Extreme Bachelor (8 page)

He even chatted with one of the women he’d
once dated, Jill, and had her laughing and looking a little too
hopeful at the end of their chat.

He did not, however, look at Leah if he
could help it. He just couldn’t. If he did, he would want to talk
to her, and if he talked to her, he’d want to explain everything,
and then maybe even beg her forgiveness, or do something equally
wimpish. Besides, he had an instinct that the time for explaining
himself had reached its statute of limitations.

But when they broke for lunch, he saw her
walking away from him in the company of the three women he’d seen
her with all morning.

As he watched them disappear outside, he
noticed Jack near the door wearing a rather grand shit-eating grin
as Michael came striding forward. “I told you I had a surprise,”
Jack said with a wink.

“Yeah, that was a surprise, all right,”
Michael said with a sigh of resignation. “So how’d you do it?”

Jack grinned. “Remember New York?”

Dear God, how could he have forgotten it? It
had been his first glimpse of Leah in five years. “What I remember
is that your brother couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.”

“And I remember you were awfully interested
in a certain laxative commercial. Imagine how surprised and
delighted I was when you won the Costa Rica gig and left me to sit
through three days of casting, only to find a gem of a laxative
girl among so many? It was the cherry on top of my sundae.”

What were the odds? Seriously, what were the
odds?

Jack laughed and gave him a good ol’ boy
clap on the back. “So . . . I was right. She does mean something to
you.”

“No, no, it’s not that,” Michael said, and
instantly hated himself for trivializing her.

But Jack had known him for
a long time and was on to him. “I know, I know, it’s never
that
,” he joked. “Not
for the Extreme Bachelor. Not for our man about town. But Mikey,
whoever she is, she’s hot.”

Michael smiled halfheartedly. “I know.”

“That’s why I added a couple of your other
old flames to the list. You know, to make things interesting. I
just want you to have fun,” he said with a laugh.

“Why, thanks, Jack. I
believe I owe you. And don’t forget that—I
owe
you, man.”

“My pleasure,” Jack said.

The sound of two women laughing caught their
attention. They turned to look, and Michael recognized one of them
as the production assistant he’d dated a couple of times.

“Gotta run,” Jack said, already striding
toward the two women.

Michael walked outside of the gym, where he
paused and stopped in the middle of the walk, his hands on his
hips.

It had to be karma.
Marnie, Eli’s girlfriend, was always talking about karma. If they
signed a really great gig, she said it was karma. If they turned
down a gig, she said it was karma. If they ordered pizza in, she
said it was pizza karma. Okay, that was a little overboard, but
if
this
wasn’t
karma, then it sure was one hell of a coincidence.

Granted, the guys were always trying to set
him up for a fall, to get back for their chief complaint that he
took all the women out of the available women pool. Okay, so he had
a reputation, but so what if he’d had a few flings? Variety was the
spice of life. And honestly, no one was more surprised than him
each time a woman would consent to go out with him. There was still
a nerdy little kid inside him, wishing Candace Flores would notice
him.

“I hate going anywhere with you and that
romance-novel face,” Cooper had complained one night when they’d
gone clubbing and everyone had been rejected—except Michael.
Michael had met a young woman from Kansas who intrigued him and
gave him her number. “It ain’t right, man. Five women walk up, and
all five of ‘em are looking at you.”

Michael had laughed, but Jack had agreed
with Cooper. “I don’t know what it is about you, Raney, but you
always leave us out in the cold,” Jack said. “Women flock to you
like flies to a dead cow.”

“That’s such a touching image, Jacko—I
didn’t know how you truly felt,” Michael had responded with a
grin.

“You know what I mean,” Jack had groused.
“You just need to get your own bar with your own little throne and
let them line up around the block. Coop and I will just hang out in
pool halls with the rest of the rejects until we die.”

