As she and the chef prepared green chile stew, he offered her tastes of the house’s special chile sauces. She took the proffered spoon, closing her eyes in ecstasy as a potent combination of chiles and spices exploded across her tongue. When she opened them, her gaze locked with Gabe’s as he stood frozen behind the camera, watching her lick her lips with a look so full of lust her mind momentarily went blank.
Mindlessly, she reached for another spoonful of sauce to buy some time.
“Now, be careful. That last one’s a bit hot,” the chef cautioned.
Once again there was an explosion of flavor in her mouth, but not the kind she expected.
Her eyebrows shot up to her hairline. “That’s got a kick to it,” she squeaked, desperately clinging to her composure, but the habanero chile sauce was more than even her seasoned palate could handle.
Her mouth felt like it had been doused with napalm. Sweat beaded on her brow and under her eyes as she flushed beet red and tears streamed down her face.
The set erupted in chaos as the director yelled “Cut,” and the chef apologized profusely and fumbled for water.
Without hesitation, Gabe shoved a path through to Reggie. With one hand he grabbed a fistful of flour tortillas as he wrapped his arm around her. “It’s okay, honey, just eat this. It’ll soak up all the oil.” Jerking his head up, he barked, “Will somebody get us some fucking milk?”
A tall glass of milk appeared, which Reggie finished in three gulps. Sighing in relief, she melted against his chest as he pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Better now?”
They both realized their audience at the same moment. The crew stared at them, obviously shocked to see this supposedly big, tough, unreachable bodyguard treating his client in a manner that could only be described as tender.
Reggie turned to the crew as though nothing was out of the ordinary. “Shall we try that again, this time without the habaneros?”
Somehow Reggie managed to get through the rest of the shoot without a hitch, and did a damn good job, if she did say so herself.
As they were wrapping, Gabe pulled her aside. “About earlier. I didn’t even think how it would look. I, uh, just kind of reacted.” Which he looked damned displeased about if the grim set of his face was anything to go by.
“It’s no big deal, really.”
He glanced around. “Are you sure? One of the sound guys keeps smirking and giving me a thumbs-up. And right now Carrie’s glaring like she wishes she was Cyclops and could burn a giant hole through your back.”
Exactly what she’d been trying to avoid, but there was nothing to be done for it now. “They were bound to figure it out sooner or later. In fact, the way set gossip works, they probably thought we were sleeping together all along.”
Yet another reason she should strive to follow Gabe’s example of professionalism.
But now the cat was out of the bag, or the horse was out of the barn, or some other animal analogy. “No use getting upset about it now. As long as I don’t interfere with shooting, let them gossip all they want. Although we probably will want to refrain from French kissing or groping in full view.”
His full lips quirked in that half smile that made her belly dip. “I’ll do my best, but you prove damn tempting sometimes.”
“Just sometimes?”
“Reggie,” Carrie snapped. Gabe was right. She was pissed.
Reggie was relieved to learn her behavior was not the main source of her producer’s irritation. Rather, it was a last-minute scheduling conflict with their guest in Seattle, meaning their shoot would have to be delayed several days, or they would have to scramble for another guest.
“But we were scheduled to have a short break between Seattle and L.A.,” Reggie pointed out, “so it won’t have a domino effect on the rest of the shoot.”
“No,” Carrie snapped, “but it means I have to rebook the local crew and reschedule all of the establishing shots. And we have to rebook all of the travel arrangements, and that will cost money…” She dug her fingers into her wild mane of red hair.
Not knowing what else to say, Reggie tried to console her. “I’m sure everything will be fine.”
“It will, but listen, Reggie, we can’t have any more delays or screwups.”
Reggie frowned. What did she mean by that? Sure, she’d had a couple of off days and had flubbed a few lines here and there, but it wasn’t as though she delayed shooting with her diva-like antics.
“All I’m saying is,” Carrie leaned closer and lowered her voice, “don’t let your little romance with Thor the wonder-schlong over there become a problem.”
“It’s not—it won’t,” Reggie protested.
