She Thinks Her Ex Is Sexy...

2

SHANNON BECAME AWARE of the burning odor slowly.

Her neighbor’s cooking was iffy, but she could never remember anything this acrid wafting from next door in the year since she’d bought a house with Romero. A house Romero didn’t share anymore. Besides, she couldn’t be at home, because her bed was way more comfortable than this. Hard objects speared into her back. Water dripped down onto her face. Her lips.

She ran her tongue along her mouth to catch the droplet, since her throat was dry. Only it wasn’t water. It was sweat.

“Shannon.”

“Romero.” Her whole mood shifted as she got her bearings.

She felt him stretched out over her, his hot male body drenched and hard. She couldn’t wait to open her eyes and see it for herself. See him. The man was sex personified.

She reached for him as she wrenched her eyelids open. And, oh, man, Romero Jinks rated high on a woman’s list of faces she’d like to see when she woke up.

He leaned over her, his dark eyes narrowed with concern. His angular face was drawn into stark lines, while a cut oozed blood just below his right eyebrow. He was part Irish and part Mexican, a heritage that had blessed him with inky dark lashes and silky black hair. Women around the globe lusted after him, but for this moment at least, Shannon had him all to herself.

Too bad her head was throbbing with pain at the time she’d managed to snag the honor.

“Are you okay?” His hand skimmed up the back of her neck and the grit against his fingertips made her realize she was lying on the dirt.

There’d been an accident.

Her fingers reached for her Celtic necklace, the only item she wore that meant something to her. She could replace the Louboutin shoes—although perhaps not too soon considering her new budget—but the necklace had been her mother’s. One of the few pieces of jewelry that hadn’t been all about the bling, since cinema sex icon Bridget Leigh had received it long before her life goals involved bringing the men of Hollywood to their knees.

Hollywood had turned out to be a bigger, badder enemy than even her mother could have predicted, driving her to her death before she’d had a chance to overcome her addiction to prescription painkillers. After dealing with a death that had turned into a media frenzy, Shannon had tried to step out of her mother’s shadow and be taken seriously as an actress, a dream that never really took off. And a dream that never would if she accepted film roles like the one Ceily had been waving in front of her nose. Another flesh movie about her mother’s life.

Shannon hadn’t even bothered to read the script.

“I’m fine. How about you? You’re bleeding.” She inched upward before realizing she was practically clinging to Romero for support. Shannon released him in a hurry—she wouldn’t let an adrenaline rush send her back to his arms. Not after he’d addressed her relationship frustrations by suggesting a trial separation. She’d been too devastated by the idea to argue. Besides, the man didn’t argue. He expected people to either be happy with him or, she’d discovered, to be out of his life completely.

“It’s nothing. But you’ve been unconscious for a few minutes. Are you sure you’re all right?” He cradled the back of her head and her nerve endings danced at his nearness.

How many times had he stroked those long, guitar player fingers over her body to elicit soft sighs until he hit just the right note? The temptation to arch up and kiss him, to drag him down to the hard ground with her, was strong.

But hadn’t that been the trouble with them all along? They’d always been so willing to lose themselves in sex, ignoring their problems until they were so monumental that the lack of a pair of hiking boots in a woman’s size six could detonate an entire relationship.

“I’m fine.” She struggled to sit up the rest of the way, needing to escape the touch that had the power to render her brainless in zero to sixty. “But what was with that guy in the van?”

Romero frowned at her, as if he didn’t believe for a minute she was fine, but at last his disarming fingers fell away from her scalp, and he dropped back to sit on his butt in the sand.

They were in the middle of nowhere. No houses or buildings, no signs or highways. Far above them Shannon could see the edge of the road they’d been on, but the embankment was so steep it would be hell to try to climb back up there. Besides, now that she thought about it, she hadn’t seen any houses or buildings on the route they’d been driving. Apart from the van that had run them off the bumpy back road they’d traveled in the hope of taking a shortcut, she hadn’t seen signs of civilization for miles.

“I don’t know, but he had a California state license plate, and you’d better believe I’m going to report his ass to the insurance company.” Romero drew in his long legs, dropped his elbows onto his knees and speared a hand through his hair. “But I don’t have a clue how we’re going to get help.”

