Extreme Bachelor (38 page)

The truth in that statement made Leah snort,
and both men turned to look at her. “What?” she asked, and looked
at Michael. “Well? It’s true. You’re not very good at telling the
whole story.”

“You’re kidding me,
right?” he asked incredulously. “We’re not going to sit here and
have a discussion about our relationship
now
, are we?”

“I’m just saying,” Leah said.

Michael groaned, then inched his way into an
almost sitting position and looked at Leah intently. “Putting
aside, for a moment, that everything coming out of this asshole’s
mouth is a load of shit, Leah—let’s keep it real here. Sometimes
you don’t make it very easy for me to be completely and totally
honest.”

“Me
?”

“Ah, and the words coming from your mouth
are pure, no?” Juan Carlo interjected with a snort of incredulity.
“You are a liar and a thief.”

“Jesus, Juan Carlo, will you stop taking
everything so personally?” Michael demanded. “Think about
it—terrorists like you tend to have agents like me on your ass.
That’s our world. It’s what we call business.”

“You fuck my wife and call it business?”
Juan Carlo bellowed.

Leah stretched her fingers wide for a
moment. “See? You slept with his wife!”

“He took my wife to his
bed many times to get close to me,” Juan Carlo said with a wave of
his hand. “She gave him all our money—” He suddenly whipped around
and glared at Michael. “And she gave you a key. Where is the
key,
señor
? Give
me the key, and this one shall walk free, I give you my
word.”

“A key to what? Her heart?” Leah asked
acidly, her own heart perilously close to sinking.

But Juan Carlo and Michael surprised her by
snorting simultaneously. “Maribel doesn’t actually have a heart,”
Michael added.

Surprisingly, Juan Carlo nodded in
agreement. “She is a hard woman, this is true.”

“So what key?” Leah shrieked with
frustration.

“A key to a safe,” Juan Carlo clarified.

“What’s in the safe?”

“None of your concern!”
Juan Carlo cried. “But the key belongs to
me
.”

Michael shrugged and lay down. “Ask your
wife.”

“I have asked her and she told me you took
it!” he roared, his face getting very red, the veins popping out.
“You had no right to take it from me!”

“I had no right?” Michael
shot back. “You were arming terrorists whose aim was to use those
missiles to hit the United States.
That
gave me the right. Your own
government gave me the goddam right!”

Juan Carlo clucked his tongue as if Michael
was being petulant and smiled at Leah. “That is what he says. But
who knows the truth? He is not honest even with you, and you do not
sell arms.”

Michael groaned and closed his eyes. “We’re
really going to do this, aren’t we? We are going to use this
opportunity to psychoanalyze me. Good torture technique, Juan
Carlo. I give—let’s just cut to the chase, okay?”

“I am a man who has had many relationships,”
Juan Carlo calmly explained. “Perhaps I can help you.”

“Go ahead and put a bullet in me. I prefer
that to any advice from you.”

“But it’s true,” Leah
said, because it
was
true. “You’ve never been entirely honest with me. In New York
you weren’t honest, and then in L.A. you haven’t been completely
honest. He’s right—
I
haven’t sold any arms to terrorists, so why can’t you be
honest with me?”

“He cannot,” Juan Carlo opined. “He is not
able to be honest. It is what we call a defect in the . . .” He
gestured toward his torso.

“Character,” Leah suggested, her fingers
aching from working the knot.

“Character,” Juan Carlo agreed.

“No, seriously. Just shoot me,” Michael
said, and fell on his side, looking entirely frustrated.

Great, Leah thought. When the going got
tough, Mikey folded like a house of cards.

MICHAEL hadn’t folded, but he’d definitely
had enough. He didn’t know if Leah was stringing Juan Carlo along,
but he really was in no mood to examine their relationship with
that asshole in the room, and when she said, “Excuse me, but I
thought I deserved a little honesty in my final hour,” he lost
it.

