.

A sparkly, curvy twenty-something with flawless skin and a halo of dark corkscrew curls, Natalie popped a spoonful of froth from her cappuccino into her mouth. “Which one’s your favorite? Nick or Alex? I mean they’re both hot as hell, right? But if you had to choose?”

Maggie’s stomach did a somersault. Since this spur-of-the-moment styling job had come up she’d been preoccupied with work. So much so she’d lost track of days. It was over two weeks since she’d been to the clinic for the medical procedure that could change her life. She’d had artificial insemination with donor sperm. She had half a dozen pregnancy tests in her handbag and she hadn’t had the courage yet to do one. She was itching to find out the result. Was she pregnant, or wasn’t she? She had more important things to think about than discussing which of the Wells twins was the hotter.

“Oh I don’t know, Nick, I guess.” She mentally crossed her fingers against the white lie.

“No way!” Natalie picked up her coffee cup. She’d left a red lipstick print on the porcelain. “It’s Alex any day of the week for me. I’m dying to meet him.”

Maggie bit her tongue. Hitting the make-up artist with the details of her past connection with Alex would be ill-advised. She clearly had a bit of a crush on him. And as for announcing, “Excuse me, I just need to pop off and do a pregnancy test”? Well, that would be unprofessional in the extreme, and probably a bit off-putting.

Maggie steered the conversation back on topic, discussed colors, the clothes, the models, and the theme for the first shoot. Then she headed back to the hotel, feeling inappropriately light-hearted at the prospect of possibly running into Alex in the lobby.

Alex was nowhere to be seen. Maggie ended the day ordering room service and crashing out ready for an early start the next morning. She had a night of fractured sleep. Three times she woke up sprawled in the king-size bed thinking she should get up and do the pregnancy test. She didn’t. She had a mental block so strong it was as if something physical was preventing her from doing what she needed to do.

If the insemination was a success, it was because her donor had knowingly made a decision to create a life without being there. Her father hadn’t made that choice. He’d been a summer romance. Her mum was sixteen when she’d fallen in love with the golden-haired surfer boy from Australia. By the time she realized she was pregnant he’d left, and by the time she tried to tell him he was a dad, it was too late.

Her mother’s pregnancy had been a minor scandal in their seaside village. By the time her grandmother had got over the embarrassment, got used to the idea of her daughter being a teen mum, and decided that they should track down surf-boy Sam, he was dead. A seventeen- year-old adrenaline junkie, happy-go-lucky Sam had surfed a notorious point break two days after he arrived home. Taken out by a freak wave, he’d drowned on the reef. His parents sent a clipping from their local newspaper reporting his death. Maggie’s mum kept it in a shoebox under her bed with a load of photos and a heart-shaped pebble he’d given her. When she went to work in Spain she left the box behind, along with Maggie.

Technically, her father had been a sperm donor. So why shouldn’t a donor-sperm baby grow up to be as strong and independent as she’d learned to be?

Finally she fell into deep sleep. She always dreamed when she was jet-lagged, but usually she had a vague sense that she was asleep and only dreaming. This time the dream was so real that she woke up all spaced-out and it took a minute or so to register that the blissful scenario she’d been so immersed in hadn’t actually happened.

And she thanked her lucky stars it hadn’t. Because in her dream she’d slept with Alex, and her heart thudded, wondering if that embarrassing little gem was going to be written on her face the minute she set eyes on him. He’d stirred up a mess of emotions. She hadn’t just been a little bit in love with him, she’d been head over heels, and right when she’d not been able to resist him a second longer, he’d upped and gone and vanished from her world. She’d thought she was oh-so-over him, but the deep down, buried truth was that she’d gone on being hooked on him for much too long after he’d left. No one measured up to him. The guys she’d dated never stood a chance by comparison, because she didn’t allow them to. When she got anywhere near starting a relationship she let it fizzle out. Fearing rejection somewhere down the line, she pushed men away. Until Marcus. Marcus had taken her over, organized her, a self-appointed personal drill sergeant. She’d trusted him completely.

