Extreme Bachelor (15 page)

“You don’t get drunk, remember? Two is your
limit,” he said with a smile.

Man, he remembered
a
lot
, which was
making it very difficult to be light and carefree and
disinterested. “And you usually don’t drink at all,” she said, the
words coming from that part of her brain that refused to listen to
common sense.

“I imbibe on occasion.” He suddenly leaned
forward, his arms on the table, grinning. “Do you remember the
night in Cape Cod? Remember we had that punch—at least we thought
it was punch—and we got so bloody drunk?”

“Don’t remind me,” Leah protested with a
wince, flicking her wrist at him. “All I remember is waking up the
next morning with my head hanging off the bed, wishing I was
dead.”

“Believe me, I wanted to put you out of your
misery,” he said with a laugh. “I never heard such moaning in my
life, and I was feeling pretty miserable myself.”

“I was
dying
,” she reminded him, tapping
her fist on the table to emphasize just how close to dying she’d
really come. “And you were
laughing
at me!”

“I wasn’t laughing, baby, I was just trying
to help.”

That small term of endearment rolled off his
tongue as if he’d never stopped saying it, and it hit Leah
broadside, right upside the head, leaving her speechless. But one
look at Michael’s face, and it was obvious that not only had he
stopped saying it a long time ago, to hear it now had been as
bone-jolting to him as it had been to her. “Sorry,” he muttered,
and shoved a hand through his hair, forcing that lock out of his
eyes. “Some habits are hard to break.”

She nodded, wished to hell the waitress
would appear with that second martini. “So what about the CIA
thing, Michael?” she asked lightly, changing the subject. “What did
you do?”

He hesitated. “Not a lot. Just some
surveillance, that sort of thing.”

“Oh come on. Surely you did more than that.
I’ve seen all the Jason Bourne movies, so I know what goes on.”

“Those movies are nothing like reality. The
truth is, I filed a lot of paperwork and not much else.”

“No!” Leah scoffed. “Come on, really—what
did you do?”

“Just that. What? Do you want me to say I
hung out with opium dealers and arms traders and terrorist
types?”

“Yes, I want you to say that. Give me
something here. Did you have all the cool gadgets? Talking shoes
and camera watches? A gun?”

“No, nothing like that,” he said with a
grin. “Just me. And a very deep cover. And a lot of paperwork is
about all I can say.”

“Come on, please don’t tell me you dumped me
for paperwork.”

The smile bled from his face.

“Sorry,” she said, holding up a hand. “But
you did dump me.” She was not going to cut him a break on that
front.

“I know,” he said, and looked around for the
waitress. She was making her way across the room, two martinis on
her tray.

“So?” she persisted. “At least tell me where
you were.”

He smiled enigmatically; it was extremely
annoying.

“Can you at least tell me how you ended up
in the movie business? I mean, as a casual observer, it doesn’t
exactly seem like a natural career path. You know, spy,” she said,
putting one hand down on the table. “Stuntman,” she said, putting
the other hand down on the other end of the table.

“I met Jack on a mission,” he said. “We
became friends. And then I reached a point where I was sick of
living lies and watching my back all the time. I was ready to end
that part of my career, but I figured I would end up at a desk job
in Langley.”

If only he had. She would have been spared
this entire, mind-boggling emotional course. “So why didn’t
you?”

He shrugged. “Jack and I became friends
because we both loved adventure. We’d hang out, doing some crazy
things.” He paused as the waitress set the two martinis down and
thanked her with a smile that probably made her melt.

“Anyway,” he said, as Leah took the martini
and sipped, “about the time I got ready to quit, Jack had learned
to fly anything with wings on the government’s nickel and had
retired from the Air Force.”

“So . . . you guys decided to start your own
stunt agency?” she asked, becoming less and less disinterested in
what had happened to him.