“Excuse
me
, Leah,” Michael said,
struggling to sit up again, “but I was
painfully
honest when I saw you in
L.A. I told you I’d made a huge mistake. I begged you to take me
back. I laid it all out for you, bared my soul, and you couldn’t
handle it. You couldn’t handle the fact that I had a
past.”

“Which past are we talking about, Michael?
The past that earned you the name of the Extreme Bachelor? Or the
past you failed to mention that involved guys like Adolfo, Juan
Carlo, whatever his name is!”

“It is Juan Carlo,” Juan Carlo, informed
her. “Regrettably, also I am not a completely honest man.”

Leah glared at him, and then glared at
Michael, who all but had his tie undone. It was a shame, really.
Juan Carlo was the son of a fisherman and should have been able to
tie a better knot than this.

“You told me you weren’t seeing anyone when
you were,” Leah was saying, ticking off all his sins. “You told me
you pushed papers around when you were in the CIA, when you were
obviously sleeping with other men’s wives, and you made promises
you couldn’t keep!”

Promises? Granted, he’d
made his mistakes, but he hadn’t broken any promises. “What
promises?” he insisted. “I keep my promises. I have kept every
promise to you.
You
are the one who keeps dredging up the past, because you are
suspicious and jealous and insecure. How can you not see all that I
am trying to prove to you is
real
?”

“But that is your mistake, Michael Raney.
You are trying to make her see this too hard,” Juan Carlo calmly
offered.

That certainly gave
Michael pause—he looked at Juan Carlo curiously. “What? How
do
you
know?”

“Leah has told me everything,” he said
cheerfully.

When they got out of here, he and Leah were
definitely going to have a little chat. “Great,” he drawled,
turning a murderous look to her. “Thanks, Leah.”

“Hey, I didn’t know he was your enemy. You
failed to mention that important piece of info, remember?”

“Why can’t you just believe me?” he
demanded. “Why can’t you just accept that I love you and no one
else?”

“I have tried to believe you,” Leah
protested, looking dangerously close to tears all of a sudden. “But
every time I do believe you, another woman shows up out of the
clear blue, or I see you flirting with several of them, or a guy
like Juan Carlo wants to kill me because you slept with his wife,
and then there is Nicole Redding, who acts like she practically
owns you—”

“She is this way,” Juan Carlo said
sagely.

“Wait . . . what?” Leah demanded.

Juan Carlo shrugged and
held out his hand to study his cuticles. “I see it in the
Star
magazine. It has
all of the informations about the movie stars. She is what you
would call a slut.”

Michael actually laughed at that as he
worked the ties at his back.

“It doesn’t matter,” Leah
snapped. “What I am trying to say is that I want to trust you, but
you won’t tell me everything, so how
can
I trust you?”

“Wait,” Juan Carlo said, holding up his
hand. “This is what is the problem. I see it very clearly.” He
paused for dramatic effect and to sip his wine. “Ah . . .” he said
with a smile. “An excellent vintage.” He put the wineglass down and
looked thoughtfully at Leah. “You,” he said, pointing at her, “are
too suspicious. A man does not like this distrust and accusations
whirling about him,” he said, making a whirling motion with his
hand.

“When a man declares his
love of a woman, he honors it. Does this mean he no longer looks at
the other women?
No
,” he scoffed. “Does it mean he does not occasionally sample
the other women? No! Of course not! Men are creatures of the body.
They must sample many women to be healthy. But that does not mean
he
loves
another
woman. It means only that he puts his love for her above all the
other women and will honor her until the day he dies, and this, she
must accept,” he said, putting up his hand to stop any argument
before it began.

“What he said,” Michael quickly cut in. “But
minus the sampling. On my life, I would never sample,” he avowed.
“That’s a promise, Leah.”

Leah rolled her eyes at him.

“Now
you
,” Juan Carlo said, pointing to
Michael. “You must be completely honest. It is how they say . . .”
He paused, then said in Spanish, “That the women are the weaker sex
and must be cared for properly.”

“What?” Leah asked. “What did he say?”