She felt raw. It didn’t help that her hormones had begun to whoosh around uncontrollably like fallen leaves being whizzed into the air on a gust of autumn wind. She wasn’t just as susceptible to the charms of Alex Wells as every other fan of the show, she was more so. She’d known him before he shot to fame – that was the trouble.

Awkwardness set in the moment Alex arrived at the studio. Hannah popped out for some takeout coffees, leaving Maggie to dress Alex ahead of Nick and the two models who hadn’t shown up yet.

The dream memory returned. It seared her mind’s eye with an image of hot, tangled bodies, obliterating reasonable thought processes. A sensuous picture of soft, warm skin and hard muscles filled her imagination; her lips seeking his, his mouth devouring hers, hands clasped, bodies entwined.

Trapped in tongue-tied silence, Maggie forced herself to focus on the brick walls and wood floors of Hannah’s warehouse studio. They helped ground her. Samples of photographic work dotted about the place gave her something more appropriate to visualize. She picked out a photo of white sailboats afloat on glassy water against the Back Bay skyline with powder-puff clouds in an azure sky, and honed in on that.

Outside, Boston basked under just such a perfect blue sky.

“Great day for it.” He oozed confidence. His drawl set off those hopping hormones again. He could make reading aloud from the telephone directory sexy without even trying.

“Couldn’t be better.” She ignored the fact that he was attempting to snare her gaze. She resolved to avoid looking him in the eye, if at all possible. If she did, he’d be bound to see all the things she’d dreamed in the night swimming in her head. Utter torture.

“Good day yesterday?”

“Um. Busy. Getting this lot ready.” She turned her back to him and stood at the hanging rail shuffling the clothes about a bit on their hangers, pretending to be absorbed in her work. “You?”

“The usual. Interviews. The final series airs here next week. And the big question on everyone’s lips is “How does Jago die?”.”

“What did you say?” Maggie grabbed a pencil and over-acted the need to score off a couple of items on her to-do list.

“I told them Nick – sorry, Jarvis – ties me up in a string of garlic, and shoves me out in the sunlight with a stake through my heart.”

Maggie turned to face him. “So it was you that started the rumor?”

“Actually – it was you! But I liked it, so I borrowed it.”

She wrinkled her nose. “So what does happen to Jago? Maybe I’ve lost the plot, but I thought he was the bad guy in this set-up?” Her tone was deliberately blasé, as if she wasn’t really that interested.

“Nice try, Maggie. I’m afraid I can’t let you in on that secret.”

“Not strangled by your brother in the sunshine with the garlic, after all? Someone should invent a board game. I bet there’d be a market for it. Great merchandising opportunity. It’s sounding more like a whodunit and less like warring vampire twins every minute.”

Wry tension twitched in the corners of Alex’s mouth. “It’s war. Make no mistake.”

Maggie guessed he wasn’t talking about their TV characters. “What’s up?”

“It’s no secret that Nick wasn’t ready for Mercy to finish. But I was. My leaving was okayed with the powers that be. They told the writers to write me out. Then the studio did an about face and cancelled the show.”

“I suppose it’s a question of balance. Without the good-vampire-twin-bad-vampire-twin thing going on there wouldn’t be much drama left.” Maggie chewed on the end of her pencil.

Alex’s shoulders tensed. He watched Maggie with deep concentration, mesmerizing her with his eyes, and lowered his voice, “I’ll swear you to secrecy. There’s a big twist in the final episode. Turns out Jago isn’t evil after all. He’s the good vampire and Nick’s character is the one that’s mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

“I’m guessing he’s not very happy with that.”

“Let’s just say that’s an understatement.” He sucked in a sharp breath and scraped his fingers through his hair. “It was time the series ended. It had a good run. If we’d gone on any longer the characters would have dried up. People would have lost interest. It’s better this way. We’re ending on a high.”

