Tall Cool One (15 page)
Cammie smiled. She’d changed before she came to meet Adam, so she could do what she did next: unbutton the top button of her Anna Sui orange sleeveless top. “She was flirting with you, Adam. Kind of like this.”
“Why would she flirt with me?”
“Because you’re hot.” She undid another button, then leaned over and kissed him lightly. “Besides, I may have been singing your praises.”
“Singing my—” He stopped. “Holy shit. That’s why I got the stupid cup-size jokes. And why Twyla was all over me. And Diva. You told people I was . . . ?”
Cammie nodded. A second later, the blouse was off, exposing her Tres Gazelle peach silk bra. She reached over to unbutton Adam’s shirt.
He caught her wrist. “Cammie, for one thing, you don’t even know if it’s true. And for another, that kinda thing should stay between us.”
“Oh, come on. Of course it’s true. Look at the size of your feet. Besides, I just raised your stock,” she said lightly. “Now you get a chance to prove me right.” She took his hand and led him into the palatial marble bathroom. He’d lit small candles all around the sunken bathtub. She slipped off her Chloé silk capris and stretched in her lingerie, knowing how terrific she looked.
He unbuttoned his own shirt and pulled it off. Tugged his T-shirt over his head. Then he sat on the edge of the tub, poured in a generous dollop of gardenia bubble bath, and began to fill the tub with water.
“Make it really, really hot,” Cammie whispered in his ear as they watched the bubbles froth.
“You got it.” Adam cranked the hot water tap all the way to the right. Between the candles and the steam rising from the tub, the room was delightfully toasty.
Cammie smiled. “It’s getting so warm, I really think I should take off my—”
Suddenly an earsplitting buzzer as loud as a retro air raid siren sounded in the suite. The horrible noise was everywhere—the bathroom, the sitting room, the bedroom. Adam ran out into the main suite, looking for a way to shut it off. As he did, icy water began to spray from the ceiling fire sprinkler system.
“Damn!” Cammie screamed as water cascaded over her.
“The candles and bath must have set off the automatic sprinkler system!” she heard Adam yell. “I can’t turn the damn thing off!”
A moment later, there was loud pounding on the suite front door. “Hotel security!” a voice boomed. “Open up!
“Shit!” She grabbed the complimentary Au Mer silk robe that hung on the back of the bathroom door and ran into the bedroom, toes squishing into the soaked carpet, as water continued to rain down from the ceiling sprinklers. Meanwhile Adam opened the door to two security guards and a manager. The manager had the face of a hawk and the body of a linebacker; the security guards in blue rent-a-cop uniforms looked as if they’d been plucked from
The Sopranos.
“Fire in here?” the manager demanded.
“No fire,” Adam replied.
Scowling, the manager strode into the suite and was instantly doused. But he went to a wall panel near the television, removed the cover, and punched some kind of a code into a keypad. Instantly the water and the alarm both stopped. Then he whirled on Adam. “Were you smoking?” he thundered, getting so close to Adam that he was practically spitting.
Adam took a small step backward. “No, sir. Maybe it was . . . the candles?”
The manager looked as if he was about to bust a blood vessel.
“You were burning candles in here?”
“A few,” Adam admitted.
“Weren’t you informed this was a non-smoking suite?”
“We weren’t smoking. We really are terribly sorry, sir.”
“What do you think multiple candles emit into the air? Cat piss?” The manager seethed.
Oh, please, enough of this shit, Cammie thought. Who did this little hospitality industry nobody think he was? Where did he get off humiliating Adam?
She gritted her teeth and stepped forward. “Excuse me, what did you say your name was?”
“Bruce Sullivan.” The manager glared at Cammie. “Night manager. And who are you?”
“Cammie Sheppard. My father is Clark Sheppard. He gives you about two hundred thousand grand’s worth of business a year. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”
“Maybe,” Bruce allowed.
Cammie didn’t give an inch. “Think about it, Bruce. People light candles in hotel suites all the time, and it doesn’t unleash Niagara Falls. What the hell is wrong with your sprinkler system? Excuse me.”
Cammie went to the closet where she stowed her purse, extracted it, then found a credit card in her wallet and tossed it to him. “So let’s skip your little temper tantrum and call it a day. Put the damages on my Visa. And get us a dry suite.”
Bruce shook his head. “I’ll run this card. But you are not welcome at this hotel.”
