Extreme Bachelor (31 page)

“Pot?” Michele asked, her eyes lighting up.
“How much fun would it be to go rafting stoned?” she asked,
delighted, and toddled off to join in the fun by becoming a close,
personal friend of a Serious Actress.

In the meantime, Trudy had pulled a silver
flask from her bag. “Rick will never notice it’s gone,” she said
confidently, and she and Jamie made up a concoction of vodka and
diet sodas for the three of them. Red plastic cups in hand, the
three women strolled around the campsite, taking it all in.

The cameras were everywhere, filming women
with their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, hamming it
up for their big shot at reality television. Men with cameras
walked around, filming candid shots of the soccer moms. The
caterers were busy laying out what looked like a feast, and a bunch
of guys, who Jamie instantly termed River Rats, were preparing the
boats for the next day’s rafting trip, but their eyes were
definitely on the actresses.

When they were joined later by a slightly
stoned Michele, the four women were comfortably buzzed, and set up
camp chairs in front of the two tents they’d snagged, sipping more
vodka drinks, remarking on how much of a vacation the whole thing
felt like. Michele was reciting a list of clothes she had brought
with her when a sleek Cadillac Escalade slid to a stop next to the
campsite, and from its very plush interior, four men who looked
like wannabe rock stars stepped out.

“Oooh, look at the eye candy,” Jamie
said.

Michael was the last to step out, looking so
damn sporting in his hiking pants and boots, an all-weather shirt,
and a baseball hat on backward.

“Oh my,” Trudy drawled, checking him out
over the rim of her strap-on sunglasses. “Look what the cat dragged
in,” she said, wearing a wolfish smile, as Michael, who had been
intercepted by Ariel, smiled charmingly at her as he took whatever
it was she handed him. “He’s so pretty,” she sighed.

Leah looked away. She wasn’t really sure
what she thought at the moment—other than she had the potential to
be a total, locked-up whack job—and thought maybe that was better
left unsaid. But she glanced back again, dying to know what he was
doing—and Michael chose that precise moment to look up and around
the camp, his gaze catching Leah’s before she could look away. The
pinprick of heat was suddenly a rash, spreading all over her
skin.

But then Ariel returned to
the scene. “
Her
again,” Trudy said. “She never lets anyone else near
him.”

“Great,” Leah muttered, and watched Michael
and Ariel walk away, disappearing behind the cabin.

“Probably going for a quickie,” Michele said
with a dreamy smile. “You know how these co-ed trips can be.”

“I’m going to get another drink,” Leah said,
standing up. “Anyone else?”

When she had drink orders, she wandered off
in the opposite direction of Michael and Ariel and whatever they
were doing. If they were doing anything. Part of her actually
believed Michael. Another part of her wondered why, if he was not a
big fan of Ariel’s, he had to wander off with her at all. And then
a third part of her—the chunk made up of equal parts bad judgment
and just general idiocy—wondered if he would even seek her out, or
whether she’d taken care of that by declaring she intended to date
other people.

Later, after the food was served—and what a
zoo that was, with half the actresses complaining about the
cuisine—Trudy, Michele, Jamie, and Leah nabbed a fire ring before
the Serious Actresses took them over and turned an otherwise
pleasant evening into a long boring discussion of craft, which
they’d heard them doing earlier.

Leah stuck close to Trudy,
which turned out to be a huge mistake, because Trudy wanted
desperately to keep an eye on Jack, because she hadn’t quite given
up on him yet. But when Jack wandered through the camp, he was
waylaid by some Starlets who were wearing very skimpy little
camisole numbers under their baby-doll jean jackets—seriously, the
jackets were so small they looked like they’d been made for baby
dolls. “Oh
hell
no, they are not going to win by dressing like sluts,” Trudy
avowed, and went after them in tight velour pants.

With Trudy gone, Michele in a post-high
funk, and Jamie telling her entire life story to one of the Serious
Actresses, Leah kept her gaze steady on the fire, nursing yet
another vodka drink. She had a better than average buzz, and
frankly, in that slightly weakened state, she feared that if she
looked at him, wherever he was, she’d find a reason to talk to him.
And if she talked to him . . . Well. She just couldn’t, not until
she’d figured some stuff out for herself.