Michael frowned. “That women are the weaker
sex and can’t take care of themselves.”

Juan Carlo inclined his head. Leah gasped
indignantly.

“This is exact,” Juan
Carlo said, waving her off. “I will not give you half-truths.” He
looked at Michael. “
You
must bare your soul to the woman you love. It is
what they want, and you must give them what they want in order to
have what you want.”

“Well . . . in spite of the fact that we are
getting advice from an international terrorist—and one who wasn’t
exactly faithful to his wife,” Leah added, frowning at Juan Carlo.
“I have to agree.”

Oh, for the love of Christ. Juan Carlo was a
fucking idiot, and she was agreeing with him.

This time, Michael managed to get completely
upright and on his knees. “I am honest. I didn’t intentionally keep
anything from you,” he argued to Leah. “Besides, we are focusing on
the wrong thing here—you have no faith.”

“What?” she screeched,
almost coming out of her chair. “I have no faith? Ohmigod, I
can-
not
believe
you just said that! I had faith in you five years ago, and you
dumped me!”

“Here we go,” Michael
said, his head lolling back, his hands free now, needing only the
right moment. “Same song, same verse.
You
dumped me, and therefore I must make everything as difficult as I
possibly can
.”

“How can you say that?” Leah cried,
incredulous and so furious that she was hopping forward in her
chair until Juan Carlo stopped her with a hand to her shoulder.

“He says this because he
is
estúpido
,”
Juan Carlo said soothingly. “He is a man who—pardon for my
language— thinks with his cock. Not his heart. A Spaniard thinks
with his heart.”

“Thanks for your help, Juan Carlo, but I
think I can handle this,” Michael said irritably.

“My friend, you do not understand the mind
of a woman,” Juan Carlo pointed out as he strolled forward to look
Michael in the eye. “A woman does not need the perfume and the
expensive flowers. She needs to know how you feel,” he said,
tapping his fingers against his heart.

Leah made a little sound of surprise at
that, and both Juan Carlo and Michael looked at her. “He’s right,”
she chirped, but her eyes were suddenly as big as saucers. Michael
didn’t like the look of her wide eyes at all. She was up to
something.

Juan Carlo smiled triumphantly and turned
back to Michael. “You see?” he said proudly to Michael. “You must
tell her how you feel with the small things. There is time for the
big things later,” he added, just as Leah pulled her hand free and
waved it at Michael, grinning broadly, clearly pleased with
herself.

He didn’t so much as blink, but his whole
body seized with fear. If she did something stupid, they would both
be dead. Juan Carlo might not like guns, but he certainly wouldn’t
hesitate to use one. He barely spared her a glance.

“You must have a care for
the heart,” Juan Carlo said, continuing to advise. “You are too
careless with the feelings of others,
amigo
. As with me,” he said,
gesturing grandly to himself. “We were friends.
Compadres
. I was very hurt by the
spying and the seduction of my wife.”

“Whatever,” Michael said.

Juan Carlo abruptly turned
around to Leah, who, thank God, had stuck her hand behind her back.
“And
you
,” he
said sternly, “must open your heart and learn to accept his
mistakes. Yes, this is very wise. Perhaps I should write it,” he
mused, and pulled the gun from his waistband and laid the nozzle
thoughtfully alongside his nose, rubbing absently, considering
it.

Michael noticed the rope was starting to
slacken around Leah and made a slight motion with his head. She
looked down and blinked, but grabbed it behind her back and made it
taut again.

“I think,” Juan Carlo said, his eyes getting
all squinty as he thought hard about it, “that you have been hurt
in this life, Leah. Your heart has been broken, and it is not so
easy to mend.”

Leah forgot the rope a moment. “That’s
true.”

Oh.
God
. Michael was now in danger of
vomiting.

Juan Carlo went down on his haunches before
her. “If you were not to die, I would urge you to trust more,” he
said, and put his palm on her cheek. “You cannot know great joy
until you have known great pain.”