Michael had tried to tell these idiots more
than once that he found the whole idea of his appeal extremely
funny, but they didn’t want to hear any of that; they preferred to
bitch about it. Nevertheless, it was the God’s honest truth that
Michael Raney had once been the biggest geek on the planet. A nerd
through and through, a stupid little moron growing up in the
Illinois foster care system.

He’d passed through six foster homes in all,
never truly integrating into a single one of them. His many foster
siblings had glommed on to the tough kids and shied away from the
science-loving nerds like him. And the foster parents? Forget
it—they usually had so many kids to deal with that he’d been lost
in the shuffle. He and his Erector set had been left alone.

Yet that wasn’t the thing that ate at his
adolescent self. What ate at him was that he was essentially
invisible to girls, too. He didn’t score as much as a kiss until he
was nineteen years old. Hell, he didn’t get as much as a look
before he was twenty-four. But then, by some miracle, he had
morphed overnight from a nerdy, lonely kid into a man who women
flocked to. Why or how, Michael had no idea. It had just happened,
and he damn sure hadn’t asked a lot of questions. From that moment
on, there had been no looking back.

The only thing that had really mattered to
him was that it never end, because Michael Raney loved women.
Absolutely loved them. Loved the way they thought and talked and
walked and laughed. Loved the way they felt under him when he made
love. Loved how delicate they were, how they smiled, how they
smelled, how they always picked up after him and complained about
his empty kitchen.

He’d been lucky enough to date women across
the globe. He’d lived with a diplomat in Paris, an artist in Spain.
He’d hooked up with a doctor in Ghana and a teacher in Australia.
He’d had numerous flings with actresses at all levels, but the
little nerd in him never ceased to be surprised when a woman was
truly into him.

Now, here he was, coming full circle around
to the one truth he’d figured out about himself: He really did want
to cherish one woman above all others. He really did want to make
babies with one woman and grow old with her. And out of the many
women he’d been involved with one way or another, there had been
only one who had stood out, only one he still thought of, only one
for whom he wished he could go back in time and redo it all.

Leah.

They had clicked from the start—she liked to
laugh, liked weird things like off-the-wall indie films, just like
him, and Thai food, just like him. She claimed to have morphed from
a gangly geek into what she was, just like him. Unfortunately, he’d
blown it all in a pretty spectacular way. The night he had walked
away from her for what he thought would be forever sat like an ugly
scar across his memory. He dreamed of it—in his dream he was always
trying to take it back, but he could never catch her to tell
her.

At the time, he thought he was doing her a
favor. She didn’t really know who he was or what he did—their whole
relationship had been predicated on a lie. Hell, what he thought he
knew of himself hadn’t even been the truth. But in hindsight, after
five more years of trotting the globe and playing with its women,
he had come to another conclusion—Leah Kleinschmidt was the one
woman who had the power to push him over the finish line.

He just never thought he’d see her again,
and it never occurred to him that he would see her in the flesh, in
L.A. On one of his sets.

Now, the Extreme Bachelor had absolutely no
idea how to proceed.

His uncertainty added to an already
difficult day that got only more difficult after lunch, when they
took the ladies out on a ropes course, a series of hurdles designed
to test their endurance and their teamwork.

He lost sight of Leah completely during the
afternoon, as he had one woman or another in his face constantly.
One got rope burn when she fell and did not let go of the rope. One
caught her hair on a swing and shrieked so loudly you would have
thought she’d been impaled. During a break, several of them camped
out around a child’s swing set—part of their urban obstacle
course—and howled with laughter about something, and when Jack
appeared to tell them break was over, they doubled over with more
boisterous laughter, leaving Jack red-faced without even knowing
why.

And moreover, Jack was right—the women never
seemed to stop talking. The longer the day went, the louder it
seemed to get. When Michael settled a dispute over a ruined
shoe—“These are Pumas!” one blonde shrieked at a brunette who
rolled her eyes—he’d had enough. Fortunately, the rest of T.A. felt
the same way. Eli, who remained amazingly calm throughout the
day—so calm that Michael was beginning to wonder if he might have
eaten a couple of elephant tranquilizers over the lunch break to
help him along—called the girls together, gave them a little pep
talk, and sent them home until the next morning.

