Extreme Bachelor Page 6

  Get it together, man, he chastised himself. He couldn’t stand at one end of the gym ogling her all day. They had a lot of work to do, and this wasn’t exactly the time or place to pick up a relationship he’d broken in half with a single blow to the gut five years ago.

  He made himself turn away, made himself work, and somehow he managed to get through the morning session. He took girls aside and tried to teach them how to play team dodgeball by complimenting them and getting them to lighten up a little, to laugh. His efforts, as usual, made him more than one friend among his group.

  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—”

  A loud screech startled them both, and Michael turned to where Leah had been standing. She was in her car, backing out, and her car was making an awful screeching sound.

  Nicole coughed as the smoke from Leah’s tailpipe blasted them. “—the guy who dumped me,” she finished.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” Michael said, waving a hand in front of his face to dissipate the smoke spewing out of the back of Leah’s car. “Don’t be like that. It was mutual and you know it.”

  “It wasn’t mutual,” she whined, waving her hand, too. “I never once said I wanted to break it off.”

  “Maybe you didn’t say it, but when you started having those late-night sessions with the director, I didn’t think you were exactly committed to our little affair, either.”

  She tossed her head at that. “Do we have to stand here in that junker’s exhaust?”

  “No. That junker is leaving,” he said, and watched Leah drive away with only one functioning brake light.

  “Jesus, they should outlaw those things,” Nicole said. “All right, all right, Michael, the car is gone, you can look at me now. God, that’s so typical of you. Production hasn’t even started, and you’re already hitting on some actress.”

  “I’m not hitting on her.”

  “Whatever,” Nicole said with a dismissive flick of her wrist. “I’m going to go get a drink. You want one?”

  Frankly, he could use a drink, and Nicole could be fun when she loosened up a little. “Okay, but no sushi bars,” he reminded her.

  She smiled. “No sushi, you wimp. Just let me get my things.”

  She gave him a come-hither look that might have sent a less experienced man to his knees before stepping around him and moving on. Michael turned around, watched Leah’s car sputter around the corner, and shoved both hands through his hair.

  One ex-lover. One ex-love of his life. So far, not a particularly great start to a film he’d been so damn certain was a gift from Guy Universe.

  Subject: Re: YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE!!

  From: Lucy Frederick

  To: Leah Kleinschmidt

  Time: 11:10 pm

  Ohmigod, I think I am going to die. Leah, Leah, please
do not do anything completely stupid because you know you have a tendency to be really stupid when it comes to guys. You CANNOT talk to him! I mean, okay, obviously you have to TALK to him, but you can’t let yourself TALK to him, TALK to him, do you understand? I hope I don’t have to remind you how you laid on the couch for six months after he did what he did. You were a friggin’ basket case! You ate an entire box of Fruit Loops in one sitting! Just pleeeease promise me you will remember that he walked out on you, that out of the clear blue, he announced that he was leaving and that was the end of that. He had no regard for your feelings or what you guys had shared for almost a year. I don’t care if he is still really hot, he’s an asshole! They call him the Extreme Bachelor for chrissakes!

  P.S. When we were on the phone, I wasn’t laughing about your humiliating fall. I was laughing at you playing dodgeball. You’re too much a goon to play dodgeball.

  Subject: Re: Re: YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE!!

  From: Leah Kleinschmidt

  To: Lucy Frederick

  Time: 8:30 pm

  Lucy, of COURSE I am not going to TALK to him. Newsflash, but I actually remember what happened. No worries—I am older and more mature and I know what I want and more importantly, I don’t want to get myself into another toxic relationship, especially with M, because I soooo learned my lesson. Yes, I remember walking around NYC like a freakin’ zombie. But for the record—it wasn’t really out of the clear blue. Every time the subject of long-term commitment came up, which okay, you have to admit it came up more than once, and then you also have to admit I was usually the one bringing it up, M was pretty clear that he wasn’t into it. So get a load of this—he called Nicole Redding NICKI. What do you think that means??? And oh yeah, even in high heels, she still doesn’t even reach my elbow, which only added to my general distress for this really miserable day, because there I was looking like a giant gym teacher from some Ukrainian village—but anyway, right when she came prancing up, he had just said, and this is a (nearly) direct quote: “I’ve thought about you a lot. Great things. Killer things, and I wish—” I wish! AUGH!!! What did he wish? WHAT DID HE WISH?!?!?!