The Thrill of It All (12 page)

Which was okay. He knew her, too. Standing this close to her made him half-hard—he’d been expecting too much to imagine that a few explosive orgasms could neuter him or neutralize her sex appeal—but his lust for her was under control. Last night he’d plumbed her physical depths, and this morning, outside OLPP and then again when Drool had appeared on the scene, he’d discovered how truly shallow she was.

She’d be easy enough to forget.

It was as if that very thought turned a spotlight on her. A thirtyish woman at Felicity’s elbow jostled her and while making an automatic apology, the stranger’s eyes widened. “Felicity!” the person said. “Felicity Charm!”

Magee saw her stiffen, but then she beamed over a relaxed and friendly smile. “Hello,” she said. “How are you tonight?”

As if they’d known each other since childhood, the woman smiled back. “I’m better, now that my fiancé’s mother-in-law flew home to Minnesota.” Then she leaned closer to Felicity, peering into her wine glass. “Is that Chardonnay or Pinot Grigio?”

The crowd shuffled a bit when a name was called out and Magee saw the exact moment when Felicity was recognized again. A man with a touch of gray at the temples nudged his very pretty, very young wife. She turned and then almost hopped in excitement. “Felicity!”

Felicity didn’t bat an eyelash. She smiled, she chatted, she admired how pretty the bracelet looked on the woman—the bracelet the woman claimed Felicity had sold to her. It was clear she felt that Felicity had personally selected it just for her.

As the older man drew his wife away, Magee caught the little sigh that washed out of Felicity. “Are you all right?” he murmured into her ear.

But there was already another stranger edging nearer. “I’m lovely,” she said cheerfully, turning toward the newcomer. “And how are you?”

By the time they made it to their table, it took more than two hands to count the number of times she’d been spoken to or at least obviously recognized. She breezed through it all like a pro—until the moment the hostess pulled out Felicity’s chair at their table.

“What’s new with Aunt Vi?” the young woman asked.

The name acted on Felicity like a doctor’s mallet to a knee. Her body jerked, one hand flying out to knock
over her empty wineglass. Magee caught it as it rolled off the edge of the tiny table.

Felicity had recovered and was giving away that pretty smile again. “Aunt Vi’s her usual self.”

“How did her charity luncheon turn out?”

“Perfect. A viewer in Louisiana called in with her mother’s iced tea punch recipe that tasted delicious. Thanks for asking.”

The hostess handed Magee the wine list, but spoke again to Felicity. “I just love hearing about your life and family.”

Magee watched Felicity’s smile thin, though the wattage remained high. “Thanks, I appreciate that.”

Then the hostess left them alone and Felicity slumped back against her chair. “I’d almost forgotten what it’s like.”

Now that her public wasn’t clamoring for her attention, he could see how her performances had rubbed away some of her usual sparkle. “What do you mean?”

But his question got lost as the sommelier dropped by their table. Apparently his college-age niece was another of Felicity’s fans. Without losing a beat, she revived the twinkle and then wasn’t able to relax again until the entrees were served.

“Jesus, Felicity, how can you possibly get a charge out of all that?” he said, as their waiter walked off. He sounded critical, he knew it, but the interruptions had annoyed him. He wanted a quiet dinner as their final goodbye.

She looked up from her pasta. “I like the people. I
like it that they like me. Talking to them is what I’m good at.”

“Lying to them, you mean,” he muttered. “Aunt Vi and her charity luncheon. Please.”

She straightened in her chair, bristling, then slumped back again. “Okay, fine. I admit that the Aunt Vi part has had me on edge all day. We’re too close to Half Palm. During the trade show, I kept imagining someone walking up and blowing my cover in front of Drew.”

Magee stared at her, anger sparking again. “So the lies themselves aren’t bothering you, huh? Just that Drool’s image of you might shatter.”

A flush rushed onto her cheeks—of temper, not shame, he was sure.

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know you’re full of shit.”

“Just a min—” Stopping herself, she set down her fork and folded her hands in her lap. “Tell me about your family, Magee. Who they are. What they do.”

“What does that have to do with—”

“Just tell me,” she insisted.

She was out to make some point, but he couldn’t figure the angle he should take to deflect it. “Dad’s a professor at Washington State University. My mother works in the alumni office there part-time—she’s a fundraiser. I have an older brother.”

Felicity laughed. “I couldn’t have invented anything more sitcom suburban if I’d tried.”

“Why is that sounding like an insult?”

She shook her head. “It’s not meant to be. Your
family is one I would have chosen myself. Stable, un-complicated, people to be proud of.”

He shook his head. “It’s not as simple as you think.”