Carrie gave her a “bullshit” look. “This morning you could barely keep your tongue in your mouth, you were so busy drooling. You proceeded to fuck up your lines and eat a mouthful of hot chili that Luis specifically warned you away from.”
“He did? All he said was it had a kick.”
“Before we filmed that part, he said you shouldn’t eat it. But instead of messing up the shot when you reached for it, he decided to go with it. Result? You end up on the gag reel, and now we’re an hour overschedule and paying the crew extra for it.”
Carrie stared hard at her for a moment, and then her demeanor softened. “I’m not trying to be a bitch here. But you know how competitive this business is. If you get any reputation whatsoever about being unprofessional or difficult to work with, it can kill any chances you have at getting more shows. You are hugely popular with viewers, but you’re not at the point yet where you can do whatever you want and get away with it.”
If anyone had told her when the Cuisine Network first picked up
Simply Delicious
that the world of food television was so cutthroat and competitive, she would have laughed her butt off. But a scant year later, boy did she know better.
Carrie echoed her thoughts. “There’s always another Reggie Caldwell waiting in the wings, someone cuter, younger, funnier. Not to mention cheaper.”
Reggie nodded resignedly. Carrie didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. But to have her lay it all out made Reggie feel like she had climbed a very tall mountain, only to have the clouds lift and find that what she thought was the summit was, in fact, just a plateau, with the summit still thousands of feet away.
Mentally, she kicked herself for being so resentful. Wasn’t this exactly what she always wanted? A successful career doing what she loved? And no one ever said maintaining and growing that level of success would ever be easy. For the time being, it required almost all of her energy and concentration, and it meant giving up almost all personal time.
Involuntarily, her gaze drifted over to Gabe, who was talking on the phone over by the steam table. At what point could she ease off enough to regain some semblance of a life?
“Thanks for being up front with me,” she told Carrie.
“You’re doing a good job, Reggie, and you’re great to work with. But you need to do what you can to make sure that doesn’t change.” Carrie punched a number into her cell phone and stalked off to rearrange the Seattle shooting schedule.
“Everything okay?” She could feel the warmth of Gabe’s body as he came up behind her. Suddenly exhausted, she fought the urge to lean back against him. No more PDA today.
She nodded and told him about the schedule change.
“What do we do for the next five days?” he asked.
“Go back to San Francisco, I guess.” But even though she should meet with Max and have more than a five-minute conversation with Tyler, the last thing she wanted to do was go home.
Ignoring the voice that warned she should use the next few days to catch up on her writing, she acted on impulse. She’d fallen in love with Santa Fe, and from the time she’d arrived had been trying to figure out when she could get back for a longer visit. Why not stay? And five days with Gabe with no location shoots…Her head spun at the possibilities.
“Or we could stay here,” she said, absolutely failing in her attempt to sound like she didn’t care one way or another. “I’d love to explore a little more, and we could spend some time together without having to worry about getting on a plane or driving to the next location. What do you think?”
Her gut clenched at his continued silence. This was too fast, trying to rope him into a romantic getaway when they’d been dating, if you could even call it that, for all of forty-eight hours.
“Are you sure?” he asked finally.
Typical Reggie, she cursed herself, jumping in with both feet without thinking it through. Despite all of his romantic skill in the bedroom, he hadn’t said anything about wanting an actual relationship. She swallowed hard, terrified she was about to humiliate herself by crying in front of him.
“Because I think,” he murmured, “that if I’m left in a hotel with you for five days with nowhere to be, you’re not gonna get a whole lot of exploring done.”
“I
’m sorry I’m late!” Natalie trotted the last few feet to Reggie’s door, no easy task in Reggie’s four-inch Manolo Blahnik pumps. Max waited at the entrance of Reggie’s building looking stylish as usual in a crimson button-front shirt with just enough spandex for it to be tastefully fitted. Paired with black jeans and Kenneth Cole uppers, he looked ready to hit the bars on Castro later that night.