“You tried the cell phones?”

“Not yours, but mine doesn’t work and the navigational system in the Beemer is out, so I’d say there’s no coverage here.”

Shannon patted her pocket for her phone and couldn’t find it. “Mine must have fallen out of my jacket when we flipped.” She started to stand. “I’ll go check—”

“No.” He gripped her arm tightly, holding her next to him. “The car smelled like something was burning. You’d better give it time until we’re sure nothing could ignite.”

Sinking back to the sand beside him, she tried to ignore the feel of his hand on her, the warmth of his palm penetrating her jacket to the skin beneath. The firm hold did something dizzying to her senses. She wasn’t some hard-core S and M chick, but she loved to be dominated. It was a fantasy she’d felt safe enough with Romero to share. A fantasy he’d been incredibly skilled at indulging to just the right degree.

Apparently, he’d been sharing some of her thoughts, because his gaze heated for one sizzling second before he released her, turning his attention back to the smoking car.

A wise woman would do the same.

She shoved aside images of Romero pressing her up against their bedroom wall and wrenching her clothes off in a fevered frenzy. Instead, she focused on the BMW perched on its roof, the front end smashed beyond recognition while the radiator hissed steam. A bold blackbird landed on one tire, undeterred by the potential for an explosive situation.

“Thank you for getting me out of there.” She couldn’t show her gratitude by covering his gorgeous mug with kisses, so she settled for the old-fashioned method. “I don’t remember us landing or you pulling me out, but you must have.”

Her heart squeezed at the thought of how close they’d come to death. If the car hadn’t been so well engineered they might not be sitting here right now.

“I’m glad you’re okay.” He shot her a sideways look. “Even if I am a self-absorbed bastard with no appreciation for anyone else’s feelings.”

She recalled the accusation, one of many she’d launched at him during their fight. One of many he’d simply accepted and hadn’t argued about. The fact that he didn’t care enough to argue, to fight for their relationship and her, that had hurt her far more than the lack of hiking boots, or his inconsistent schedule that dragged him away for months on end, then planted him back home for weeks straight, only to hide out in his basement recording studio.

“Yeah, well, clearly you’re having a good day.” She rose to her feet, unwilling to face more reminders of their breakup. The loss of him was still an open wound for her even though he’d been able to roll right on with life without missing a beat. “If that car hasn’t exploded by now, I’m not going to worry about it. I’ll see if I have cell coverage so we can get out of here.”

Shannon wobbled on her heels in the sandy terrain, her unsteadiness as much from her head injury as her impractical shoes.

“Are you in that much of a hurry to leave me?” he called after her.

“I’m not the one who likes to run away when the going gets tough.” She shot the accusation over her shoulder. “But I think you’d agree we’ll both be better off when this trip is over and we can go our separate ways.”

SHE HADN’T TOLD HIM anything he didn’t already know.

Romero was well aware that she’d had enough of him. That had been abundantly clear during the daylong rampage when she called his bluff on the trial separation idea and moved straight ahead to removing him from her life completely. She’d still been spoiling for a fight when he’d pulled out of the driveway with a bag in hand. But he couldn’t help a twinge of regret that she still harbored some resentment toward him even now, when they’d nearly died. Would she have shown up in front of St. Peter’s gate with her score sheet in hand of all the times Romero had ticked her off?

“You’re a hard woman to please,” he muttered, and got up, unwilling to let her be blown up in the hunt for a cell phone that wasn’t going to work anyhow.

“I disagree,” she replied as she hunkered down near the open window of the Beemer and peered inside. “I’m an easy woman to please for people who are willing to engage in the occasional disagreement to work through problems in a relationship.”

Romero’s head pounded with frustration about the car, the accident and the long walk he feared was ahead of them, so Shannon’s latest slam seemed poorly timed.

He bracketed her hips with his hands and hauled her out of the way so he could find her phone for her. She huffed and puffed about it, but he knew damn well she wouldn’t want to crawl around in an upside-down car to retrieve her things.

“Do you have some kind of bionic hearing or what?” He couldn’t imagine how she’d heard him talking to himself twenty yards away from her.