“They did. I came in later. Essentially,
Eli, Cooper, and Jack go way back. They grew up together in Texas
and developed a love for sports—football, baseball, basketball,
rodeo—whatever sport they could play, they played. But when regular
sports got to be too easy, they began to create their own sports.
They went swimming in mining holes, created dirt-bike trails
through the canyons that apparently rivaled the professional
circuit. They made a game out of breaking horses without using a
bit, and built motorized conveyances that they would race across
fallow cotton fields.”

“Wow,” Leah said, impressed.

“By the time they finished college, they
were into the extreme side of sports in general. They were experts
in white-water rafting, rock climbing, canyon jumping, kayaking,
surfing, and skiing—a person could name a sport, any sport, and
they had tried it. After college, Jack went into the Air Force.
Cooper and Eli weren’t as interested in flying as they were in
jumping off buildings and blowing things up, so they headed out to
Hollywood to hire on as stuntmen. They got their start working on
some of the biggest action films in Hollywood, and before long,
they were choreographing huge action sequences.”

“They do know their stunts,” Leah said
wryly, still sore from yesterday’s training.

“They do. On weekends, however, they trekked
out to ocean kayak, or kite surf, or helicopter ski—whatever caught
their imagination. But it wasn’t until they got the bright idea to
take a couple of pals along who just happened to be big stars that
their outings began to be the talk around movie sets, and the next
thing they knew, they were taking the Hollywood bigs along on their
adventures. As a result, their adventures got even bigger. But what
they did really well was to keep the press and paparazzi out of
those jaunts.”

“Really?” Leah asked. “Do they still do it?
The adventures?”

He nodded. “Cooper came up with the idea of
making a business out of their love of adventure. It was expensive
to stage, but there were a growing number of Hollywood moguls who
wanted the exclusive and exotic outings they offered, particularly
if it came with the guarantee of total privacy. So when Jack
started making noises about getting out of the Air Force, they
convinced him to come to L.A. and join them, like the old days.
They figured if they could provide their own transportation and fly
their clients to their adventure destinations themselves, they’d be
that much more mobile and private. That’s when they founded
Thrillseekers Anonymous.”

“The stunt group?”

“That, and the members-only adventure club.”
At Leah’s look of confusion, Michael said, “The motto is, ‘Name
Your Fantasy, and We’ll Make It Happen.’ We cater to an exclusive
clientele who want extreme adventure with a lot of privacy and can
afford to have both. Whatever they want—helicopter skiing,
windsurfing, volcano hiking—we make it happen, and we guarantee
their privacy.”

That sounded like the coolest job on the
planet, yet Leah still didn’t understand how Michael had ended up
with T.A. She remembered that he liked to ski and surf and golf—all
the usual guy things—but she didn’t remember that he’d ever been
into extreme sports and said so.

“Oh yeah,” he said, nodding, “I’ve always
been into extreme sports. That is what I was trained to do.”

“So how did you hook up with them?”

“I got out of the agency just as T.A. was
starting to get a steady stream of high-profile, highly demanding
and privacy-seeking clients, and Jack approached me about becoming
a partner. I was reluctant at first—you’re right; it wasn’t exactly
my career path. I was into extreme sports, true, but I’d never done
any stunt work. And I was definitely the odd man out with those
three—it was obvious they were real tight. But in the end, Jack
convinced me I had something they needed.”

“Which was?”

He looked a little sheepish. “Contacts.
Worldwide contacts.”

“They wanted you for your Rolodex?”

“You could say that,” he said
self-consciously. “I’ve just met a lot of interesting people along
the way. Granted, most of them really were terrorists, or arms
traders, or financiers who supported radical governments with the
drug trade—but I’ve also met some solid, law-abiding people who
knew how to get things done. Jack and the guys wanted me to bring
those contacts to their organization . . . along with the utmost
secrecy by which I’d cultivated those contacts.”

“What are you saying?” Leah asked, confused.
“You know kings and queens?”

