Now a Major Motion Picture (35 page)

If he’d taken a girl home to Illinois, obviously they were serious. It wouldn’t be fair for her to intrude on that. And then, of course, there was Colin to consider. She doubted he’d be thrilled if she suddenly decided to reconnect with a former fiancé, especially with the media following her every move. With her luck, they’d sniff out the whole sordid story and plaster it on tabloid covers.

No, she definitely couldn’t talk to Noah.

It was all a moot point anyway. Who was she to think he’d care about their ancient history? And even if he did, what did it matter? As far as he and the rest of the world knew, she was engaged to somebody else.

Without meaning to, she groaned out loud.

“What?”

Startled, Amelia looked up and shook her head. “Nothing. I mean, I just don’t know what to order. Everything sounds good.” She bit her lip.

“Hmm,” Colin said, glancing back down at his menu. “I’ve heard the duck fried rice is really good. And they have awesome pizzas.”

She smiled. He’d let her off the hook again, but this time she was glad—their “engagement” was the last subject she wanted to bring up. It was just another false, dumb rumor, but it was being perpetuated by the press and had spiraled out of control.

Two months earlier, a blogger had posted a picture of Amelia with what looked like a ring on her left ring finger. Within a day, two major tabloids had similar images on their covers. Before she and Colin even had a chance to deny the rumor, it went viral. And now no matter how much they refuted it—even in legitimate interviews—it was still being reported as fact.

People seemed to think she and Colin were covering it up, trying to maintain some laughable level of privacy, but Amelia knew they just wanted to believe the lie more than the truth. Almost every day she read a new report about her supposed wedding. She’d learned which locations she and Colin were scouting, the dates they were considering, their potential honeymoon spots. Last week she’d watched a ten-minute talk show discussion about which fashion designer would create her dress.

Colin seemed to think it was hilarious—he’d started answering her calls with “How’s my bride?”—but to her the jokes weren’t funny so much as uncomfortable. The word “marriage” had never entered their conversations before this tabloid mess. She couldn’t imagine Colin wanting to marry her, and she couldn’t imagine marrying
him
either, at least not anytime soon. For one thing, they’d barely spent time together in the seven months they’d been dating. For another, she had serious doubts about whether she could survive in Colin’s world long term—she was having a hard enough time surviving it this
week
.

Her thoughts shifted to another wedding, the one she
had
planned once. She thought about the dress she’d picked out, the small group of friends and family who would have filled every pew of the tiny church. She pictured Noah, tall and handsome in a crisp black tux…

Lost in her reverie, she didn’t notice the server, himself clad in crisp black and white, who’d appeared beside her.

“Ma’am? What may I bring you?”

She jumped, her cheeks flushing crimson yet again. She dropped her eyes to the menu and read the first entry they landed on.

“Um, I’ll have the smoked salmon salad with artichoke risotto.”
Ugh.
She didn’t even like artichokes. Oh, well. That was the price she paid for thinking taboo thoughts.

She glanced up at Colin, who was studying her curiously. The server rounded the table to him, so painfully courteous he appeared almost bored. She’d noticed that L.A. waiters and waitresses seemed totally desensitized to celebrity.
If only everybody felt that way.

“And what for you, sir?”

“I’ll have the prosciutto wrapped chicken.”

“Yes, sir. Did you decide on any appetizers?”

His eyes flashed back to hers. “Yeah, you know what? We’ll have the…um.” He glanced back down at the menu, “the Mediterranean tapas, please.”

The server nodded, smiled, and then bowed his thanks and hurriedly retreated. Amelia’s eyes trailed after him.

“Tapas?” she asked, her voice wavering slightly.

“Yeah, I thought you’d probably still be hungry later if all you eat’s a…what was it, a smoked salmon salad?” Colin scrunched his face up as she tossed her napkin halfheartedly in his direction again. He leaned down and snagged it from the terra cotta bricks at their feet and handed it to her.

“It sounded good.”

“You never even looked at the menu,” he corrected. “I’d kill to know what you’re thinking so hard about over there.”

“Well, I wouldn’t recommend that,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “The tabloids would have a field day.”