But she was so certain she was going to make
eye contact or somehow unwittingly invite him back into her life
that she left Jamie in the middle of her big crescendo on the life
story (which was, apparently, getting this job), and turned in.

MICHAEL was thinking he was going to kick
some serious Jack Price ass when this whole thing was over with,
because he could not shake Ariel to save his life. He walked out of
the T.A. cabin, and she was there. He got in line at the mess hall,
and she was there. He walked around the camp looking for Leah, and
who should he literally bump into, as in collide with when she
darted out from behind a tent, but Ariel.

He finally resigned himself to it and let
her lead him to a fire ring where Cooper was sitting between two
very pretty Starlets, looking like a Greek god. He did, however,
manage to lose Ariel when he at last managed to push her off on one
of the camera guys that was ogling her, and stepped away,
retreating to his cabin before she could discover he was
missing.

It had to be a first, Michael thought as he
crawled into a sleeping bag. A campsite full of beautiful women,
and he could not have been less interested. He’d had enough of
beautiful women to last a lifetime. For the first time in his adult
memory, he really was just tired of having women hang around for
the sake of hanging around. He wanted something more meaningful. He
still wanted Leah.

HE and Eli were the first ones up the next
morning, along with the caterers they’d hired, standing around in
the chill of the morning, sipping coffee while most everyone else
slept.

“This is going to be a long day,” Michael
said. “Never thought I’d be herding a bunch of women down white
water.”

Eli laughed a little and gave Michael a
friendly clap on the back. “Cheer up. This might just be the ride
of your life.”

Two hours later, as Michael looked around at
twenty women stuffed into life preservers, he began to believe Eli
was right. They were chattering like they always did, everyone
talking at once, but miraculously hearing each other. Cooper and
one of the four river guides were trying to talk, and while the
women appeared to be listening, they were moving and whispering and
looking around to see what each other was wearing. At least that
was the way it seemed to the guys.

Michael swore not one of them understood
what they were supposed to do if they fell in the water. He was
certain none of them understood their left from their right. And as
he exchanged a look with one worried river guide, he tried to
smile. “Hey,” he said, “we taught them how to wage war. They’ll be
all right.”

The guide did not look convinced.

When it came time to split the women up into
four groups—each of the T.A. guys taking a raft—Cooper made them
all count one through four, then assigned the ones to a raft, then
the twos, and so on. It turned out that Leah was assigned to
Michael’s raft—go figure—and he got a withering look for it, as if
he had somehow managed to conspire with Cooper to get Leah to count
off as a three. He held up his hands as she went marching by. “It
was pure dumb luck.”

“More like the luck of . . .” She frowned,
trying to think of a comeback. “Whatever,” she said with a toss of
her head and followed their river guide, looking like a giant
orange marshmallow in her life jacket.

The women climbed into the rafts with a lot
of laughing and splashing, which was, Jack opined, the result of
having too many cameras around. The four rafts—plus a fifth one
holding a camera crew—were set. The guides and the T.A. guys pushed
off, then scrambled onto the rafts. When Michael was seated, he
glanced to his left and smiled a little. Once again, the guy gods
were messing with him, because Michael was sitting next to Jill
and directly behind Leah, who sat with her back ramrod straight,
and oh goody, there was Ariel, too, sitting up front and grinning
like a goon at him from the front of the boat. “This is so much
fun!” she shouted at him.

How in God’s name
had
this
happened? So much for Guy Universe smiling down on him. This
was karma all right—the bad variety.

Leah blasted an icy glare over her
shoulder.

Michael smirked at her back until he felt
someone staring at him and turned to his left. Jill was smiling,
one brow cocked high above the other. “Trouble?” she asked
sweetly.

“Eyes front,” he said sternly, and she
laughed and inadvertently dropped her oar in the water.

The ride of his life? More like the ride
from hell.

