Finding Mr. Right Now (13 page)

Monica washed her face and managed to unearth her brush from beneath two tubes of mascara. She thought about washing her hair and using the blow dryer to try to bake her curls into submission, but she didn’t want to take the time or risk waking Ronnie. Unfortunately, without the application of a blow dryer, her curls had a mind of their own. She made a few half-hearted swipes with her brush, but nothing was going to get her hair civilized. She decided she’d limit herself to a quick application of lip-gloss and head for the lobby.

She switched off the light and tiptoed toward the door, managing to stub her toe on a chair leg before she found her shoes. Ronnie muttered something and then seemed to sink deeper into dreamland.

There didn’t seem to be many people in the halls—fortunately. In the lobby the same iron-ribbed woman from last night stood behind the desk. Maybe she slept there.

“Good morning,” Monica murmured.

“Morning,” the desk clerk said, without looking up. “Breakfast room’s to the right.”

“Thanks.” Monica scuttled by, keeping her head down. She figured the fewer people who saw her in her natural state the better. She hadn’t gone out without makeup since college.

The blessed smell of coffee drifted from a door at the side, probably the promised breakfast room. She slid inside and stopped.

The room was full of people in flannel shirts, cargo pants, hiking shorts and T-shirts, all downing huge helpings of enough carbohydrates to give an Atkins devotee heart palpitations. A buffet line stretched across one wall, with a server at the end fixing omelets to order. She’d never seen so many people so cheerful so early in the morning. She felt as if she’d somehow stumbled into a workout video.

“Monica,” someone called. “Hey, Monica, over here.”

She turned to see Faisal sitting at a table at the side along with a pair of people who looked ready to tame the West single-handedly, given the amount of equipment hanging from the various loops and pockets on their cargo pants.

“Morning,” she mumbled.

“Morning. Grab a chair. The food’s great.”

Monica glanced at his plate and managed to repress a shudder. Pancakes, potatoes, eggs, bacon, something that looked like scalloped tomatoes. Normally, she ate toast and coffee for breakfast—on the rare occasions when she ate breakfast at all.

Five minutes later she’d managed to load her plate with a variety of foods she hadn’t eaten since she was a child. Blueberry muffins. Applewood-smoked bacon. Eggs over easy. And toast. Made of fresh-baked, seven-grain bread, of course, but toast nonetheless.

She settled down opposite Faisal. The other two people at the table had already left, probably to do something nauseatingly healthful. “So where’d you end up last night? Paul said you were in a bar.”

“Yeah, for about ten minutes. Denham told me he knew someone who might be able to fix the camera, so I went off to meet him.”

“And could he? Fix the camera, that is?”

Faisal shoveled in another bite of home fries. “Yeah. He sort of took it apart and put it back together. Turned out some of the connections were loose.”

“So is he some kind of photographer?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know. I think he used to be in the business. He talked like it. I got the idea he was a cameraman somewhere—maybe local news or something”

“What did he charge?”

“He didn’t. Said it was on the house.”

Monica frowned. People who did things for free always made her a little nervous. Probably because they frequently didn’t mean to do it for free after all, and the charge could be high. “That’s good. I guess.”

“Damn straight.” Faisal shoveled in another bite of eggs. “At least now Artie can’t come up with some way to take the repair bill out of my pay.”

She tore off a bit of her muffin and took a quick taste.
Oh dear lord!
It was possibly the best blueberry muffin in the known universe. Somehow she managed not to shove the rest of it into her mouth. “But now you’ll have to shoot some video of Ronnie and the guys having fun around town.”

“Yeah.” Faisal grimaced.

So much for the two-day pass Paul had promised her. Not that he was in any position to promise her anything. “I’ll try to set something up. Some kind of event for Ronnie and the guys, so you can film them doing stuff.”

Brendan and Billy Joe would probably be glad to be back in the game. Paul would hate it, of course. But she couldn’t let that influence her one way or the other. She really couldn’t.