She shrugged. “I’ll have to take your word for it. But when I started at OLPP, what I wanted seemed very simple. Nobody knew me, so nobody knew differently when I spun a harmless little fantasy about who I wanted the Charms to be. I didn’t pretend to be a sheikh’s daughter—though two were my classmates. I didn’t co-op the past of the Beverly Hills junior high dropout that was my first roommate. I merely took Aunt Vi and Uncle Billy and made them…”

Fake
. He nearly said it out loud. “And then you took your harmless little fantasy to TV.”

“I didn’t intend to.” She picked up her fork and fiddled with her food, making designs in the sauce. “My first week on GetTV, we had Reese Witherspoon as a celebrity guest. One minute we were talking about her line of luxury pet carriers and the next, she asked me about my family. The past I’d made up for myself when I was eleven years old just popped out.”

He stared. “
Luxury pet carriers?
” It was hard to get past that.

She made a face at him. “What I’m trying to say is that it was an accident. It just…happened.”

As she’d just happened to remake the Charms.

He still didn’t get it. He still didn’t get her. But, damn it, every time he thought he had her pegged, she twisted on him.

She picked up her fork and held it, staring down at
her plate, her eyelashes casting feathery shadows on her cheeks. Her voice was tired. “But don’t you worry. I pay for it. Every day I’m afraid that someone will see through it. I’m afraid someone will see through
me
.”

Oh, hell. Every time he thought he had her pegged, she twisted his heart. He wanted to remember her as a shallow sham of a woman.

“It’s a good thing you’re leaving in the morning,” he muttered. Because his smooth goodbye was already in jeopardy.

She glanced up. “Leaving?”

“In the morning.”

An expression crossed her face. An expression that made him uneasy, that made him remember every painful piece of ill luck that he’d had in the last year and a half and that he was paying for every good piece he’d had in all the years before that.

“You don’t know?”

He shook his head. “What?”

She lifted one shoulder in a casual shrug. “I thought maybe those Mountain Logic people would have mentioned it to you. We’re doing a live shoot from this area next week and taping some teaser segments to run during the spring. I’ll be hanging around until then, scouting locations.”

She let a beat go by, then smiled a smile so full of sweet innocence that it sent a shudder worming down his spine. “So this isn’t goodbye after all.”

M
agee was staring at her from across the table as if she’d gone mad. Felicity let her smile widen, enjoying the idea that she’d dropped the news into his unsuspecting lap. She’d agreed to dinner because…because she was hungry, not realizing it presented such a prime opportunity to get the upper hand with him.

She liked unbalancing him for once. Last night…But she wasn’t going to think about last night. If she couldn’t regret her lapse in clear thinking, then she refused to remember it.

Magee finally found his voice. “But you said you were leaving.”

She noted the muscle ticking beneath the dark stubble developing along his jawline. “What can I say? I’m the proverbial bad penny.”

His frown deepened. “Bad pennies keep turning up.
You
won’t go away.”

As if it was her fault. “C’mon, Magee—”

A couple—more fans of GetTV—paused by their table, interrupting her point. Even though she felt
Magee fuming over his plate of fettucine, she drew out her conversation with them. Darling man, his frustration only increased her confidence. She could handle him.

The instant the two people wandered off, he leaned across the table. “Look, we have to talk,” he said, his voice tight. “I need to tell you something.”

“You’re getting Alfredo sauce on your shirtfront,” she pointed out.

“I don’t ca—”

But the restaurant hostess was back, with a helper from the kitchen in tow. Felicity turned her attention to the shy young man, chatting with him in her halting Spanish, leaving Magee to dip his napkin into his water glass and dab gingerly at his shirt.

With an inward smile, she managed to signal his predicament to their hostess, and they finished the meal with frequent visits from the young woman, their waiter, and the restaurant manager, all checking in on either Felicity, their food, or the status of the stain the hostess herself had doctored with a fresh napkin and club soda.

Magee’s steely fingertips didn’t leave the small of Felicity’s back as they left Il Calore to the tune of the dark-eyed hostess’s gushing, “
Arrivederci
.”

“It appears you made a new conquest,” Felicity said as he prodded her in the direction of his car.

He didn’t glance back. “We have to talk,” he repeated. “I need to tell you something.”

“So talk.”

His head swiveled, taking in the crowded sidewalk. “When we’re alone.”

Once they were both sitting inside his Jeep, he gripped the steering wheel without looking at her. Tension radiated off him like heat and she half-expected the car’s interior to melt. Her thin blouse and silk suit started to itch like woolly tweed.

What could be so difficult to tell her? Her fingers fumbled a little as they moved to unfasten the first few buttons of her blouse. But she was under perfect control, she reminded herself.
He
was the one whose equilibrium was upset.

“You don’t have a weird communicable disease or something, do you?” she finally ventured.

“No. It’s that…” He glanced over. “Jesus! Do up your shirt, will you?”

She looked down, light from the nearby streetlamp confirming there wasn’t anything uncovered that warranted his reaction. “What’s your problem?”