He gave her a wry smile. “Come on. Penny for your thoughts.”

She chuckled. “My grandfather used to say that. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody use that expression who was under fifty.”

Colin gave her a hurt look, but his eyes were amused. “Are you saying I’m not cool?”

“Yep. You are
soooo
uncool. I’m ashamed to be seen with you.” She smiled and reached forward to brush the back of his hand with her fingers. He flipped his hand up to enclose her fingers in his, and she was glad the distraction was effective.

Because he couldn’t pay her enough to tell him what had just been on her mind.

Close-Up

Noah, January

Noah glanced up from the plans he was studying, his vision blurred from hours of intense concentration. He blinked into the late afternoon sun, which was softened only somewhat by the filmy, perpetual haze that seemed to hover like a dome above the whole of the L.A. landscape.

An involuntary grimace crossed his lips as he thought about this place he was just beginning to get to know. The hotel he was helping get off the ground—literally—was his first-ever West Coast project. It represented a new milestone for him, but he was having trouble seeing it that way.

This city left a bad taste in his mouth.

For months now—since that day in October when Erin had left him alone, completely alone, in his condo…the same day he’d seen the news of Amelia’s engagement to Colin—he’d been hit with a stronger dose of Hollywood than he thought he could stand. Being here, so close to the source of his tension, was unnerving.

The buzz about Amelia and Colin’s relationship was everywhere he looked. Maybe it wouldn’t seem that way if he could stop himself from looking for it, but he couldn’t. Now that he didn’t have Erin’s feelings to consider, his will to resist his daily fix of Colinmel gossip had melted entirely away.
Daily. Right. More like hourly
, he thought miserably, his fingers twitching toward the phone in his pocket. He didn’t know why he was torturing himself over Amelia’s relationship with Colin. Just because Erin was gone, just because she’d left him with some half-baked notion that he needed to track Amelia down, well, that didn’t change anything. Erin’s permission didn’t give him any more right to intrude on Amelia’s new life than he’d had when he wasn’t single.

Especially since she was happy. That was the real rub. As he sank deeper into this lonely, bitter space he now occupied, her happiness only seemed to increase by the day. He could see it in her face, in the pictures of her he needed like he needed air. She was in his life again, sort of, and he didn’t know how to let that go.

He tilted his neck back, letting the warm sunshine spill across his face and wash away his dark thoughts. He gulped in a lungful of Southern California air, warm even in late January, as a breeze danced across his skin and ruffled the pages in his hands—plans for the fifteen-story structure that would soon fill the empty space in front of him. His eyes traveled across the mounds of dirt and rubble that were slowly being lifted and hauled away as workers readied the site for construction.

He’d been in L.A. for three days, his travel schedule no less exhausting than it had been a few months earlier. This was the third hotel he’d seen move from concept to some stage of reality in six months, a thought that made his head spin. But it had kept him absurdly busy, and busy was good.

“Noah!”

Ripped from his thoughts, he glanced around to see where the call had come from. His eyes fell on Adam Russell, project manager for the Dallas-based development group behind the hotel chain. He’d been hanging out with Adam more and more at home and out at hotel sites—their work often landed them in the same place at the same time.

He glanced at his watch.
Holy crap. 5:30 already?
He’d been on-site for four hours now, after a morning jam-packed with meetings. He jerked his chin up in a nod, more than ready to call it a day and sign on to whatever plan Adam was forming. Adam’s brisk footsteps slowed, and he stopped on the dirt a couple feet away from where Noah was standing.

“Hey man, me and a couple of the guys are thinking dinner at this place somebody knows on Vine, then maybe hittin’ a bar or two,” he said in his slow Texas drawl. “What do you think?”

“Sure thing. What time?”

“I’d say around seven. Nothin’ll be happening anywhere till at least nine, but we can start the drinkin’ early.” He glanced down at the plans in Noah’s hands, then shaded his eyes and looked over his shoulder across the wide expanse of dirt. “You ‘bout ready to head? I’ll ride back with you if that’s all right.”

“Yeah, sure. Let’s get out of here.”