The water was smooth where they put in, the
day beautiful, and it wasn’t long before the two front rafts—with
Cooper and Jack leading the charge—began to splash and make various
attempts to ram each other. And, as undoubtedly every river guide
in the country knows, once the seed of hijinks is planted in the
minds of novices, everyone is in on the act. In Michael’s raft,
Ariel was the first to fling water, and the game was on. The women
were all screeching and laughing . . . all of them but Leah, whose
paddle was dragging in the water.

He tapped her paddle with his. Leah jerked
around. “Your paddle,” he said. “Stay in the rhythm.” That seemed
to wake her up, and she grabbed her paddle and began to row,
clashing with Ariel’s oar in front of her. “Hey!” she shouted at
Leah.

“Sorry,” Leah said, and shot another glare
at Michael over her shoulder for good measure.

They reached the first small rapid run, and
they could see the first couple of rafts bobbing through, their
shrieks of laughter echoing up the canyon walls. One paddle went
flying out of the second boat, and a cameraman tried to stand to
capture the mayhem just as their boat began to go through. He
almost tumbled in, but some quick-thinking companion pulled him
down.

“Forward!” the guide shouted at everyone in
his raft, and the women began to row, their paddles clashing with
one another in a riot of disorganization and lack of rhythm.

Michael groaned, and while the guide paddled
on Jill’s side of the raft—Jill was too intent on seeing the next
raft go through to paddle—Michael began to paddle on his side and
kept hitting Leah’s paddle, which was constantly a moment behind
everyone else. But they sailed through, soaring over rocks and
water and screaming at the huge splash that soaked them in the
end.

Jill laughed the loudest and turned toward
Michael, her eyes and smile shining, and reached to wipe the water
from his shades. He grinned at her and then inadvertently looked at
Leah, who was looking at him as if he’d just grabbed Jill and laid
one on her.

“What?” he asked, as Jill leaned forward to
say something to the other women in the raft.

“Nothing!”

“Why are you staring at me?”

“I am
not
staring at you,” she said, just
as her paddle bounced off a rock and rattled her.

“Hey, Blondie, let’s keep our eye on the
river, okay?” the guide said to Leah. She snorted and began
paddling again, almost knocking Michael’s paddle out of his
hands.

They hit calmer water, and the four rafts
began to battle again, splashing each other with full frontal
paddle assaults and ramming each other when they could. One of the
soccer moms went over the edge of her raft, much to the delight of
everyone else. Cooper caught her paddle first, then her, and pulled
her back in like a man who had saved a million women before.

They hit a couple more fast runs before
lunch, but nothing too spectacular. Nevertheless, the women seemed
to think that they had seen some real white water when they stopped
for lunch and were already trading war stories about who had almost
gone over on what shoot.

Michael looked at the guide from his raft.
“When does it get good?” he asked.

“Oh man, about an hour after the lunch
break, we hit some sweet water,” he said with a bob of his head.
“You won’t be sorry.”

Easy for him to say.

The kid was right—an hour after lunch
(during which Leah studiously managed to avoid him), they hit some
great white water, which definitely made it worth the trip. Michael
loved riding the water, loved taking the edge. His guide was down
with it, and the women were inconsequential to the maneuvering of
the boat.

The water was sufficiently fast enough that
Leah didn’t have the time or inclination to stare at him over her
shoulder. Michael was pushing it, too—the thrill of the ride was
helping him let go of some of the pent-up frustration he’d been
feeling. The last good shoot of the day, aptly named Bones Canyon,
was awesome. It looked like a drop of about forty feet overall,
flowing hard through the shoot. The guide shouted at the women to
ready their oars, and on his command, to go forward as hard as they
could.

Everything was going
great—they were flying—but then they hit a rock, and that slammed
them up against the canyon wall. Leah went flying off the side, her
paddle long gone. Michael grabbed her arm with one hand and
maneuvered his paddle into the boat with his other hand. Her eyes
were wide with terror as he manhandled her back into the raft while
the guide shouted at the rest of the boat to
Move right! Move right! Move right
!