“Hardly. My hearing just seems good to you by comparison because you don’t like to listen and, as a result, hear very little.”

He picked her cell off the visor and removed her purse strap from a bar it was caught on under the passenger seat. Handing both items out to her, he then grabbed his wallet out of the glove box along with some tissues and a first-aid kit.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he removed the keys from the ignition and brought them around to the back of the car.

Finally, words from her mouth that were not arrows aimed at him.

“I’m going to get our suitcases out so we can streamline what we need.” He pried open the trunk with considerable effort, since that had bent, too, but the moment he released the latch, all the suitcases dropped out to the ground with a thud.

“What?” Shannon paced in a nervous circle, her shoes kicking up dirt as she walked, so a dust cloud formed around her ankles. “I haven’t even tried my phone yet. And we don’t know that the car won’t work at all, do we?”

He sent a meaningful look toward the upside-down, torn-up automobile.

“But if we could flip it—”

“It would still have a blown tire, a bent front axle and a slew of engine parts that broke during the fall. Trust me, the vehicle serves no purpose.” He took his keys out of the trunk and didn’t bother to shut it.

“Do we even know where we are?” She bit her lip as she stared down at her phone, and Romero knew she couldn’t get a signal.

“Shannon, there’s no phone service.” He tugged the cell away from her and dropped it in her jacket pocket. “Something like twenty percent of Mexico doesn’t even have electricity, so there are definitely large pockets without cell coverage. We need to figure out which way to walk that will yield some sign of life first. Any guesses?”

“Walk?” Her fingers crept back up to the chain she liked to wear, the one with the Celtic knot, and began to slide the pendant along the links.

It occurred to him that he knew she loved that necklace, but he didn’t have a clue why. For all he knew it could be a bauble from another boyfriend—he’d never thought to ask. The realization tweaked his conscience until he reminded himself he’d been on tour for something like a hundred and fifty days in the past year. Was it any wonder they hadn’t ever really known each other?

The sun cooked the countryside despite the fact that it was February, the heat reflected back by the pale sand beneath their feet. A lizard darted over his boot and he noticed the profound silence that came with being lost in the middle of nowhere.

“C’mon, Shan.” He burrowed in his overnight bag and found a bottle of water to hand to her. “I’ve seen you rock the treadmill for ninety minutes and knock off almost ten miles. I’m sure you can manage a walk to the next town.”

She took the water bottle from him and he noticed two of her nails were broken and the back of her hand was scraped up, no doubt from the accident. He cursed the driver of that van all over again.

Damn it, he would find a way to prosecute that bastard once they returned to the States, no matter what a pain in the butt it was to chase someone down for a crime committed in another country.

“I’m usually a little better equipped for running when I hit the treadmill.” She cracked the bottle top and took a sip. The movement of her lips on the container transported him to other times and places, romantic dates when he’d watched her sip vintage champagne from long-stemmed crystal or purse her mouth around a Jell-O shooter when they went out with friends. Something about the way she moved those full lips reduced him to seeing her through a slow-motion lens, and he had to blink his way out of the encroaching sex fog. He’d lost the right to fantasize about her lips when he’d peeled out of their driveway.

Funny about that—their driveway. No house he’d ever lived in felt as much like home as when they’d moved in together. The pricey piece of real estate had become a haven in no time. And although the house had been a joint investment, he was in no hurry to sell it or see her move out. He’d been staying in a hotel until he figured out where to go next, but he didn’t want to think about living in a house without her in it. Her fashion-conscious dogs. Her frequent ventures into ethnic cooking, from Norwegian to Thai. Her impromptu parties.

“Romero?” She waved a hand in front of his eyes and he remembered how much it drove her crazy when he zoned out.

She figured he wasn’t listening, and maybe she was right, since he didn’t have a clue what they’d been saying. He’d worked so damn hard to shut out his overbearing family from an early age that he’d carried the habit into all his other relationships, including a failed quickie marriage before Shannon. The complaints of his ex-wife hadn’t been all that much different from the frustrations Shannon had expressed.