The women immediately broke into chatter and
showed no signs of going anywhere. It was, apparently, social
hour.

“I think we need to talk about that second
battle scene,” Cooper was saying, pulling out a sheet of paper from
his back pocket. “After what I saw on the ropes course, there is no
way in hell we are going to get some of these girls to jump off a
rooftop without killing themselves, and we can’t afford to hire
enough stunt women to do it for them.”

Michael watched Leah emerge from the little
locker room, her backpack over her shoulder. She waved goodbye to
her friends, the same wiggly fingers she used to wave at him at the
subway, and walked toward the parking lot.

Okay, this was it. He couldn’t help himself,
he couldn’t watch her walk away and not say something. He slipped
away from the very serious discussion of rooftop jumping and
followed her.

Leah was walking fast. He jogged to catch up
with her. “Leah!” he called out when it looked like she might
actually beat him to her car. “Wait up!”

She paused; he saw a slight but discernible
dip in her shoulders. But when she turned around, she was smiling.
An odd smile, but a smile nonetheless. “Oh! Hey, Michael . . . ah,
listen, I really have to run,” she said, jerking her thumb toward
an old Ford Escort. “I’d love to chat, but I’ve gotta be someplace,
and you know, the traffic—”

“I just want a minute, Leah. One
minute.”

She looked at her car, then at him. Her eyes
were so blue—he’d forgotten how blue. “Well . . .” She glanced at
her watch.

“Listen . . . that was really weird today,”
he said, wasting no time. “I was blown away by it.”

“Oh,” she said, nodding, and then her brows
dipped a little. “By what?”

She had to ask? “By seeing you. I was hoping
we could talk a minute.”

“Ah. Well. Here’s the
thing,” she said, squeezing the bridge of her nose for a minute.
“I’ve really got to be someplace, and it’s just . . . our . . . you
know . . .
stuff
. . . I mean, it’s old news, isn’t it?” She dropped her hand
and looked at him, and the expression on her face made his gut
wrench. “No offense, but it was really a long time ago.”

“Five years,” he said
instantly. “Look, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, Leah. I
just want to . . .”
Dammit, what did he
really want
? “I just want to talk,” he
said decisively. “Just talk. If not today, maybe
tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” Honestly, she seemed to be
debating if she would even be back at work tomorrow. “Yeah, maybe.
Okay. So I’ll see you tomorrow—”

“Leah, listen,” he said,
before she could run off. “I’ve thought a lot about you over the
years. A
lot
.”

Leah blinked. “Huh. Well . . . I’ve thought
about you, too.”

He could just imagine she had. “But I
thought nice things,” he said with a lopsided grin. “Great things.
Killer things. Things I can’t forget, and I’d really like to talk
to you. I’d like to tell you that I wish—”

“Michael?”

His name startled him, and he jerked around.
Nicole Redding was staring up at him, her hands on her tiny hips,
her lips pursed and her frown deep. “Nicki,” he said with a false
smile. Why in the hell did she have to show up now? He mentally
kicked his own ass for having slept with her. She’d been trouble
from the get-go.

“Well,
hello
, stranger,” she said in a tone
that made him cringe, and gave Leah a once-over before lifting her
face to be kissed.

Michael reluctantly put his hand on her
elbow and pecked her cheek, Hollywood-style.

She reared back, squinting up at him in a
way that made her multimillion-dollar face look very bitchy. “I
didn’t know you were in town.”

“Yeah . . . I just got in.”

“Costa Rica, I heard.”

“Yep.” Why was she here? Why didn’t she go
back to Bel Air where she belonged?

“So what are you doing here? Film? A woman?
Or both?” She laughed at her little dig.

Michael didn’t laugh. “Neither. But thanks
for asking.”

“I guess T.A. is doing the
stunt work for
War
, huh?”

“Looks like.”

“Lucky me,” she said with a frown. “I’ll get
to see the guy who—”