Alex’s tension filled the air in the empty studio. He stared off into space. “Nick doesn’t agree with you on that?”

He let out a grating laugh. “Nick blames me for the show being cancelled. He’s livid.”

“He’ll come round.”

“He has no choice. He’s going to LA to talk movies. I’m going to London to do theater.”

“Cool.”

“It’s time for us both to move on with our lives, and he knows it. Even if he’s not ready to admit it.”

Alex’s moodiness and her wayward pheromones produced a terrible combination of angst and attraction. She wished Hannah would come back with the coffee, although she still had that weird metallic taste in her mouth. She didn’t want to be so interested, but she was itching to know if Alex had managed to find a way back into serious acting. She couldn’t picture him headlining a West End musical, somehow. “What theater are you doing?”

“Hamlet.”

“Wow. Shakespeare in London. That’s a far cry from vampires in LA.”

“That’s the general idea.”

“To be or not to be.” She put on a tone of ominous gravity.

Suddenly she blushed, thinking about her own date with destiny. She hadn’t done the pregnancy test. She told herself she’d been way too busy, but she was putting it off.

“To be honest, I’m ready to disassociate myself from the vampire gig. It’s been a blast, but it wasn’t part of my plan. I did it because Nick wanted me to, and because I didn’t want him to miss out on his big chance.”

“You went along for the ride.”

Alex let his breath go in a long sigh. “Enjoy the ride while you’re on it?” He paused and fixed Maggie with his gaze. “It hasn’t been all bad. Far from it. But Nick needs to get over himself. He’s much too into this promo tour. Vampires is over.”

“It’s over for you, but the fans are looking forward to the final series. It can’t hurt to big it up for a few more days,” she coaxed. Alex harrumphed. “And now you’re getting to do Shakespeare, like you always wanted to, so it’s all good.” Nick might be going to discuss a movie, but it didn’t sound like he had anything definite lined up. It was little wonder he was having more difficulty than Alex letting go of the series that had made him famous. “You got your dream.”

“You remember that about me?”

“Sure I do.” She looked down at her bright-yellow nails for a second. “Why wouldn’t I?”

His sexy mouth spread into a wide smile. He started to undo his buttons. And suddenly he was stripped to the waist.

“How do you want me?”

Maggie picked her jaw up off the floor. “Um.” She focused on the row of clothes on the rail. The hangers tinkled as she faffed. “Here,” she said, as if she was actually concentrating on her job. Really she was busy enjoying the view. His broad, bronze chest and honed muscles blew her away. His hands went to his belt buckle and she couldn’t help but notice the dark line that arrowed downwards into his jeans. “I need you to change into this lot.” She pushed a well-laden hanger into his hands before he could strip off completely.

Clearly he’d been around enough wardrobe girls not to feel bashful. Why would he? With that body! He was way too hot to handle, a one-hundred-and-ten per cent sexy fireball of a man. His fingers brushed hers as he took the clothes. The contact ignited fierce heat inside her. She wished the floor would open up and swallow her. She had to remind herself that it would have been insane to turn this job down.

A hot, half-naked Alex must feature in a high percentage of women’s fantasies. And she was living the dream.

Might as well enjoy it!

Everyone arrived together. Hannah with the coffee, Natalie with the make-up, and Nick with the two stunning flame-haired, pre-Raphaelite-style models. From then it was all go. Run off her feet, Maggie clicked into super-efficient mode, making changes to the clothes to suit Hannah, keeping a tight rein on Natalie to make sure that she didn’t do anything too scary with the make-up, generally trouble-shooting, and making sure that everything was absolutely fab.

At lunch they all went to a bustling café-bar near Faneuil Hall. The walls were covered with Boston Red Sox memorabilia. The place was packed. It made Maggie smile to see how the lunching office workers and shoppers made a production out of acting like they hadn’t noticed the famous Wells brothers. Not to mention the striking six-foot models they were with. Before she joined the others at the table Hannah’s assistant had reserved, Maggie ducked into the Ladies. She bolted the cubicle door, took a deep breath and dived into her handbag to dig out a pregnancy test.

