Beautiful Stranger (8 page)

She hadn’t shared her news with Cammie or Anna yet—or with anyone, for that matter. Normally Sam was as much a part of the Tinseltown gossip mill as everyone else. But about this? It felt delicious to keep the secret for herself. For just a little while. The conference call could wait.

Eduardo stirred, stretched like a panther, and opened his eyes.

She smiled at him. “I was watching you sleep.”

On the nightstand next to his bed, his cell phone rang. He ignored it, slinked an arm around her, and curled her into him, kissing her forehead. “Very boring, I imagine.”

“Better than most of what’s on TV, actually,” Sam quipped, even as she wondered if she had morning mouth. If she did, he certainly didn’t seem to mind as he kissed her, raising himself on one flat palm to peer at her in the bright morning sunlight.

For a moment she felt her usual panic—that her face wasn’t pretty enough, that her body wasn’t good enough, that her calves were the size of a thousand-year-old redwood’s trunk. But Eduardo’s eyes only got that lusty look she loved.

“Such a beauty.” He nibbled at her neck, her collarbone, and then between the tops of her breasts. Then his cell sounded again. This time he checked caller ID.

“Sorry, I have to take this.
Hola
.” He answered the phone as he swung his legs out of bed, cradling it between his ear and his shoulder as he pulled on his red silk boxers and walked through the archway into the living room to continue the conversation. Sam strained to hear. Whatever he was talking about was entirely in Spanish. She could only make out a few words.
Nuevo York
—New York—was one of them. Then he was in a part of the apartment where she couldn’t hear at all.

A few minutes later, he returned to the bedroom. She had been dearly hoping they’d pick up where they had left off, but now Eduardo sat on the edge of the bed, looking very serious. “I have to go to New York.”

Damn.

“When?”

“This afternoon. The president of Peru is coming to speak at a special conference at the United Nations in a few days. The guy who was supposed to do the prep work at our mission to the UN had to go home to Lima because of some medical crisis in his family—I don’t know all the details and frankly I don’t want to know. So they’ve got me on a flight out of LAX in three hours.”

“Need a ride to the airport?” Sam offered, trying to be understanding. Eduardo didn’t have an ordinary job. He was an official representative of his country’s government here in America. If the president of Peru needed him, he needed to be there, recent engagement or not.

He shook his head. “They’re picking me up from the consulate here. They want to do some kind of briefing. Please put some coffee on, okay?”

“Okay.” Geez, he was all business. But she put on one of his dress shirts, dropped two English muffins into his toaster, and brewed a pot of strong coffee while he showered, shaved, dressed, and packed in under thirty minutes. The coffee was in a mug on the table when he came into the kitchen with a garment bag. He was wearing a white shirt similar to the one he’d had on yesterday, a yellow silk tie in a double Windsor, and a charcoal gray business suit with black Bruno Maglis.

“When will you be back?”

“As soon as I can. I’ve got a bride-to-be waiting for me. That means I’m highly motivated.”

She grinned happily, loving to hear him say it. “Don’t forget your passport.”

He tapped his back pocket. “Got it. But thanks for reminding me. I’ve forgotten it before.”

“I miss you already.”

“Me, too,” he said, but he seemed distracted, as if this trip had already started for him. Well, that was fine. It was business, which was a far cry from lolling in bed together. But Sam was a big believer in mixing business with pleasure whenever possible. And while he’d been showering and packing, she’d gotten a terrific idea. In fact, she’d already made a few phone calls to put that idea into action.

“You know, I’m not doing much over the next few days,” Sam said casually. She hoped he’d invite her to go with him. She hadn’t been in Manhattan since the previous fall for a film festival at Lincoln Center, and she loved it there. What fun that would be, and so romantic: in New York City with her new fiancé. And if she booked a suite at the Hotel Gansevoort down in the old Meatpacking District, there’d be plenty of opportunity for pleasure.

“Well, hang out with your friends,” Eduardo suggested. “And work on finding the right script for your sensational movie.”

Either he hadn’t gotten her hint or he hadn’t
wanted
to get her hint. No, that was impossible. It was the former, not the latter. Either one had the same operative effect: He was going alone. Then he gave her a quick kiss goodbye, said he’d call when he could, and was out the door. Sam padded back into the bedroom with his untouched coffee and sprawled out on Eduardo’s bed. She felt disappointed, slightly ticked, and—okay, she had to admit—somewhat anxious. Her brand-spanking-new fiancé had just taken off for the other side of the country, and he hadn’t even thought of inviting her to go along.