Michael laughed. “What I’m
saying is, if one of our clients is on a remote-island hike and
wants a particular foie gras flown in at a moment’s notice, I’m the
T.A. guy who actually knows what foie gras is, but more
importantly, I know where to get the
best
foie gras and how to get it to
that island. Or if we have clients that want to hike some of the
greatest red canyons in the Middle East for one of their
adventures, I know who to call. Those sorts of
contacts.”

“Wow,” Leah said, in awe. Here was Michael,
the guy she’d loved and lost, the same guy she believed had been a
very cute financial director with a pocket protector. It was a
little hard to absorb that he was, in fact, some globetrotting
sports guy with more contacts than Elvis. “Sounds like the CIA
trained you well,” she said, for lack of anything better to
say.

“Yeah,” he said. “They did.”

Leah picked up her martini and took a
sizeable swig of it. “So is that it? Just the four of you?” she
asked, still trying to wrap her mind around the notion that not
only had the man she’d been so incredibly in love with been a
globetrotting spy, but he knew who to call in the Middle East if
she should ever need a camel. How was that possible? And more
importantly, how come she didn’t get to know it at the time?

“There’s one more person. We were contracted
to a do a wedding in conjunction with an extreme sports outing for
a couple of high-profile movie stars last year. But none of us knew
anything about weddings, so we had to hire a wedding planner.
Marnie Banks is her name. The wedding ended up not happening, but
she stuck around, mainly because she and Eli ended up stranded on a
mountain, and . . . and it’s a long story,” he said with a slight
roll of his eyes. “But now they are talking about getting
married.”

“It sounds like a great job,” Leah said.

“It is.” He glanced down at his martini. “So
. . . what did you do after I left?”

Talk about throwing a bucket of ice water on
the party. What did he want to know? That she’d worn pajamas for
weeks until Lucy made her change them? Or that she’d been almost
incoherent for a month? That she’d felt like her heart had been
ripped from her chest and smashed into pieces so small that she
still couldn’t find them after five years? Or perhaps he wanted to
know how many letters she had written him, some of them begging him
to come back, some of them condemning him to a fiery pit of
hell?

“Leah?”

The question made her angry—a whole lot of
stuff was suddenly bubbling up, all the crap that had taken years
for her to lock away. And then he showed up unexpectedly, and it
was all erupting all over again. “Nothing,” she said brusquely.

“Did you get the sitcom deal?”

She stared daggers at him. A million retorts
skated through her mind, but she said only, “No.”

He looked surprised by that. “So you stayed
on Broadway,” he said.

“No.”

His brow furrowed in confusion. “So . . .
when did you come to L.A.?”

“About a year after . . . Look,” she said
suddenly, pushing the martini away from her. “It’s not fair of you
to even ask. If you can’t tell me what happened to you, then I
don’t have to tell you what happened to me.”

“Okay—”

“No, not okay, Michael,” she said, feeling,
inexplicably, angrier. “None of this is okay. I don’t want to go
back, all right? You should have left me alone when I asked you
to,” she said, and abruptly picked up her backpack, suddenly
desperate to be out of there. “This was a huge mistake.” She thrust
her hand into her backpack and found her wallet.

“Why is it a mistake?” he asked as she took
out her wallet.

“Please
—It just is.”

“Wait—what are you doing?” he asked as she
opened her wallet. He put a hand on hers to stop her, but Leah
yanked it away.

“I’m leaving.”

“Leah, I am sorry,” he said, and damn him if
there wasn’t a bit of exasperation in his voice, as if she were the
one being unreasonable here. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just
that I’ve thought so much about you—”

“Right. Well you obviously didn’t think
enough of me to answer my letters,” Leah snapped, and regretted the
words the very instant they flew out of her mouth. That had been
her problem all her life—speaking without thinking, always popping
off before she could think.

“What letters?” he demanded.

“You know what letters.”

“No, I don’t know what letters,” he said,
and this time, caught her wrist and held it firmly. Why that should
remind her of sex, Leah had absolutely no idea . . . except that
they had shared a mutual desire for experimentation, and there had
been the time that he’d held her wrists high above her head—

“What
letters?” Michael insisted, yanking her back to the
present.