Breaking the Rules (7 page)

“Good Lord.” Ally sighed and shook her head. “I meant about last night.”

“I won’t tell him anything.”

“What if someone else besides me saw you coming in this morning and they say something to him? Everyone knows you and James are engaged. The show’s producers are just slobbering for someone to come between the two of you. They’re
encouraging
it.” Ally giggled. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. I’m also not supposed to tell you that they think you’re pathetically boring. They’re afraid you’ll have viewers yawning, Claire.”

Claire felt a surge of defensiveness. “Why’s that?”

Ally raised a finger. “Number one, your unwavering devotion to James. It may be sweet, but it’s not good for ratings.” She lifted a second finger. “Then there’s that gawd-awful two-piece swimsuit you wear. Has your belly button ever seen the light of day?”

Claire scowled.
Pathetically boring.
She hated being
pathetically
anything. “I don’t really care what the producers think of me. As for James, if he asks about last night, I’ll tell him just what I told you. The truth.”

“Sure you will.” Ally’s grin looked wicked. “I think the producers are wrong about you, Claire Louise. You’re pulling a fast one on everybody, acting like you’re so prim and proper and all. I know better, though.”

Claire gathered her guilt-strewn wits and stood. “Let’s go. I need to make a quick stop by the confession booth before we go to dinner.”

Ally scooted off the bed. “Thanks for reminding me. I have a confession or two of my own to make.”

Mitch peered into the camera that sat behind the confession-booth curtain.
Eden’s
creative team had decided contestants might speak more freely if they couldn’t see the person filming them. It worked. Over the past couple of weeks, he’d heard intimate details explicit enough to make Hugh Hefner blush.

The contestant who’d just entered the booth sat in the chair facing the camera, then cleared his throat. “Damien Dimeola from Jersey,” he said for the record, as all the contestants had been instructed to do.

Damien leaned back. Balancing on only two chair legs, he crossed his arms over his sculpted pecs, which were apparent despite the silky black dress shirt he wore. “Ally,” he said, as if tasting the name. “Ally, Ally, Ally.” His mouth curled up at one corner. “She wants me.
She
”—his
brows bobbed—“
wants
”—they lifted and fell again—“
me
.”
On the final bob, the chair legs hit the floor with a
thunk
.

Mitch lifted a brow of his own.
It’s really a shame you don’t have more confidence, buddy.

Damien uncrossed his arms. “The woman hung on every word I said. She was eating me up, you know what I’m sayin’?” He leaned in toward the camera. “Eating me up, I’m telling you. She couldn’t even speak. The lady was speechless, she was so into me.”

Ally wasn’t the only one speechless. Mitch zoomed in for a closeup of Damien’s smug face.
And what do you think of her?
he wanted to ask.

Damien saved him the trouble. “I think she thinks I’m the one for her.
The. One.
We’re not in the same group for dinner tonight, so I’m gonna make her suffer some. Catch her eye while I’m giving the other chicks their chance. Make her work for it, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you’re saying.
Over the past two weeks, he’d waded through different versions of the same bullshit more times than he could count.

Tuning Damien out, Mitch let his thoughts meander to the modest green suit in the canvas bag at his feet. Maybe it was just his imagination, but he thought he could smell her perfume. Poison, the bartender had said. A more fitting brand name would’ve been Aphrodisiac.

He became so caught up in his thoughts of Aphrodite O’Malley that he didn’t realize Damien had left until the door to the confession booth opened and a woman with shoulder- length curly brown hair stepped inside.

“Ally Kendall. Dallas, Texas,” she said, taking her place in the chair.

Mitch snapped to attention. Ally Kendall. The woman who was “so into” Damien. He grinned.
This ought to be good.