He just didn’t know how to fix it. A damn shame, since losing Shannon had hurt even more than the breakup of the marriage he’d rushed into. He missed the spark she’d brought to his life with her nonstop energy and her insistence that he enter the world now and then. Before he’d met her, he liked to hole up between tours, working on his music in solitude. But he’d discovered a new way to relax with Shannon, a way to hang out with friends and experience a quiet life without going to ground.

“How do you expect me to walk through the Mexican desert dressed in jeans and three-and-a-half-inch heels?”

Romero peered around at the scrub and patches of grass scattered around the landscape. A thick stand of low trees loomed fifty yards away from where the Beemer had crashed down the embankment.

“Actually, the Sonoran Desert is one of the more kind terrains as far as deserts go because—”

“That’s not the point!” She screwed the cap back on the water and thrust it toward him, her silver bracelets jingling with a resonant hum like a cymbal. The dull thump of her foot on the ground broke the melody. “Don’t you see that I’ve got nothing to wear for hiking around Mexico?”

He scowled, acknowledging this was a cause for concern. He’d brought comfortable clothes for traveling, but Shannon didn’t ever seem to dress that way. Even her exercise outfits looked like something she could go clubbing in at a moment’s notice. Not once in all their time together had he known her to put on a pair of cutoff sweats and a tee for a workout, but then, she’d been hounded by the paparazzi all her life as the daughter of a megastar. She’d confided in him once that she didn’t dare have an “off” day or she’d be roasted in the tabloids for weeks afterward, and with the number her mother had done on her, Romero gathered that she didn’t deal well with too much public scrutiny.

“I’ve got a shirt you can wear.” He wouldn’t have made the offer unless they were in dire straits, since seeing her in his clothes made him seriously hot for her. And possessive as hell.

Then again, looking at a woman in your clothes was only one step away from seeing her with your rock on her hand, and Romero didn’t have any intention of taking that kind of step no matter how possessive he felt about someone. He’d witnessed firsthand how marriage could change a person, with that ill-advised union in his twenties. For that matter, he and Shannon had probably started growing apart the minute he’d made the big leap of faith and asked her to move in with him. He’d try like hell to remember the fact once his Ramones shirt was hugging Shannon’s breasts.

She moved closer to him, frowning down at the contents of his overnight bag as he retrieved the worn black cotton.

“I’m not worried about my clothes so much as my shoes. I only brought high heels for the wedding.” She tucked his shirt into her bag, as if to put it on at a later date, then dropped down onto a flat rock near his leather satchel and stretched her long legs out in front of her.

The same long legs she used to wrap around his waist. Or twine around his in bed when she wanted him to touch her. He could see the outline of her thighs in the taut fabric of her jeans, long slender muscle neatly defined from all those hours on the treadmill. All that time in his bed.

“I can’t help you with the shoes,” he admitted, determined to focus on the problem at hand and not give in to another slow-motion inventory of the ways Shannon Leigh was sexy.

“Yeah. I guess you can’t help me with the shoes.” Her voice went flat. Cold. “Pretty damned ironic that this would have been the perfect time for me to have a pair of freaking hiking boots.”

Okay, so he’d walked right into that one. But if she thought he was going to engage in her war of words when they had hours of walking ahead of them, she had another think coming. He wouldn’t do the argument thing on a good day. And frankly, today sucked monkey butt.

He just hoped they found civilization faster than he feared they would, because while Shannon might have reached her boiling point with him, she had yet to see his. But, sure enough, it was building.

And the fallout wasn’t going to be pretty.

3

UN-FREAKING-REAL.

Big, ugly birds screeched overhead, and Shannon wondered if they were vultures as she pounded out random combinations of numbers on her cell phone. Maybe she could somehow jar the unit into working before the scavengers started to close in. How could she be in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of noisy birds, no real walking shoes and a man who’d put her heart through the wringer? They had no phone, no map, no navigational system, no car. Thankfully, Romero had traveled with two cases of water in the trunk, since he refused to drink any liquid besides alcohol while south of the border.

He unpacked bottle after bottle from the shrink-wrapped carton now, loading up his overnight bag with Evian. His movements were sharp, quick. Angry. His obvious decision to take the higher ground and not engage in an argument with her about the hiking boots might be admirable if he hadn’t taken that route every single time she’d ever had a bone to pick with him. How could they ever solve their problems when he refused to acknowledge them, let alone discuss them?