“Me? I am the last person in the world who should give you guy advice. Because if someone were grading me, I’d flunk.”

Anna stirred some milk into her pot of English Breakfast tea as she spoke. She and Sam were sitting at an outdoor table at the City Bean coffee emporium, on Lindbrook Drive near UCLA. Each of them had chosen a jeans/T-shirt combo. Even though it was early August, the Westwood district was bustling with students—almost as bustling, Anna thought, as Bleecker Street back home in New York. Sam had called an hour earlier with the news that Eduardo had had to leave on a last-minute business trip to New York, and hadn’t even considered inviting her along. She needed help figuring out what it meant.

But that hadn’t been the shocking news. No, the shocker was the late morning sun sending glimmers of refracted light off the rock on her left ring finger. Anna had already said the requisite “I’m so happy for you.” And she certainly was happy that Sam was happy, especially because Anna really liked Eduardo.

But
engaged
? Sam? It seemed so out there, so … so premature. Anna wondered—though she didn’t dare say it—if Sam hadn’t said yes because she was afraid of losing Eduardo. If that was the case, it seemed like the wrong way to be betrothed.

Betrothed. Was that even a word that anyone used anymore? And what insight could she possibly offer into the Eduardo-asked-me-to-marry-him-one-day-and-took-off-for-New-York-without-me-the-next crisis? She herself had barely slept the night before because of her fight with Ben. They’d argued before, but this was different. He’d said horrible things designed to cut her. She felt as if she’d been bled out; used up, empty, and fragile. She was the last person on the planet who could help a friend figure out the mind of her newly minted fiancé. Wasn’t that supposed to happen
before
two people got engaged?

They were sitting close to the low-slung redbrick building, behind a short red wooden fence that separated the café seating from the sidewalk. Anna looked around. Every table was taken—didn’t anyone in Los Angeles work during the day? To Anna’s left was a young woman who carried a small white Pomeranian with an emerald collar. She was bellowing into her cell phone at a volume that could be heard in San Diego, ignoring the older woman—her mother, most likely—with whom she sat. To their right was a twentysomething couple who were clearly in the throes of lust. They had matching short punk hairdos and matching nose rings. As they held hand’s across the table, they had eyes only for each other. Their full cappuccinos sat untouched.

She and Ben had been that way once.

“When I asked Ben and Caine to date me … at the same time,” Anna began, “was that when I wrecked everything? I really want to know.”

“Maybe.” Sam sighed. “Of course, if Cammie were here, she’d say definitely. But what I wanna know is, would Eduardo have invited me to New York if I’d said no to his marriage proposal? Let me answer that. Maybe. Maybe now he doesn’t even think he needs to make an effort?”

“Maybe.” Anna sighed. A lot of maybes. At least Sam wasn’t sugarcoating the bad news for her, so she wasn’t about to sugarcoat it for Sam. She’d felt so strong when she’d asked Ben and Caine to take a step back and date her. It had seemed like such an independent, powerful notion. Something that an active heroine would do. But look where it had led. The truth was self-evident: Both guys had dropped her.

Sam said she was hungry, and a waitress with butt-length platinum blond hair, whose fat-injected lips were spackled with strawberry lip gloss, came to take their lunch order. They both ordered chicken Caesar salads. Not that Anna had any kind of an appetite—she could never eat when she was upset, even though she knew Sam was just the opposite. As if to illustrate that, Sam called the Donatella Versace lookalike waitress back and added a side of fries.

“The Caine thing doesn’t really hurt,” Anna mused aloud when the waitress had gone inside to place their order. “Except for my ego, I mean. But Ben—”

“I don’t get why you did what you did. You’re in love with the boy and you pushed him away.”

“Because it all happened so fast—”

“Oh, please.” Sam waved a dismissive hand. “Look how fast it happened between me and Eduardo. When it’s right, it’s right.” She downed the café Americano she’d ordered when they arrived. “God. Sometimes I wish I smoked. This would be a great time for a cigarette. Of course, you can’t smoke in public anymore, anyway. Where was I? Oh yeah. Maybe I don’t get this little New York wrinkle, but I’m wearing his engagement ring. I must be doing something right.”