He was staring at the dashboard again. “It’s the hickey, okay? I can’t think straight when I can see that damn hickey on your neck.”

“Oh.” Served him right for sucking on her. But she refastened the buttons anyway. “There.”

He cast a sideways glance. She felt it flick over her buttons, then up to her face. When their gazes met, her pulse leaped and her blood rushed to the surface of her skin. The hickeys on her neck and her breasts throbbed. Last night his mouth had been—

No!
She wasn’t going to think about last night.
Folding her arms over her chest, she tried forcing her brain onto something else. The alphabet. The alphabet backward.
Z…y…x…

Cursing, he started the car with a jerky motion.

“What now?” Felicity choked out.

He stayed focused on the road. “We need to talk alone, alone but around other people, all right?”

She should tell him not to worry about it, that she wasn’t about to let her physical impulses overrule her mental reasoning again. Instead, she spent the next few minutes breathing.

By the time they’d traveled a few traffic-congested blocks and pulled into a parking space, she’d regained her cool confidence. Let him rail, let him argue, but there was nothing she could do about leaving the area until her work for GetTV was completed. Her job came first, before anything.

He grabbed her hand and pulled her down the street, tugging her through a door. Dark, quiet night switched to fluorescent-lighted, drumbeat-thumping day.

She blinked. “What is this place?” She had to raise her voice over the loud rap beat of a Nelly song.

“Rock gym.”

A gymnasium, she realized, a cavernous, three-story-high structure, with walls that looked like sometimes-craggy and sometimes-smooth rock studded with small circles of different-colored plastic. The floor space was broken up by monolithic boulders made of the same material as the walls. Climbers in bright-colored sportswear crawled over the sur
faces like insects while others watched from the ground.

“Why are we here?” Felicity asked.

“Nobody will know you.”

He dragged her around one boulder and along half a wall before pushing her through another door. It was a small café, with a few tables, a juice/espresso bar, and a wall of glass that offered a view of the people moving over the gym’s perpendicular surfaces.

Magee pulled out two chairs at a table along the glass wall and pushed her into one of them. “Want something?” He gestured toward the bar.

Though she shook her head, he came back a few moments later with a bottle of sparkling mineral water for each of them.

“So,” he said, settling into his seat. “You gotta get out of town. Go back. Go away.”

She sighed. “Magee, you’re being unreasonable. I have a job to do.”

His mouth flattened and he took the top off his water with a vicious twist. “We’re trouble for each other. You’ve gotta know that after the sex last night.”

She made a big play of rolling her eyes, to show him who was boss. “Speak for yourself. As far as I’m concerned, we took care of the trouble last night. It’s over now. Done.
Finis
.
Finito
.
Terminado
. Inishedfay.”

He’d waited patiently through her speech, not even cracking a smile at her pig latin. “Are you going to be staying at your aunt’s?”

“Well, um…I haven’t really thought…” But she
had. In that old bed, wrapped in quilts so worn that their batting was mere memory, and lulled by the motorboat purrs of many cats, she’d been sleeping like she hadn’t slept since she was eleven years old. She’d already decided to remain in her old room until the rest of the GetTV crew rolled into town.

She lifted a shoulder. “Aunt Vi will expect it.”

“Then we have a problem.” His gaze bore into hers. “We won’t be able to keep apart. At least admit that much. Within a few miles of each other and we become a magnet and metal filings.”

Twisting off her own bottle top, she reminded herself that
she
wasn’t metal or a magnet or anything other than an ambitious woman who could forget the past when it was necessary. “I don’t agree,” she said coolly. “I can control myself.”

One of his eyebrows lifted. “Maybe I can’t.”

“Oh, please.” She just barely resisted the urge to lean over and bite him. “Magee—”

“Do you know what I’ve been thinking about since I woke up this morning? The way your body is so soft and wet. The way it opens for my fingers, then grips them, hard, when I slide inside of you.”

Her stomach hiccuped. Heat swarmed over her body.
Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it
. She tried the alphabet backward thing again.
Z…y…x…
It wasn’t working. “You just say things…things like that to aggravate me.”

Sighing, he shook his head. “Aggravate you? No, dollface, if I wanted to aggravate you, I’d tell you the truth. I’d tell you—”

A thunderous knock on that glass wall just inches away startled them both. A man on the other side directed a series of hand gestures and eyebrow signals at Magee. Though he tried waving the other man off, though he tried an irritated “Get lost,” though he even tried turning his back, the other man was having none of it. In obvious challenge, he shook a coiled rope in Magee’s face and grinned.

With a groan, Magee rose out of his chair. “He won’t leave me alone until I take care of this.”