Residual frustration simmered inside her, but what was the point of rehashing old terrain? He obviously hadn’t thought their relationship was worth fighting over three months ago, since he’d lit out of town on two wheels. She’d heard he’d gone to stay with friends out on Catalina for a few weeks, then he’d taken up residence at a posh Beverly Hills hotel. And in case she wanted to know how he was faring, the supermarket newspapers posted pictures of him tooling around town on his motorcycle or attending glitzy music awards shows. She had no reason to think he’d want to defend his decisions or talk through their issues now.

She’d be better off focusing on getting out of Mexico and back to civilization, away from scrubby bushes and carnivorous birds. She would put Romero behind her. And with any luck, she’d make him eat his heart out at his loss, to boot.

Not that it would be easy while trekking through the desert in jeans and a blazer, since she couldn’t wear his T-shirt without getting seriously turned on. The scent of him lingered in that cotton, as did memories of other times he’d worn it. Other times she’d taken it off him. Hence the need to stuff the thing directly into her bag. But she would find a way to make him regret that he’d left her. Wasn’t that a woman’s best revenge? To have her ex realize he’d made a colossal mistake?

Sauntering over to the spot where he worked to strip down the contents of his bag now overflowing with purified water, Shannon figured she’d better follow his example and sort through the stuff she had to bring with her.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” she asked, just because she hated pronounced silences.

Her mom had been either depressed or bored with her life for as long as Shannon could remember, and her silences had always meant trouble was brewing. Usually that she’d overstayed her welcome wherever her mom was filming and that Shannon would be on her way back home with a nanny before long. She’d worked damn hard to keep her mom too entertained to fall into the long silences and then send her away, but she’d had even less success as a daughter than as a serious actress.

“I tried to take a shortcut off Route 1 back in Insurgentes, where the interstate veers east before coming back west. But I stopped seeing signs a good five miles before we were run off the road.”

She recalled they hadn’t noticed any other vehicle besides the van once they’d left the main route, so even if they could scale the embankment they’d fallen down, it wouldn’t do much good to wait for traffic on a road that had looked more geared to ATVs than real cars. “So we can either backtrack to the highway or try to cut northeast and see if we can meet up with it ahead of us.”

She unzipped her biggest suitcase, the vintage trunk, one of her favorite pieces of luggage, and wondered how she would leave anything behind. Even though they couldn’t see any other signs of two-legged life right now, that didn’t mean looters wouldn’t crawl out from the bushes to make off with her stuff.

“Right.” Romero dug a knife out of a tool kit that had fallen out of his trunk, and stuffed it inside the bag he apparently planned to bring with him. “But if we backtrack, we know the phone won’t work for the whole trip. Whereas if we move forward, we at least have the possibility of finding some kind of cell coverage.”

Shannon glanced at her bridesmaid dress, her curling iron and her hot rollers. None of them would be helpful on a journey through the Mexican desert, but she couldn’t see herself leaving all of it behind either, especially as the dress was the single most expensive item in any of her suitcases. Romero’s trunk latch had broken when he forced it open, so they couldn’t lock it up again. Tugging out the pink garment, she rolled it up tight to pack in the medium-size carry-on bag.

“You’re not bringing that with you.” Romero seemed to be cutting the carpet out of the BMW, for no real purpose that she could see.

“Did I tell you what to pack?” The sun overhead went behind a cloud and she noticed for the first time the day turning overcast. The ugly birds that had been stalking them had taken off, but she didn’t know if that meant impending bad weather or that the carrion-eating rats with wings had gotten tired of waiting for them to die.

“No, but that’s because I have the greater good in mind instead of thinking about what to wear tomorrow.” The carpet he’d been sawing at flopped on the ground, the underside stiff and rubberized.

“I’m not wearing this dress tomorrow.” In fact, she’d never wear it again, since the first thing she had to do when she returned home, after feeding her dogs, was post the garment on eBay to try to make a little money back on the ridiculously expensive piece. “But it’s Vera Wang. I can’t bloody well leave it in the desert for thieves.”