The woman nibbled on a cuticle a second, then examined her nails before lowering her hand to her lap. “How can I possibly express to you my deep feelings for Damien Dimeola?” she asked, staring directly into the camera. After a dreamy sigh, she opened her mouth wide and stuck a finger inside of it, gagging herself. “The only thing I found even remotely interesting about Damien was the crustacean hanging from his left nostril. Tenacious little ol’ thing. I kept waiting for it to drop off, but it held tight all the way through dessert. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Good Lord, the thing struck me mute.”

Mitch didn’t even try to muffle his laugh.

Ally scowled. “Why is it all my dates have been duds? Are there any men playing this game who won’t bore me to tears? I’m starting to have my doubts.” She tilted her head to one side. “Hmmm. Maybe I should just follow the lead of one so-called
committed
female contestant and look to the crew for a little fun on the side.”

Startled by that last comment, Mitch waited to hear more, but Ally Kendall stood.

“Anyway, that’s all I have to say about my last date. When it’s time to boot someone off the island, Damien gets my vote.” She turned, then glanced over her shoulder at the camera. “And when he leaves, he can take his crusty little friend with him.” Opening the door, Ally stepped out.

Mitch leaned back away from the camera. That last little tidbit of information had been no slip-up. Ally had an agenda, no doubt about it. Before he had a minute to determine if her sly revelation had anything to do with him and the goddess, he heard someone else enter the booth.

Mitch peered into the lens of the camera and saw a woman. A redhead. Pretty. Hell, they were all pretty. Even Damien. Weary of it all, he slumped on his stool and yawned.

The woman sat in the chair facing the curtain, her back erect, her feet crossed at the ankles. Her toenail polish was a mess. She had something on her heel, too, though he couldn’t tell what. He lifted his attention to her face. A sprinkle of freckles crossed her nose and fanned onto her cheeks.
Cute.
Mitch yawned again.

Lifting her chin, she stared at the camera…and blushed. “I…” Her left eye twitched. “This ritual is humiliating.”

Mitch slammed his mouth shut and sat up straighter.
That sultry Texas drawl.
He’d recognize it anywhere. His foot hit the tripod the camera sat on and he had to grab quickly to keep it from toppling over.

“Everything okay back there?”

“Fine,” he rasped.

“Okay, then. I’m Claire Mulligan from Prairie, Texas.”

So she wasn’t a complete liar. At least the Prairie, Texas, part had been true.

“I think I know what you’re hoping I’ll say. You’d just love to hear that James and I are on the outs, that he’s playing hoochie-coochie behind my back or that I’m doing so behind his.”

Mitch frowned.
James? James who?

“Conflict is intriguing,” Claire went on. “So is deceit. And that’s what this show’s all about, right?”

Mitch opened his mouth to answer her, then remembered she spoke to the camera, not him.

“Well, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you by being
pathetically boring—”

Pathetically boring? Aphrodite, goddess of the sea? Born of Uranus’s genital sea foam?
Mitch thought of her striptease on the beach last night. Even from a distance, even considering the fact that, at the time, he couldn’t see every gorgeous detail he was looking at now, she’d knocked his socks off. Or she would’ve if he’d been wearing any. Claire Mulligan…alias Aphrodite O’Malley…was definitely the least pathetically boring woman he’d met so far on this island. As a matter of fact, she was the least boring woman he’d ever met, period.

“But the simple truth is,” Claire continued, “James and I will leave this island every bit as committed as we were the day we arrived, if not more so.”

Committed.
That was the word Ally had used in reference to the player who’d “looked to the crew for a little fun on the side”. The puzzle pieces began to snap into place in Mitch’s mind. He recalled talk of one committed couple competing among the other contestants. An engaged couple the producers had tossed into the mix of singles to see if they stuck together or were ripped apart. Of course, being producers, they hoped for the latter. This was prime-time television, after all. He had never met up with the couple because, during the first round of the show, they had not been in the group of contestants he’d been assigned to follow and film.

Claire lowered her gaze to her pink polish-smeared toenails and kept it there. “Nothing’s changed. Nothing except…” She glanced up at the camera and burst into tears. “Nothing except the fact that I’ve become a total and complete liar.”