To her relief, he didn’t look annoyed that she was ten minutes late for their meeting. She quickly dialed in the key code that opened the front door. “I got caught in a meeting with Tyler. There’s a problem with the Seattle shooting schedule, and he needs to figure out some logistics for a couple of appearances.” She paused as it occurred to her that she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone but Tyler the details of Reggie’s schedule. But surely Max didn’t count. Her boots echoed on the stairs as they hurried up to Reggie’s floor.
“What’s she doing?” Max asked.
“Tyler is trying to book her on a morning news show and the usual book signing and cooking demo will need to be rescheduled.” She unlocked Reggie’s apartment door and motioned Max inside as she quickly entered the alarm pass code. Even though she had the code memorized, she still broke into a bit of a sweat ever since the day two weeks ago when she’d inadvertently set off the alarm. She’d been struggling with a pile of dry cleaning and a box of books that had arrived for Reggie and must have weighed 500 pounds. She’d dashed the dry cleaning into the bedroom, figuring she could make it there and back with enough time to disarm.
Wrong.
It had been gratifying, though, to see how quickly the police had shown up. Not so gratifying was the phone call she got from Gabe after the security company alerted him to the false alarm.
Alarm safely disarmed, she motioned for Max to have a seat in the living room. But instead of sitting down, he wandered over to the huge window that offered a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge. “This place is spectacular. And Reggie’s decorated it so nicely,” he said, nodding at the putty-colored sofa and love seat that Reggie had accessorized with cushions in rich tones of crimson and deep blue.
She wrinkled her nose. To Natalie’s eye, Reggie’s apartment reeked of Pottery Barn generic, but whatever. She fumbled in a bag for the neatly typed five-page proposal she’d produced for her new show concept,
The Skinny Squad with Natalie Caldwell
. “I did what you asked after our last meeting and wrote out a more detailed proposal along with a list of episode ideas.”
Tension coiled in her shoulders as Max wandered aimlessly around the living room, inspecting the books, DVDs, and framed photos that adorned the bookcase that took up an entire wall.
“I didn’t realize Reggie was such a
Star Wars
fan,” he remarked, picking her special commemorative box set off the shelf.
What the hell? Was Max always this scattered? Reggie had never mentioned it before, but he even struck Natalie as a freak, and that was saying something. “She’s kind of a closet science fiction nut.” She tapped her papers on the coffee table in a very businesslike manner and tried to steer Max back to the topic at hand; namely, her and her TV show, which would save Cuisine Network viewers from the obesity sure to be caused by their other programming. “As I said, the show will focus on both food and fitness. And I thought at the end of every show, we can have a trainer come in and tell everyone exactly how much exercise they need to do to burn off whatever recipes we’ve presented that day! Like, if we make burritos, they’d have to run on a treadmill for an hour at a six-point-five-mile per hour pace!” She was rather proud that the knowledge accumulated from her seven-year subscriptions to magazines like
Shape
and
Fitness
finally had some practical applications.
Max smiled benignly. “Reggie had a schedule change, you say?”
Natalie’s teeth clenched so hard she feared damaging her twenty-thousand-dollar veneers. “Yes, with the Seattle shoot. Now, as I was saying, I envision a set with a fully functional fitness area, so guest trainers can demonstrate workout moves.” She used Reggie’s kitchen to give Max an idea of the layout she envisioned and how they could set up free weights and cardio equipment. “It might have been easier to envision if we’d met at the studio.”
“Meeting here was more convenient,” he replied. “Besides, I think there’s enough space for me to get an idea.”
She looked up from her handout and met Max’s stare. The baby hairs on her nape bristled. Sometimes she got an odd vibe from him. Nothing she could put her finger on, just an uneasy sense that maybe there was something about him they were all missing.
Like now, the way he was looking at her, his gaze flicking up and down her body like he was checking her out, but…not. Ninety nine percent of the time she would have sworn on a stack of bibles that Max was gay, but every once in a while he’d look at her, look at Reggie, and she wasn’t sure what to think.
Then he smiled and he was the same old Max, good looking in his fastidious way, and she dismissed the creepy feeling. Obviously, Reggie’s run-in with the stalker was making her paranoid.