Anna didn’t necessarily agree, but there was no point in saying so. Nothing felt right anymore; not the California sun slanting down, not the crystalline blue sky, not the smell of the salty ocean just a few miles away, not the pouty-lipped waitress or the movie-star-handsome valet she saw getting into the cherry red Lamborghini as its balding fiftysomething owner flipped him the keys.

She recalled Caine telling her that she didn’t belong with Ben, that he was a Beverly Hills kid and “that’s just not you.” Maybe it was West Coast Ben who hadn’t fit with East Coast her. Maybe this whole experiment was a failure. Maybe she didn’t belong here at all.

“I’m ready to go home.” Anna felt the words spill out of her.

“I hear ya,” Sam agreed with a brisk nod, dumping a packet of Equal into her steaming coffee. “But stay with me. If I eat french fries alone, I’ll never forgive myself. And I’ll never forgive you if you don’t eat half of them.”

“I don’t mean home to my father’s place,” Anna said slowly, stirring her tea as the idea began to form itself more fully in her mind. “I mean … home to New York.” She looked up into Sam’s surprised eyes. “Yale starts in three weeks anyway. What’s the point in hanging out here now?” She shrugged and put her spoon back down on the table. “I should just pack my stuff and go back to Manhattan.”

“Um … me?” There was a palpable edge to Sam’s voice. “You’ve got a job with my dad’s company helping me read scripts, remember? We’re looking for one for me to direct too?”

“I can do that from New York. You can just FedEx me scripts and—”

“How about a little thing called friendship?”

Anna saw the hurt in Sam’s eyes and felt bad that she’d carelessly blurted out her feelings.

“Sam, listen to me. Maybe it’s not so much that I want to be in New York as it is that I want to be far from Ben. Besides, there’s a cocktail party for incoming freshmen at the Yale Club in a couple of days.”

“And the Yale Club is in Manhattan?”

Anna nodded. “Near Grand Central Station.”

Sam held up a palm. “Speak no further—brilliance is breeding and multiplying in my great brain. We go to New York
together
. Just for a few days.”

Anna looked at her friend thoughtfully for a moment. Actually, that really
was
appealing. Several days of shopping, seeing Cyn and some of her other old friends, maybe some real New York culture like MoMA or the ballet—she didn’t know if she could drag Sam to Mostly Mozart, but it was certainly worth a try. Sam knew Cyn from their trip to Las Vegas in the spring. The three of them could hang together. It was the perfect thing to make her forget all about her never-ending tragicomedy with Ben Birnbaum and her L.A. experiment gone awry.

“We should stay at the Gansevoort hotel downtown,” Sam went on, her eyes lighting up with enthusiasm. “We’ll get a suite. We’ll party our asses off. And I’ll surprise Eduardo.”

Anna looked at her friend with a knowing smile. There it was. Of course Sam wanted to go to New York. She wanted to find out what the hell Eduardo was up to.

Well, Anna didn’t blame her for having ulterior motives—especially not when they dovetailed so perfectly with what she herself was craving so strongly right now. She hoped things would work out for Sam and Eduardo better than they had worked out for her and Ben. Because losing him this time hurt so much that Anna didn’t think even three thousand miles between them could begin to heal the wound.

“You’ve got a deal,” she said finally, moving her glass over as Sam’s french fries arrived. “And I’ll do you one better than the Gansevoort—we can stay at my house.”

“How amazing would this have been?” Ben asked Cammie as they wandered past the row of long-abandoned hydraulic car lifts. She looked around at the layers of dust and grime, wondering which “amazing” part he was referring to. “I mean, sure, new clubs open in this town all the time. But my ideas are fresh, and this space …” He shook his head. “Culver City is cutting edge. There’s nothing here now, which means we could establish something, the way the Meatpacking District became the spot for clubbing in New York. The space is off the hook. I have a million ideas.” He leaned against a support pillar, seemingly not caring whether the accumulated filth rubbed off on his weathered denim jacket.

“So you’re saying first your dad said he’d finance you, and then he changed his mind?” Cammie wanted clarification. When she’d called Ben for a friendly “Hey, want to get a drink?” he’d brought her here first, to show her the place of his dreams that had died on the vine.