Wedding Survivor (18 page)

Marnie's brows dipped into a V over her eyes and her smile. "As a matter of fact, I do."

"Ooh, where are you going?" Mrs. Banks asked. "Bel Air?"

At Marnie's long-suffering sigh, Eli chuckled. "Give me fifteen minutes," Marnie said, and stood up. "Mom, promise me you will not badger Eli while I'm getting dressed."

"Don't be silly."

"
Mom
," Marnie said in a voice full of warning.

Mrs. Banks gave her daughter a wide-eyed look of innocence.

With a groan, Marnie left Eli with Mrs. Banks, who trotted over to the fridge and returned with a half-eaten cheesecake that looked, Eli had to admit, out of this world. "So Eli," she said slyly, as she sliced off a piece and put it on a plate. "My friend Diane says she heard from a hairdresser friend of hers who has a friend that is a massage therapist that Jude Law and Nicole Kidman are getting together." She pushed the plate halfway across to him. "Is that true?"

"I don't know, Mrs. Banks," he said, and reached for the plate, but Mrs. Banks suddenly snatched it back, out of his reach.

"You don't
know
?" she asked with a devilish smile. "Or you won't say?"

Jesus. How long was Marnie going to be?

IT was a half hour later, not a quarter, before Marnie returned to the kitchen, because she had a small crisis in her closet. Now that she was fully awake, having seen Eli again had her thinking… what did one wear when one definitely wasn't trying to seduce her boss, but wouldn't mind too much if he seduced her?

In the end, she decided there really wasn't a perfect dress for that scenario, and settled on the slightly casual, but good enough for Bel Air halter dress, matched with a pair of cute kitten-heeled gold sandals that had little flowers on the straps.

She left her hair in a ponytail because of a major case of bed head and no time to correct it after her closet crisis.

She thought she must have done okay, because Eli sort of did a double take when she returned to the kitchen. He had his head between his hands and there was an empty plate with cheesecake crumbs in front of him. Mom was sitting across from him with a big man-eating smile on her lips.

"Eli knows Tom Cruise!" she chirped.

"Oh man," Marnie said with a wince. "I'm so sorry, Eli."

"For knowing Tom Cruise?"

"No. For knowing my mother."

"I resemble that remark!" Mom said brightly and hopped off her stool. "I don't have any more time to chat, kiddos. I'm meeting Bev in an hour and we are going to get spray-on tans. So if you will excuse me," she said, putting away the cheesecake, "I'll see you guys later. Oh, Marnie, don't give Bingo any treats. After the two fat gourmet biscuits Eli brought him, that silly dog will just get enormous lying there. Okay! Bye, Eli!" she said cheerfully, and went out of the kitchen whistling, pausing to pet Bingo.

When her mom had disappeared out the back door, Marnie looked at Eli. "You brought Bingo biscuits?" she asked. Eli shrugged sheepishly. "That was so sweet, Eli," she said, and gave him a smile that emanated from somewhere near the bottom of her heart.

"It was nothing. Just a couple of dog biscuits." He stood up, checked her out with one brow cocked above the other, his blue eyes shining appreciatively. "Nice dress," he said. "You ready?"

"Yes. Can we take the BMW this time?"

"Why?"

She didn't want to tell him that she didn't think she could get in the cab of that truck with this dress, so she said, "Because your truck is too bouncy."

"Bouncy?"

"Yes, bouncy," she reiterated as she stood up. "Every little bump in the road makes me bounce."

"Well, yeah," Eli said, looking a tiny bit perplexed. "It has a very stiff suspension for all the obvious reasons."

There was nothing
obvious
about Eli McCain or his truck, and besides, she didn't really know what a stiff suspension was and was too embarrassed to ask. "Yes, obviously," she said, as if she knew what she was talking about. "But is it okay if I drive this once?"

He sighed, pushed his fingers through his dark-gold hair, and Marnie could imagine him standing at some split-rail fence in Texas, one foot on the railing, taking off a cowboy hat to shove that hand through that hair, then putting it back on again, real slow. And maybe a long blade of prairie grass between his teeth—

"Are we waiting for something?" he asked, interrupting her cowboy fantasy.

"No! No, let's go," she said, and stooped to say goodbye to Bingo. So did Eli.

ELI started griping about her driving the minute she pulled out of the drive. Granted, she had not seen Mr. Simon walking his dog behind her, but she had stopped in plenty of time for him to get out of the way. They motored up Rimpau Boulevard, past L.A. High School. "That's where I went to high school," Marnie said as they drove past. "Right over there," she said, pointing to a street behind the high school, "is where I had my first kiss. Brett Lipshitz."