Any woman of Shannon’s acquaintance—and most of the men, for that matter—would have understood. A vein in Romero’s temple throbbed so hard it looked like it might well explode.

How could he walk out on her without a fight, and yet a dress brought out the ferocious beast in him?

“I think thieves are the least of our problems. Put the dress back and take the rest of the water I couldn’t fit in my bag.” He exaggerated the articulation. Clearly, he thought she was a moron.

“You know I may not have all the right survival skills to make it in the Mexican desert.” It looked like a freaking desert to her, damn it. She tossed bottle after bottle of water on top of the Vera Wang as a compromise. “But I’ve lived in Hollywood on my own since I was fourteen, becoming an emancipated minor at sixteen after my guardian aunt spent all my mom’s fortune.” Not that her personal history wasn’t known by every Hollywood insider, outsider and tabloid, considering her mother’s fame. “That means I’ve been surviving for over a decade in a jaded jungle full of people who wanted to tear me down, or at the very least, expected me to turn into my druggie mom. And not only have I managed to have a successful career—” okay, so she’d fudged that part, but this was her rant “—I’ve also never been photographed naked, never threw up in a nightclub, never got in a fight with the paparazzi, and not once did I cave to addictions that spit people out by the dozens every day in Los Angeles. The mere fact of my existence speaks to my intelligence, don’t you think?”

When she had all the bottles of water in her bag, she zipped it up and stared at him, daring him to tell her what to do again.

“I hope you’ve got everything you need in there, since you don’t have an ounce of space left.” He glared meaningfully at her bulging bag.

She didn’t. She had to have her face cleanser and a few other toiletries. But she could stuff those in the side pouches, couldn’t she? She was about to fire off a sharp retort when she remembered the movie script. Even though the treatment was for some crummy indie film cashing in on her mother’s fame, her ass would be grass if someone else got their hands on the screenplay and leaked it.

“Crap.”

Romero was at least wise enough to go back to peeling the carpet out of the trunk instead of gloating. Maybe that was a benefit to being with a man who never argued. He didn’t jump down her throat when she messed up, either. Sighing, Shannon sank to her knees to retrieve the one item she couldn’t jam into some tiny side flap. The padded manila envelope contained the project that represented Shannon’s only offer to stay in Hollywood. Not that she was taking it.

From Ceily’s description, Shannon knew the movie was about her poor mother’s arrival in Tinseltown, and her rise to fame that had included nude spreads in a variety of men’s magazines and rumors that she’d used sex to get some of the industry’s juiciest roles. Later, she’d descended into drugs, alcohol and depression. Nothing the public hadn’t heard about before.

Baby Doll would be a movie about a woman’s use of sex to get her way—a theme Hollywood producers loved. But Shannon had managed to have a sixteen-year career without taking her clothes off or playing the sexpot. Her mother had been famous for both, blazing through Hollywood with studio directors and producers panting at her heels. Bridget Leigh had elevated sensuality to an art form.

No, Shannon didn’t want to do a movie focused on all the things she resented most about her mom, the things that took Bridget away from her daughter before they could fix their dysfunctional relationship. But the script couldn’t stay here, either. Vera Wang would have to go.

“Is that the proposal for the film about your mom?” Romero had set aside his knife and rolled up the carpet tightly with a bungee cord around it.

He stuffed the long roll into an elastic side strap on his overnight bag, which was more functional than label conscious. Romero had never been about high fashion or glitz, even in his days with bandmates who wore eyeliner like it was going out of style. Hence his decision to invest a few grand in a new brand of hiking boots to help give the fledgling company a PR boost. He liked to fish on the weekends and take a boat out to Catalina.

“Yes.” She hadn’t wanted anyone to know she was desperate enough even to consider this kind of film. Especially not a man she wanted to eat his heart out. “I’m probably not going to do this project, since I have a lot of other things in the works.”

Like a play so far off Broadway she’d probably be playing Staten Island.

“But it’s important enough to sacrifice the Vera Whatever for it.” He retrieved some energy bars from his glove compartment before moving to where she bent over her suitcase, firing water bottles out onto a thin brown patch of grass.