Noah took a last look over the site, which was emptying fast. He rolled up the drawings in his hands, patted his pocket for keys, and trailed Adam to his rental car, glad to have the company. The last thing he wanted was to hang out alone—he tried to keep his mind as occupied as possible these days. He’d gone out with Adam and his friends each of the past two nights, mindlessly trailing them from bar to bar, joining in to the point that he might even say he’d had fun once enough beer had flowed through his system to take the edge off his thoughts.

All the guys were single, which was good and bad. Their number one game, apart from picking up women in the semi-hot hotspots they’d found to hang out in, was to grade them. Most of the ones the other guys called A’s were the type Noah put more in the B-minus category. They all looked alike—fake blonde hair, fake boobs, fake tan. The other guys, especially Adam, gave him shit every time he pointed out his version of an A. What could he say? He liked the girl-next-door type.

Still, he played the game. It was better than crashing out alone in his room with a six-pack, moping over grainy, stolen images of Amelia. But he drew the line at feeding cheesy pick-up lines to random, phony girls in L.A. bars. The thought of it made him feel emptier than he already felt.

Instead he played wingman for the others. He was good at wingman.

* * *

Later that night, Noah checked his watch again and shifted on his barstool. He was restless, ready to leave. Adam was plastered, and Craig and Cameron, the other two guys with them, weren’t much better off. He had that overly conscious, floating-above-the-action feeling that came from being the only sober person in a group.
Maybe I’ll get my own cab and bail.

He glanced up at the TV mounted at the far end of the bar—their second bar of the night, a packed, kind of grimy place on Sunset—and squinted at the screen. He couldn’t make out the score of the Lakers game.

He stifled a yawn.

He was stuck here for the entire weekend, since he had another round of meetings Monday morning before his flight left Monday night. He couldn’t wait to get back home to Dallas—L.A. wasn’t his scene.
Might have a little something to do with who lives here
. He pushed the thought out of his head.

He felt a nudge against his shoulder and looked up to see Adam squeezing between two girls in their late twenties who were standing behind Noah. One, a redhead in a short skirt, rubbed herself against Adam as he passed. Her friend, whose silvery blonde hair was no match for the frost in her eyes, shot Adam an unseen look of disgust as he waggled his eyebrows at Noah and leered at the other girl.

“Hey, Noah,” he yelled above the din. “Wanna ditch this place and find a club?”

His words came out slurred, and Noah cringed.
No, I don’t.

He shrugged. “Nah, man. I think I’m about done. It’s weak, I know, but I’m tired.” He flashed a smile. “Getting old.”

Adam made a face. “Speak for yourself, dude.” He turned to the redhead.

“How
you
doin’?”

She grinned at him. “I’m doin’ fine, baby, how you doin’?”

Noah gaped, his eyes darting back and forth between them. That had to be the most clichéd pickup line in TV history. Had it actually
worked
? She was obviously even drunker than he was.

Noah slapped Adam on the back and signaled for the bartender. By the time he’d tabbed out, Adam, Craig, and Cameron had done the same and were heading for the exit. He followed them out onto the street, the redhead tagging along with them as the blonde friend tried to order her back inside. Noah left them all standing by a cab on the sidewalk—its back door hung open as the blonde tugged at the redhead to keep her from getting in the cab with the guys.

Another cab approached in the right lane, and Noah signaled for it. The cabbie swung so hard toward the curb that he barely missed the first cab’s bumper. Noah hopped into the second car and slammed the door, cutting off the mingled sounds of curses being hurled at his cab from the other driver’s open window and the shrill, whiney voice of the redhead, which was ringing in his ears.

He gave the cabbie his hotel name, laid his head back against the seat, and closed his eyes. He didn’t even care who won the chick fight. He was tired, and he wanted to be alone.

It wasn’t long till he regretted the decision.

Back in his hotel room, he peeled off his clothes, fell into bed, and then found himself wide awake, his mind taking him places he didn’t want to go. He wondered where the guys had landed and suddenly wished he was with them. A club packed with desperate guys falling all over themselves to impress a roomful of uninterested, uninteresting girls still had to be better than the quiet, depressing hum of hotel air conditioning, his phone beside him but no one to call.