Eli laughed. "With a name like that, you might think he wasn't very good at it."

"He wasn't," Marnie said. "He made out like a fish. I was very disappointed and swore to all my friends I'd never kiss a guy again."

"And?"

"And?"

"Did you ever kiss a guy again?"

She smiled coyly and punched the brakes for a red light. "Maybe a couple," she admitted with a grin.
But none as good-looking as you, Cowboy
. She stole a glimpse of his lips. She imagined him standing beneath a big Texas moon, those blue eyes gazing down on her, those fabulous lips of his pursed… "What about you? Kiss many girls?"

"Maybe a couple. And the light is green," he said.

Marnie jerked her gaze to traffic that was already moving and hit the gas, making Eli buck in his seat. His hand snaked up and caught the handle above the passenger window.

Marnie laughed as she swung out wide left onto the boulevard. "Are you scared?"

"No. I'm terrified," he said, and winced as Marnie darted around a bus and sped past it.

"Not to worry," she said reassuringly. "I've been driving in LA. traffic for almost twenty years and I haven't had an accident yet."

"What about tickets?"

"Oh yeah," she snorted. 'Tons." She changed lanes again.

"That's not making me feel any better," Eli said as Marnie turned onto La Brea to shoot up to Wilshire Boulevard.

"So do you really know Tom Cruise?" she asked, looking at him while she shifted lanes again, and noticing that he was now gripping the console between the seats, too.

"I worked a couple of films with him, that's all."

"You're very closemouthed about the movie business," Marnie opined, hoping a little reverse psychology might result in some good dirt on Mr. Cruise.

Now Eli glanced at her from the corner of his eye—but only briefly before he quickly turned his attention to the road again. "I'm not closemouthed. You wanna watch where you're going?"

"I am watching where I'm going."

"Well when you get to Bel Air—and it appears we will reach it in record time—you're gonna want to turn onto Stone Canyon Drive."

"So you're not going to talk about it?" Marnie asked, as she sped up Sunset.

'Talk about what?"

"Who you know. Who you don't know. What you do."

"Why are you so interested?"

She braked for a red light and gripped the wheel. "I don't know. I guess I'm warming up to you," she said with a sly wink. "I'm starting to wonder if there is more to Eli than a general revulsion to weddings."

He frowned at that instead of laughing, as she expected. "I don't have a revulsion."

"I think you do," she said, and playfully poked him in the side.

"Look," he said sharply, "can we just keep the conversation to the job at hand?"

His reaction stung her, and Marnie quickly withdrew her hand and shifted her gaze to the road in front of her. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't realize I was bothering you."

Eli sighed, relaxed his grip of the console and looked at Marnie. "You're not bothering me," he said quietly. "I'm sorry I was so…"

"Mean?"

"Mean," he admitted. "It's just that I think we ought to keep our personal lives separate from this gig, that's all."

"Why? Why keep our personal lives separate? You know an awful lot about mine, I'd like to point out. Anyway, it's not like I'm going to
do
anything with the information, it's just a way to know you better, so you know… we
work
together better, and—"

"Not a good idea," he said, quickly cutting her off.

What was with this guy? One minute he was giving her warm fuzzies, and in the next minute he was cold as ice, making her believe she was an enormous pain in his ass. It made her so crazy that she abruptly demanded, "What is the matter with you, Eli? Don't you have any friends?"

"Of course I have friends, but if you let the personal stuff mix with work, you run a risk…"

"A risk of what? Being human?"

"Of allowing people to get under your skin. To poke you. To make you uncomfortable when you're trying to work."

"That's ridiculous," she said, but suddenly remembered that Daichi, the
Star Trek
guy in her office, had once told her she was on his last nerve when she was just trying to be friendly. Maybe she was really bugging Eli. Maybe her thoughts of being seduced by her boss were too out there, she thought with much disappointment.

They didn't talk about anything but traffic until they reached Bel Air—Eli made a lot of comments about her driving, and Marnie just drove faster. In Bel Air, she followed his instructions until they arrived outside a very simple stone gate that she recognized. Eli jumped out of the car and went round, punched in a code, then got back into the car. Marnie slipped the Beemer through, and Eli told her to wait until the gate had closed behind her. When he was certain it was closed, Marnie drove on.

This time, they drove to the front of Vincent Vittorio's mansion, a big Mediterranean-style house that had to be ten thousand square feet at a minimum. "Wow," she said, as she parked the car on the circular drive. "He lives here by himself?'

"Hell if I know," Eli said, and got out of the car and came round to the driver's side like a gentleman to help Marnie out. She paused to straighten her dress, and then the two of them went to the front door.