“It doesn’t matter; your suites suck,” Cammie commented. “Anyway, I’ll be sure to tell my dad and the rest of the agents at Apex to take their business to the Hotel Bel Air.”
Mr. Night Manager ignored the threat; he and his sidekicks strode out of the room. Adam shut the door behind them and turned to Cammie. “Well, mission not accomplished. That wasn’t exactly the way I was planning to get screwed,” he managed ruefully, trying for a joke.
How could she not love this guy? She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him.
“I’ll pay you back for whatever this costs,” he told her.
“Believe me, my father will have his attorneys handle this; it won’t cost us anything. They’ll probably give him a two-week voucher for a better suite than this one.”
He smiled down at her. “You are something else, Cam.”
She kissed him again. “All of this . . . what you planned for us . . . it was so sweet. It really would have been ‘it’ this time.”
“Definitely,” he agreed.
She gazed up at him. “You know what? I’d rather be right here, right now, like this, with you, than having wild sex with anyone else.”
Cammie knew herself to be capable of saying pretty much anything to anyone to achieve whatever it was she wanted to achieve. So the fact that she said this to Adam wasn’t bizarre. What
was
bizarre was that she meant it.
A
nna dragged her board out of the briny water and dug its end into the sand. “I’m sorry, Kai, it’s hopeless.”
She’d scheduled a two-hour private surfing lesson with him, vowing that she’d master the damn thing once and for all or at least get one ride on a wave. Kai had been patient and supportive. And this time, there was no need for a wet suit—the ocean had warmed to eighty-one degrees Fahrenheit; practically a bath temperature. Plus the late afternoon had been beautiful—the air temperature as balmy as the water, the sun bright. Anna had been amazed at the clarity of the light closer to the equator and far from the smog of Los Angeles. The surf had been cooperative, too—three-foot swells, with eleven-second intervals between sets. Kai had pronounced the conditions absolutely perfect.
But Anna still couldn’t surf. Try as she might, every time she got to her feet on the board, she lost her balance and flipped it over. She spent more time in the water by her board than on it. It irked her. For one thing, she hated to fail. For another thing, there was nothing wrong with her balance; years of ballet had proved that.
“Maybe you ought to try waterskiing,” Kai suggested.
“No. I want to surf,” Anna said stubbornly.
Kai dug his own board into the sand next to Anna’s. “You always get what you want?”
“No,” Anna said, but there was a pause in her voice.
“Usually, though,” Kai surmised. “That’s how you think life should be, right?”
Anna brushed the hanks of wet hair back off her face. “If I work hard at something? Yes.”
“So all the people with crappy jobs and crappy lives just don’t work hard enough?” Kai mused. “That’s your life philosophy?”
“That’s not fair. You’re putting words in my mouth.”
“Not really,” Kai said. “I’m reading between the lines.”
Did she detect an edge to his voice? They hadn’t yet discussed last night. Anna had been raised by a woman who could carry on a pleasant conversation about the weather while watching pachyderms mate, the old “if you don’t acknowledge something, it doesn’t exist” philosophy. So Anna’s instinct had been to just pretend that last night hadn’t happened. But now she realized that that was exactly what her mother would have done. She forced herself not to do it the Jane Percy way.
“I just want to say that I probably should have thought things through before inviting you to my suite last night,” Anna began. “I thought I was ready for . . . something . . . I wasn’t ready for.”
It wasn’t exactly direct. But it was the best she could do at the moment. And it was the total truth.
“It’s a sheila’s prerogative to change her mind,” Kai said.
“A sheila?”
Kai laughed. “Aussie slang. A female, I mean. Anyway, no worries. Really.”
He really was being nice about it. One tiny part of Anna was grateful. Another part was tweaked that he wasn’t more upset by her rejection of him; ridiculous, she knew, when all she’d ostensibly wanted was a fling.
“Drink?” he asked. “Joaquin’s on duty. He makes a killer margarita.”
“Just some lemonade, if he’s got it.”
“This is Las Casitas. We’ve got it.” They went to the Surf Shack bar and perched on a couple of bar stools next to an elderly, distinguished-looking couple who were deep in conversation in Italian. Joaquin poured them two glassfuls of icy lemonade, then brought them a plate of fresh-baked Mexican poppy-seed pastries from the Las Casitas bakery.
“Bottoms up,” Kai toasted. “Life is too short to stress out; that’s my motto.”