Not
a
very good one, either,
Mitch thought. Damn, he hated it when women cried. It was all he could do not to part the curtain and go out to comfort her.

“James is treating me like yesterday’s newspaper. He’s flirting with anything in a bikini, and that’s not me.”

Thinking of the prim green suit, Mitch smiled.

Claire swiped at her wet cheeks with the back of one hand. “Last night, I couldn’t stand it another second. I went off alone, hoping he’d follow me so we could hash this out without everyone else around. But he didn’t. And then the island blacked out. And then…and then…” Her voice rose an octave. “I ended up sleeping with a
stranger.”
She shook her head and sobbed. “Not
sleeping
sleeping. Sleeping literally. We didn’t do anything.” With a sniff, she glanced at the camera, then quickly averted her eyes. “Well, not much anyway. Just enough to…to…” Bursting into tears again, she lifted a hand to cover her face. “Just enough to make me feel guilty, which makes me mad at myself because James obviously doesn’t feel guilty about being touchy-feely with other people, so why should I?”

She took a moment to pull herself together before risking another glance at the camera. “The man…the one I was with last night. I…he…I can’t quit thinking about him,” she said in little more than a whisper. “We
connected.
This morning when I woke up, he was still sleeping and he looked so…”

Claire’s eyes widened suddenly, as if it had just occurred to her that everything she’d revealed could be broadcast to the entire nation unless the show’s producers chose to cut it out. And Mitch could guarantee that the footage would not end up on the cutting-room floor. It was exactly the sort of material the producers wanted.

“Oh, God.” Claire closed her eyes. “Forget what I said. Please, forget all of it. I’m not going to see the man again, I can promise you that.”

There you go, lying again.
She would see him. He’d make sure of it.

“Nothing happened between us and nothing’s going to happen.” Pushing back her chair, Claire stood, then ran from the booth without looking back.

Switching off the camera, Mitch balanced it on his shoulder while grabbing the drawstring bag at his feet. Carrying both, he went out the rear entrance and found Coot, his replacement, whose break wasn’t up yet. “I’m having trouble with this camera,” Mitch fudged. “Fill in for me while I go check it out, okay?”

“Yeah,” Coot said, stuffing the last bite of a hot dog into his mouth. “Sure thing.”

Mitch started off toward the editing bungalow. When he was sure Coot no longer watched him, he veered left toward his cabana. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to erase the segment of footage he’d just filmed of Claire and to make a few choice cuts in Ally’s, too. Then he had some business to take care of.

Some red-haired, freckle-faced business.

Chapter Seven

Claire heard James’s toast and the musical clink of crystal tapping crystal. But as the others in her group lowered their glasses to drink, hers remained in midair.

Mitch headed toward her table, a determined expression on his face, a drawstring bag slung over his shoulder, his camera at his side. The khaki shorts and white short-sleeved shirt he wore brought out his tan. Starched, pressed, and combed, he seemed a far different version of the rumpled man she’d left behind that morning. Either way, Mitch Talbott was too great looking for his own good. Or hers.

She searched for cameras. To her relief, the only ones she spotted were busy filming other disasters in progress.

“Claire? Are you okay?”

Ally’s voice tugged her gaze from Mitch. Claire managed a tight smile for the benefit of her table companions. “Why wouldn’t I be?” She lowered her drink and sipped. What was Mitch thinking? He would get them both into trouble if he let on that they’d spent time together.

“Claire?”

It was Mitch’s voice now. For one woozy, lightheaded moment, fainting seemed her best option. The perfect escape. A nice little nosedive into the shrimp dip. Effective, but messy. She looked up and smiled. “Hello. Do I know you?”

The corner of his mouth quivered as he set the camera down beside him. Claire noticed that his eyes were the softest shade of brown and brimming with curiosity. They held her gaze like gravity, tugging her heart every direction but the one she wanted to go.