For her part, she could kiss the guy for giving her some time to recover. When Magee returned, she’d get him to take her back to her car. From there she’d go home, crawl under the quilts, pull a cat or two over her eyes, and use sleep to restore her battered self-control.

After all, one night of wanton, reckless sex with the wrong kind of man didn’t mean she’d taken an irrevocable turn. She’d remade herself and sex with Michael Magee didn’t mean her image was permanently marred or her life plan irrevocably changed. Closing her eyes, she thought of the Joanie as she’d seen it on the dais in that Las Vegas ballroom. Cool, gleaming, golden feet firmly rooted onto golden ground.

“Hey, Lissie! Don’t you want to see Magee air-walk?”

Felicity’s eyes popped opened. It was Gwen from the climbing shop, her head poking through the café’s door, her dozen braids quivering.

“What?”

“He’s going up on the tightrope.”

Tightrope? Curious, she followed Gwen into the gym. At the far end, climbers were huddled beneath two giant boulders that were twenty-five feet high and twenty feet apart. A figure on top of each mammoth rock was busy knotting down a line between them. One of the figures was Magee.

Felicity felt her eyes bulge. “
What
is going on?”

Gwen’s gaze was glued to the activity above them. “It’s called tightroping a slack line.”

“Slack?” Felicity squeaked. Slack did not sound good.

Gwen nodded. “Circus ropes are tight, helps with balance. But Magee and my brother won’t have that much tension on the rope.”

“Before they walk on it.” She was still squeaking.

The girl sent her an impatient glance. “Don’t be such a sissy. I’ve seen Magee walk a line a hundred feet off the ground. All it takes is incredible balance and
juevos grande
.”

Felicity’s stomach churned. “Oh. Well.” Were these people crazy? “If that’s all.”

“I knew you couldn’t appreciate a man like Magee.”

The you’re-not-one-of-the-tribe dismissal from this tomboyish little twit made Felicity want to whack her with a high heel and then spray her silly with a particularly cloying eau de toilette. “Explain him to me, then.”

“Magee’s put new routes up some of the toughest mountains in the world. But he gets off all the same, he says, on a boulder or a cliff that’s been climbed a
hundred times before. He just looks between the regular routes and finds one even hairier, even sicker.” She shrugged. “And then he does it.”

“It’s a math thing,” Felicity murmured. “A math problem.”

Gwen’s head turned around to stare at her. “You
do
know him.”

She didn’t. Because he claimed to be giving up the very thing that so very clearly defined him. But there was no time to puzzle out why when one of the men—Gwen’s brother, she was told—clipped a short lead from his harness to the line strung between the boulders. With a grin for the crowd gathered below, and then another for Magee, he started across.

At his first wide-armed step, the rope sank and Felicity gasped. “Something’s wrong.”

“Nah,” Gwen replied. “Climbing ropes are designed to stretch a foot or two when under stress.”

Tension! Stress! Apparently these people didn’t know the meaning of the word, because they were all watching the man wobble and dip with a nonchalance that had Felicity ready to scream. And then she did, just a short, choked-off one, when, halfway across, Gwen’s brother lost his balance. His fall was a quick, downward jerk as if an invisible Jaws lurked in the ocean of air beneath him.

At the same instant, the lead clipped at the man’s waist pulled taut and his fist closed over the line. Hanging by one arm, he wryly grinned at the spattering of applause from those below. Then he walked
himself, hand over hand, to the boulder he’d started from and scrambled back on top.

At his go-ahead gesture, Felicity realized it was Magee’s turn.

He’d removed his shirt and shoes. His naked torso gleamed under the fluorescent lights. In contrast to his pleated dress slacks and polished leather belt, his ripped pectorals and sculpted abdominal muscles appeared even more powerful and primitive.

Folding her arms tight against her chest, Felicity reminded herself she liked civilized, cerebral men. Her gaze stuck on Magee, though, as he called out something insulting to his challenger, then approached the tightrope and clipped on his own safety leash from the slack line to the harness around his hips.

Even from two and a half stories below, she could see the new light in his eyes and feel the heat of the daredevil rising in his blood. He glanced down at her and grinned.

She couldn’t help herself. She grinned back. He looked so young, so free, so full of energy that it didn’t matter, suddenly, how “sick” and how “hairy” the tightrope walk appeared to her. His confidence was infectious. If at that moment he’d told her he was going to fly, she’d have believed him.

He took his first step, and the climbing rope sagged.

After that, Felicity didn’t blink. She just dug in, her feet to the floor, her fingernails into her palms, and watched Michael Magee stroll across air.

Oh, my Lord
.

It was beautiful.
He
was beautiful. He held his head
slightly back so that his dark, bad-boy hair brushed the spine between his shoulder blades. A slight sheen of sweat glistened on his sculpted chest and arms as he moved with relaxed grace. Her heart contracted, but it was fascination, not fear, that squeezed from it.