“What’s going on in Seattle?”
God, did he want a printout of Reggie’s daily itinerary? She forced her tone to sweetness, and said, “There’s been a delay, so they won’t be shooting there until Thursday next week, instead of Monday through Wednesday. Like I said, it’s not a big deal.”
“So will she come back home? I’d really like to discuss her ideas for next season, and I can barely get her on the phone these days.” He ran his hand across the soft fabric covering the window seat. “Sometimes it’s so much easier to communicate in person.”
Her cell phone chirped and she nearly growled. Yeah, these meetings are better in person, like the one you’re supposed to be having with me right now! “I have to take this,” she said when she saw Reggie’s number on the display. She flashed Max an apologetic smile as she greeted her sister. Max mouthed the word
bathroom
? and she motioned him down the hall.
Five minutes later, Natalie hung up, trying to convince herself that the pit in her stomach was due to the fact that she’d only had diet soda and a piece of dry toast today.
In between rapid-fire requests to print out and mail drafts to her editor, follow up with Tyler on her appearances, and water her plants, Reggie had managed to relay with giddy enthusiasm the fact that she and Gabe were…something. Natalie wasn’t totally clear on how they were defining themselves, but she was clear on two things. Mainly that the sex was phenomenal, and whatever it was, it wasn’t casual, at least on Reggie’s side.
Why Natalie felt so awful about it she didn’t know. Maybe because lately, the only man who managed to capture her interest treated her with nothing more than casual friendliness.
She sighed. Not like her sister’s news was any big surprise, given the way Gabe had circled Reggie like she was a big, juicy bone and he was a starving wolf.
Though based on what Reggie said, Gabe actually had a big, juicy bone.
Natalie hung up, wishing that someone, someone with gorgeous blue eyes and thick blond hair, might slaver over her for once.
Her phone went off again. Tyler. Had she inadvertently summoned him with her lascivious thoughts? “Oh hey, I just talked to Reggie. She and Gabe are staying in Santa Fe a few extra days,” Natalie said after she answered.
“Are you okay? You sound upset?” he replied.
She closed her eyes and ignored the pulse of pleasure that shot through her at his display of concern. It meant nothing. Though they had an amicable working relationship, he’d given no signs of actually being attracted to her. Besides, she reminded herself for what felt like the millionth time this week, Tyler wasn’t even her type, uptight, yuppie womanizer that he was. Though she had to concede that she’d hooked herself up with some real dogs in the past that could put Tyler’s prowling ways to shame. She assured Tyler she was just distracted, as she was in the middle of a meeting with Max.
“Pitching your show?” he taunted.
Now that was the Tyler she knew and…she didn’t even want to go there. She clung to the faint sarcasm in his tone, praying it would douse the spark of attraction she was foolish enough to feel. “Yes, and it’s going fabulously,” she singsonged and rang off.
Speaking of Max, what was taking him so long? She tiptoed down the hall, not wanting to disturb him if he was still in the bathroom, but still, he’d been in there a long time.
The bathroom door stood open. No Max.
From the office came the sound of feet and paper shuffling.
Max looked up with a bright, benign smile. “Sorry. This apartment is so cute I couldn’t resist taking a look around.”
Mentally, she rolled her eyes. Her chances at her own TV show seemed to be dwindling by the second. “Yeah, this is the office, where all the brilliance happens.”
Max made himself at home in front of her computer, admiring the slick flat-panel display. “Nice. So that was Reggie on the phone?”
“She and Gabe decided to take a few days in Santa Fe.”
“Ooh, right. The burly bodyguard. It’s a shame Reggie feels the need to employ him.”
“Her secret admirer has her a little freaked out. Besides,” she said, unable to keep the spite from her tone, “I don’t think Gabe’s company is exactly a hardship.”
Max’s eyebrows raised. “Ah, how very Whitney Houston, Kevin Costner. How do you turn this thing on?”
“What?”
“The computer. I’m in the market, and I’d love to just have a look. I don’t think Reggie would mind, do you?”