“You’re one of those people who lives only in the present, aren’t you?” Anna pondered as Joaquin refilled her glass without her having to ask. “And you just accept whatever happens?”
“Pretty much,” Kai agreed.
“No ego involvement?” Anna asked. “No wants? No mountains to climb?”
“Definitely no mountains to climb,” Kai decreed. “That’s me.”
It’s definitely the opposite of me,
Anna thought.
Not that my approach has worked out so well.
“You know, I can almost see your brain synapses firing overtime,” Kai went on.
“I know,” Anna admitted. “It’s like I can’t turn it off. I’m starting to think it’s congenital.”
Kai leaned back in his chair. “That’s why you can’t surf, you know. You have to turn off your brain and just be in your body. Be the wave.”
“Be the wave?” Anna echoed dubiously. “How Zen.”
“It is. Nothing to it but to do it.” He grinned. “You know, I’d love to kiss you right now.”
Anna was surprised and flattered. “After what I pulled last night, you still want to kiss me?”
“Not on the job, though,” Kai teased. “But after six . . .”
Anna felt much better. Now she knew for sure that he wasn’t mad. She might not understand him—his life view was so foreign to her—but she definitely liked him. “After six. Are you sure you want to plan so far in adva—” Anna broke off, mid-word, squinting past Kai at someone heading their way across the sand.
Kai turned. “What’s up?”
“Unless I’m delusional, that’s—”
“Anna!”
It was Sam Sharpe, clad in L.A.M.B. black capris and a Bebe yellow halter top, jogging the last hundred feet toward her.
Anna jumped up, met her halfway, and gave her friend a huge hug. “Sam! What are you doing here?”
Sam laughed. “Slumming!”
Kai trotted over. “Hi. I’m Kai. I teach surfing here.” He shook Sam’s hand. “You’re a friend of Anna’s?”
Sam nodded and pointed to the surfboards. “Never would have guessed. I’m Mary Poppins. At least that’s the name I used to register.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Poppins. This is the most discreet place on the planet, Ms. Poppins. You’ll love it here, Ms. Poppins,” Kai assured her. “I’ll let you guys catch up. Anna, if you’re up for another lesson or anything . . .” He let the “anything” hang in the air—the intent was clear. “You know where to find me,”
“Tasty,” Sam commented, checking out the rear view with approval as Kai went inside the Surf Shack. “You don’t waste any time.”
“He’s teaching me to surf. Well, trying to, anyway.” She punched Sam playfully on the arm. “Now shut up and explain.”
Sam shrugged. “Remembered you were here, got bored with Beverly Hills, planes, trains, automobiles, roll the credits. I hope you’re glad to see me.”
“Yes, of course,” Anna assured her.
Sam grinned. “Good. I’m starved. Do you have any idea what living on a thousand calories a day does to a person? It’s not pretty.”
Anna laughed. “Let’s go eat—the food is fantastic, you can get anything you want whenever you want—and you can fill me in on everything.”
“So long as you fill me in on surfer boy,” Sam allowed. “He was looking at you like you were a cold drink and he was a hot day.”
Anna didn’t feel ready to tell Sam about the seduction that wasn’t of the night before, so she deftly deflected the hint. “I
will
learn to surf by the time I leave here.”
Sam slung an arm around Anna. “Who knows, maybe I will, too.”
“I mean, do I set myself up for this shit?” Sam mused in between bites of her fried soft-shell crabs. She stopped for a moment to savor the food. “You have no idea how good this is until you’ve starved yourself for a few weeks.”
Anna knew that was true. “I guess that’s one argument for starving yourself.”
“Oh, stop flaunting the fact that you’ve never had to diet, Anna.” Sam blew her a kiss. “Anyway, the question is, how could I possibly have thought that clubbing with Cammie would make me feel anything other than awful? The only hot guy who came on to me was some asshole actor who wanted to get to my dad. I swear, if I’d told him he could read for my father’s next movie, he’d have jumped me on the dance floor, fat thighs and all.” She took a long sip of her Diet Coke.
Anna had been through variations on this conversation with Sam many times. But hey, that’s what friends were for. “You’re not fat, Sam.”
Sam licked some crab off her pinkie. “Oh, please do not start with that, Anna.”
“But you’re not. Okay, you’re not as skinny as Cammie, maybe—”
“Or Dee, or you.”