“Maggie, is that you in there?”

Oh flip. It was Natalie. She thought about putting on a very deep voice and pretending to be a transvestite to get her to leave, but she liked Natalie and she didn’t want to freak her out.

“Yes,” she squeaked.

“Oh. My. Gosh. I think I’m in love. Don’t tell my fiancé, but Nick Wells is the most delicious thing on this earth.”

Maggie abandoned her mission to establish if she was or wasn’t pregnant and exited the toilet cubicle.

“Didn’t you tell me that Alex was the vampire for you – any day of the week?”

“That was yesterday, before I’d met them. Today …” Natalie sighed dreamily. “It’s Nick.”

Maggie nudged her with her elbow. “Fight you for him.”

“No way.” Natalie slicked on a generous layer of her signature red lipstick. “You can have Alex.” She paused with a minxy grin on her face. “Judging by the way his eyes were following you all morning, I’d say you have a better chance with him. And I don’t mean in your dreams.”

Maggie froze. Unless Natalie had supernatural powers, there was no way she knew what Maggie had been dreaming. Even so her words had an uncanny effect on her resolve to appear unaffected by Alex.

“You leave my dreams out of this,” she joked. “Come on, let’s get some lunch. I’m starving.”

Paralysis set in the moment she walked into the bar. The compelling rumble of Alex’s smooth-as-the-most-exquisite-chocolate voice resonated off the baseball-themed walls. The group was hanging on his every word – and so was everyone else in the café-bar.

“Maggie and I are old, old friends,” he said. “We knew each other in London, right before Nick and I moved to LA.” He stared directly at Maggie, and she stopped, hands hanging weakly at her sides. “Things moved pretty fast back then. I guess we lost touch.”

As his words trailed off Nick cut in. “The last time we saw Maggie she was wearing sparkly stilettos, red silk stockings and a verrrrry cute Santa suit! Alex had to lend her his best sweater so that she could go home on the London Underground without drawing too much attention to herself.”

“And reindeer antlers.” Alex’s cool Jago face brightened into a wide, winning smile. “Don’t forget the reindeer antlers.”

There were guffaws of laughter. All eyes turned on Maggie. The picture Nick and Alex painted didn’t exactly tally with her current blend-into-the-background image. In smart black designer jeans and black ankle boots, with a businessy white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck where she’d hooked her big, black oversized sunglasses into the vee, she aimed to look unremarkable. The laughing triggered a blush the color of a London bus – a glowing contrast to her monochrome look.

Great!

“And to avoid freezing,” she chipped in. “I’d like to point out that it was one of the coldest Decembers on record.”

“It was Christmas Eve, actually.” Alex spoke slowly. The piercing glimmer in his eyes sent shivers up and down her spine. She wished he would stop looking at her like that.

“Hence the Santa ensemble.” She made a face, shrugged, and held her palms out apologetically to the group.

Sitting on a bench seat at the opposite side of the table between the two models, Nick leaned forward and moved the things in front of him about randomly – the salt pot, his sunglasses, a coaster. He seemed to be watching his brother for a reaction. Alex didn’t say anything more. He stopped looking at her and stared off into the distance.

Maggie sat down at the table, picked up a couple of menus and handed one to Natalie, who suddenly closed her gawping mouth, as if for a fraction of a second she’d lost control of her features. Almost faint, not with hunger, but embarrassment at being scrutinized by every woman within earshot, and most of the men, Maggie’s fingers trembled. “So,” she announced, eager to close the subject. “Enough of the boring friends reunited stuff.” She rolled her eyes. One of the models sent her a sympathetic smile across the sea of drinks, menus and cutlery littering the rustic table top. “Should we order? What’s everyone having?”