And Ronnie. She thought of Ronnie last night, dancing with a bunch of men who had no idea who she was. They danced with her because she was a pretty girl, not because they’d been paid to compete for her hand. She’d seemed so happy. So…relaxed.

Monica stared down at the remains of the blueberry muffin in her hand. “Faisal, what if the camera hadn’t been fixed?”

“If it hadn’t…?” His forehead furrowed. “But it was.”

She nodded. “I know. But if it hadn’t been fixed, you couldn’t take any shots, could you?”

He gave her a you-really-
are-
an-idiot look. “Why no, Monica, if the camera hadn’t been fixed, I could not take any shots.”

She took a quick breath. “So did you tell anybody else about it?”

“Nope. It took a while to put everything together. To tell you the truth, I haven’t been back to the room yet. I crashed on the repair guy’s couch for a couple of hours.” He narrowed his eyes. “Where are you heading with this anyway?”

“Maybe we could just pretend that the camera never did get fixed. After yesterday, I think we all could use a day to just kick back. Take it easy. With nobody watching.” She gave him the best smile she could muster. “We’ll be back on track when we go to Elkhorn Run. You can shoot lots of stuff there.”

He shook his head. “Glenn won’t be happy. He thinks I’m racking up hours of film here. When he finds out I’ve got nothing, he might fire me.”

“I won’t let him.” She thought about crossing her fingers when she said it. In reality, there was no way she could keep Glenn from doing anything. “I’ll tell him it was all my fault. I’ll tell him the camera got fixed too late to shoot anything here in town, and I didn’t think it was worth it to try.”

Faisal still didn’t look happy. “Then he might fire you.”

Monica waited for the shiver of dread that statement ought to inspire. It didn’t come. “If he fires me, he fires me. Just please don’t ask me to set up any stunts here in Salt Box.”

There was a moment of silence as Faisal seemed to consider the wisdom of what she’d just said—or more likely the idiocy. Then he shrugged. “Okay. Maybe I can shoot some stuff on my own. Some scenery or something. I might even do a few stills.” He pushed himself to his feet, coffee cup in hand.

“Thanks, Faisal.”

He shrugged. “Don’t thank me yet. Wait until you see what Glenn has to say.”

Monica could anticipate what Glenn would say, and it wasn’t pretty. Still, she wasn’t about to back down. Ronnie deserved a day to enjoy being a real belle before she had to be phony again. And before the tabloids plastered her face across the country so that someone, maybe a lot of someones, might recognize her even in Salt Box, Colorado.

Oh right, Monica, this is all for Ronnie’s benefit. How selfless of you.

Okay, Ronnie wasn’t the only one who deserved a day of real. That kiss with Paul had been a whole heapin’ helpin’ of real. That was another thing she didn’t necessarily want Faisal filming.

What had happened between them might mean nothing, after all. Like she’d said at the time, it had all the trappings of a summer romance. He still might hide when he saw her coming. But somehow she didn’t think so.

A two-day pass. Or maybe a one-day pass. But one day might be enough.

Paul sat in a rocker on what passed for a veranda at Praeger House. The view stretched across the valley up to the blue peaks in the distance. He could hear a stream tumbling somewhere, probably a creek that had branched off from the river. Judging from the teenagers heading down the street with enormous inner tubes balanced on their shoulders, it must be close by.

Summer afternoons drifting in an inner tube down a mountain stream or a river, riding over the rapids and getting dunked in water that felt like ice, then climbing out to dry off on a sun-warmed rock by the side. That had been a large part of his life until he’d moved to California and the Big Time.

For a moment, he thought about joining the teenagers. But right now he had to waylay Monica.

He leaned back in his rocker, remembering their brief make-out session on the drive before Ronnie Valero had arrived to pull Monica back to sanity. Damn, that had been good. It wasn’t anywhere close to the usual for him, but that was actually a good thing in this case. The usual didn’t hold a candle to Monica. He wanted the two-day pass he’d promised last night. For both of them.