He stood so Natalie could sit in front of him. Sighing, she powered up and logged on to the computer. Was Max always this off focus when he worked? Maybe once she sated his curiosity he’d concentrate on the topic at hand.
She keyed in the password and pushed the chair back, startled to find Max standing so close behind her. Was he looking down her blouse?
Max stared at the screen. “Nice display. Great for graphics and watching videos, too, I imagine.” He gasped. “Look at the time! I have a meeting in twenty minutes with the host of a home decorating show I’m developing.” He started down the hall.
Natalie hurried after him. “But I haven’t even gone over my menu plans yet. And we haven’t even discussed a target date to shoot the pilot.”
Max barely spared her a glance as he hurried out the door. “We’ll set something up next week. And can you have your sister call me? I have another idea for her to do some local specials.”
Natalie sank down on the couch. The printout she’d carefully prepared for Max lay abandoned on the coffee table. How could she be so stupid, thinking she actually had a shot at getting her own TV show? Max had been humoring her, stringing her along to be nice. Meanwhile, all he wanted was to produce more shows with her sister, the cash cow.
Reggie Reggie Reggie! God, she sounded like Jan Brady at her demented worst, jealous of her older sister and all her success in every facet of life. Wasn’t it enough that Reggie got the hot TV show and the fat book contract?
Now she was off visiting fabulous places and having incredible sex with an amazingly hot guy to boot.
A small voice attempted to remind her of how hard Reggie worked, even while visiting said fabulous places, and that the aforementioned hot guy was around because another man sent Reggie pictures of his balls and broke into her hotel room.
But Natalie was too invested in feeling sorry for herself to pay the voice any heed.
Contrary to what he thought, Gabe was not, in fact, able to keep Reggie tied to the bed for the next five days.
Not that he didn’t do his best to exhaust her. But she seemed to have boundless stores of energy for visiting Santa Fe’s many art galleries and shopping in its many western-themed stores.
“I don’t see why you need a shearling coat,” he grumbled, as she modeled what had to be the tenth coat at a gigantic secondhand store she’d found. “It never gets below forty degrees where you live, and that thing looks ready for an arctic expedition.”
Twirling and admiring herself in the mirror, she said, “It’s not about need. It’s about how cool this is.”
Then it was off to the Georgia O’Keefe museum, and then the Cowgirl Hall of Fame for margaritas and barbecue.
Despite Reggie’s attempt to make their time as vacation-like as possible, Gabe refused to let down his guard. She was recognized often, and they were hard-pressed to walk anywhere without someone stopping her to say hi, exchange recipe tips, or tell her how much they enjoyed her show.
Reggie met each fan with an enthusiastic smile, eagerly shaking hands and sometimes, to Gabe’s increasing fear and annoyance, offering hugs. He did what he could to keep them at bay, but even his most fearsome glare couldn’t ward off her seemingly endless stream of fans.
“Can’t you give it a rest?” Reggie whispered as Gabe stepped bodily in front of a woman before she had the chance to touch Reggie. “I’m sure all she wants is an autograph.” Reggie peaked around his shoulder and took the woman’s proffered pen and paper. The woman eyed Gabe warily.
Smart woman, he thought viciously.
“Reggie, you’re killing me,” he muttered under his breath.
“Can’t you can the bodyguard act for one day?” she said after the woman left. Her dark eyebrows were set in an irritated frown as she looked up at him.
He rubbed his eyes tiredly. “What is it going to take to get through to you? You seem to think that since there hasn’t been contact from the stalker in over a week and he hasn’t threatened you physically, you can pretend he doesn’t exist.” Her nonchalant attitude toward her safety was enough to send him over the edge.
“I suppose you’re right,” she conceded sullenly. “But I wish for once we could just act like a regular couple.”
Gabe did his best to indulge her—to a point. He refused to let up his guard, but later that night as they walked back to their hotel, Gabe stopped several times to steal a kiss. On their way, he even stopped to buy her a box of chocolate-covered strawberries he caught her eyeing.