Suspiciously Obedient (21 page)

If, on the other hand, you had told him that right now he’d be sitting on a beach in Bali or Thailand or Vietnam hung over, coming down off some godforsaken local drug that no one had heard of in the United States and that he’d be sticky and covered in goo of undetermined origin on parts of his body best left unmentionable…
that?

That he’d believe.

What in the hell had he agreed to when Mike had asked him to come here and take care of Lydia? The directive had been ambiguous. He knew what Mike
didn’t
want: for Lydia to get hurt. Too late. That ship had sailed long ago, christened by and started up with a viral media blitz that had destroyed lives and careers, Mike’s most of all.

Protecting Lydia meant something entirely different, depending on how you chose to interpret it. Was he supposed to make sure that no one knew she was the girl from the video? Should he monitor her at work to make sure that she was being respected? Was his job to follow her everywhere and essentially stalk her to make sure that no other guy got his hands on her? Or (
and this is the interpretation that he chose, Mike be damned
) did protecting Lydia mean softening the hard shell that she’d slammed around her heart the second the video had gone public? Did it mean showing her that she had value? That she was as amazing as some part of her knew she was? Could it mean letting her get to know him and seeing if what he thought had a spark of mutuality might be able to grow?

Most of all, did protecting Lydia mean protecting himself and Mike and the power that the potential for something greater than all three of them held?

It was a hell of a reach, taking Mike’s words and pulling them into that dimension. Jeremy considered himself up to the challenge. Whether he really was or not depended entirely on his own motivations. The more time he spent with Lydia the more he understood why his old buddy had finally allowed himself to feel, to fall, to fulfill, and to falter, as he knew Mike was likely shocked by the intensity of what
real
love felt like. A part of Jeremy was jealous and wanted to touch that, not just to touch the woman who ignited that within Mike, but to touch the
essence
of what it felt like to be that far gone in something with another person, so big that it enveloped you.

And made you forget the cameras.

Jeremy had joked with Mike and with himself about the sex tape, how Lydia must have been one hell of a ride, to make him forget that he was being taped, that they were being catalogued by a Hollywood team of cameras, all recording for a reality TV show that was anything but. The dose of raw emotion, of real sensuality, of two people stripped bare, literally and figuratively, was too much reality for most people. It made shells go up, it made souls crawl behind walls, it forced reckonings that too many people simply couldn’t bear. And so, instead of taking it at face value and examining that tape for what it was, the media had to turn it into a joke, a never-ending loop of fucking that made its way around the world. Played for titters and gasps and chuckles—and stripped of real meaning.

Jeremy hadn’t watched that tape over and over and over just to come up with his idea about Diane and having her take responsibility for it. He’d watched it, too, with an eye for the authenticity in the way her fingers lingered on Mike’s skin. How Mike’s eyes rested on her shoulder just a little longer than you would think you’d need to, how the interplay between the two was like its own language, something he wished he could learn to speak and eventually become fluent in.

So as he sat here, needles clicking, tongues clucking, and Lydia staring him down, he knew that just being—his butt resting against a hard wooden chair that could barely contain his long form, his eyes focused on a piece of dyed wool and his breath even and steady as he knitted and purled, and knitted and purled—that this was how he would protect Lydia.

Just by being here.

Thirteen Euros, three hours and one ragged scarf later, Lydia and Jeremy left the knitting shop, her head pounding from caffeine deprivation but her heart warm and calm, filled with wonder and questions at what his presence meant. He certainly hadn’t come to Iceland to learn how to create a scraggly piece of knitting. She knew Michael Bournham had sent him, but beyond that she didn’t know the significance.

It was time to take the reins here and become the leader. Jeremy didn’t seem to want that role, forcing Lydia to accept it. She didn’t really want it either, preferring instead to be led, not so much to be controlled but to be told why. Why Matt—no, Mike—had done this. To be told why she was walking down a stone sidewalk toward her favorite Reykjavik cafe. To be told why she’d been skyrocketed up the corporate ladder and at the same time shunted aside.

To be told the truth.

From the look on his face, though, Jeremy wasn’t going to give her any satisfaction. Cagey, like a big yellow lab with a ninja standing behind it, he was one thing on the surface and all stealth underneath. What she needed to understand was what the stealth
meant,
because decoding Jeremy was going to be about as easy as reading a hieroglyph. He seemed to have cultivated this affable, lazy, world traveler image, and the knitting episode raised her hackles. It was a bit too…something. The word escaped her. Too cute. Too kitschy. Too campy to be real.

A tiny sliver of her wished that it were, that he had come to Iceland for her and not on Mike’s behalf. She was starting to think of Matt as Mike, after hearing Jeremy refer to him so many times that way, and it felt wrong. It felt co-opted. He wasn’t Mike to her. He was Matt. And if he wasn’t Matt—and make no mistake, he
wasn’t
Matt—then he was Michael Bournham. That she had fallen in love with Mr. Playboy CEO in disguise was enough to make her decide that it was time to be the bitch in charge.