He couldn’t take the chance that she’d try to duck whatever it was they had going at the moment. He didn’t know exactly how she felt about the whole thing, but he planned on doing a lot more exploring.

As if she’d heard some kind of subliminal call, Monica chose that moment to walk through the front door of the hotel. She wore jeans and a white T-shirt with a red cotton sweater over it that did nothing to hide those superlative breasts underneath. Her hair billowed around her face in a wave of curls.
Interesting.
He’d had no idea that butterscotch hair was actually corkscrews.

Altogether she looked a lot less put together than usual, as if Salt Box, Colorado, had peeled off a couple layers of veneer. He planned on peeling off a few more himself.

“Hey,” he called.

She started, then turned in his direction. “Hey yourself.”

“Where are you off to this fine summer morning?” He managed not to grimace. All of a sudden he sounded like something out of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

She shrugged. “I need to go to the garage and find out what the damage is and if the car’s going to be drivable in the near future.”

He pushed up from the rocker. “I’ll go with you.”

“Oh.” Her eyes widened slightly. “Sure. That’d be great.”

“Let’s go.”

Sunlight bounced off the hummingbird feeders and window glass. He pulled out his sunglasses.

“Geez it’s bright around here.” She squinted down the drive, fumbling in her purse. “Is it always like this?”

“Pretty much. We’re up around seven thousand feet. The air is thinner.”

“Hmmph,” she snorted, balancing her sunglasses on her nose.

“You don’t like it?” He grinned in spite of himself.

“Everything is so…glittery. Like it’s just been washed or something.”

He shrugged, following her down the drive toward the street. “Some people might think that was a plus.”

“Some people didn’t wake up with a blast of sunlight in the face after being up late the night before,” she muttered.

He raised an eyebrow. “Not a morning person?”

“That’s an interesting question actually.” Her eyebrows pulled together as she thought. “I can remember being a morning person back when I was growing up. Even in college I’d study in the morning rather than pulling an all-nighter.”

He put his hand on her elbow to maneuver around a pothole, then left it there. “So when did you change?”

“I don’t know exactly. Probably around the time I started working twelve-hour days.” She grimaced again. “All right, that’s it, I swear, this is the last whining for the day.”

“Whine away.” He resisted the urge to put his arm around her waist, although it seemed like the natural thing to do. Monica was giving off a confusing set of vibes. She seemed tense about something, but he didn’t think it was him.

The town was waking up around them. Shops were opening, cars with kayaks and canoes heading down Main Street toward the river. Up ahead he saw a large gray wooden building with a lot next door full of cars, probably Al Monteith’s place.

“Did you call ahead?” he asked.

She glanced at him, forehead furrowing. “No. I didn’t know his number. Do you think that’ll be a problem?”

“Nope. It’s a small town. People probably stop by all the time.”

She sighed. “To tell you the truth, I just wanted to get out of the hotel for a while. I’ve been on the phone since breakfast.”

Probably out of the hotel and away from Ronnie. Paul couldn’t blame her. “Anything new from Donovan?”

She shook her head. “Still in a holding pattern. He wants us to drive up there as soon as we can, but he’s not concerned enough to send a car down yet.”

“Hell, if it weren’t for the luggage, we could probably hike up there. It’s only a few miles.”

She sighed again. “You could hike up there, and maybe me and Brendan and Faisal. I’m a lot less sure about Ronnie and Billy Joe.”

He considered Billy Joe’s cowboy boots and Ronnie’s platform sandals. Probably not.

Monteith’s garage looked a lot like a former barn, minus horses, hay and space. An array of cars, ranging from a beat-up Chevy to a sleek Mercedes, was parked in the yard, probably either waiting to be worked on or waiting to be picked up. They headed toward a door at the side.