Seated across a small table in the sun on that favored rooftop garden, a triple latte in front of her, helping the headache to recede, she let her face go completely slack, leaned over and took both of Jeremy’s hands in hers, his fingers so long and strong she wanted to close her eyes and just feel them. Licking her lips, she held herself at bay. This wasn’t about Jeremy. This wasn’t about the feel of a man for the first time since she’d touched Mike. This wasn’t about her, even.

This was about finally getting some answers.

Jeremy maintained a look of expectation, mild bemusement reflected in those warm eyes. “Yes?” he asked, a tiny smile pinching his lips. He looked down at their hands and looked back up at her, wiggling his eyebrows. She squeezed, her fingers closing over his, and as she squeezed harder and harder, his face began to melt from bemusement to abject confusion and then to a mild shock.

Her fingernails dug in, not hard, not enough to hurt him, but enough to make a point as she opened her mouth and said, “Tell me the truth Jeremy, because I am about to let go, and if you haven’t started by then, I am standing up and walking out of here.” She glanced at her coffee. “And I am completely done with you and Michael Bournham’s world.”

Oh, fuck,
he thought, her hands an amusing pressure against his, squeezing tighter and tighter, but only to transmit some sort of message that her eyes kept hidden. “Then why are you sitting here across from me”—he leaned back in the chair and spread his arms out wide—“on this beautiful rooftop in the middle of Iceland?”

“We’re not in the middle of Iceland, we’re on the western coast.”

He gave her a flat look. “Don’t deflect.”

She pulled back in surprise. “You’re right,” she admitted, then took a sip of her drink. “I am deflecting. Good catch.”

“You pick up a few things traveling around the world for ten years.”

“I’d imagine you’ve picked up a few diseases traveling around the world these past few years.” She pointedly looked at his groin.

He didn’t know what to do with that, and just cleared his throat. He could see why Mike was attracted to her. She wasn’t just funny; there was a sharp edge under it all. Of course, the outer package certainly was alluring. Damn, if he couldn’t get the images from that video out of his mind, the way her breath had hitched, how her legs had shifted in just the right way to make it obvious that Mike…

He shook his head, trying to banish the thought. “No, not those kinds of diseases, and no, not
that
kind of thing you pick up,” he said.

Struggling to find the right words, he interrupted himself and took a few sips of his coffee. The sky was so blue it could have been the sea, and for a moment his equilibrium shifted, the right side of his brain taking over. Everything he did felt perfect, the movement of his elbow bringing the glass of coffee to his mouth, the flip of her head as she pushed her long, deep brown hair back off her shoulder. How the wind swept it away for her like a servant attending her every need. The acuteness of the moment left him dumbstruck, for not only could he see what Mike saw in her, a rising wave of his own desire began to push back his obedient quest to watch over her. No longer was it
for
his friend, no longer was he there
in lieu
of his friend. As subtle as a shift in the wind by a few degrees, his course changed.

Now, Jeremy was here for himself.

Her eyes narrowed and she leaned forward. “You realize there’s no way I would ever entertain the thought of being with
Mike
”—she spat the word out—“again, knowing that he
set me up.
”

He frowned. “Set you up how?”

“Oh, please,” she said. “It was all over the television—that producer said that this was part of the deal, that Michael Bournham—” she mocked the name—“had come to him with this great idea of luring some woman to have sex with him on camera and create a viral video tape that would shoot Bournham Industries’ name through the roof.”

“And you believed that?”

“It was on television.”

“You believe everything you see on television?”

That seemed to stop her cold. “Oh, no…I…” She faltered.

“For someone who’s trying to break into the media and marketing business, you certainly are about as savvy as a nine-year-old getting on the Internet tubes for the first time.”

A flush of rage filled her face. Good. He got an actual emotion out of her other than some derisive sneer.

“I was not!”

“You were. You were snowed, Lydia, by that guy, that stupid jackass producer who set all of this up. So was Mike. Those cameras weren’t supposed to be on.”

“Mike said that?”

Jeremy shrugged. He didn’t know quite how far to take this. He knew, though, that he had to set the record straight for his friend’s sake. “As far as Mike knew, the cameras were supposed to roll during work hours, how you define that is up to you, and he had a talk with that guy after Mike realized that the cameras had been rolling, and the guy tried to blackmail him.”

“Blackmail him?”

Jeremy really wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say. He gulped down the rest of his tepid coffee and set the pint glass down, looking around as the jolt of caffeine got his veins pumping and his eyes flitted about from place to place, settling anywhere but on her now-inquisitive face. How much could he say? How much could he reveal? And really, how much
should
he reveal? Would it help Mike, or would it hurt Jeremy?