shouldn’t push him out of the car. “I’m a very good actress,” she said instead. “I just haven’t had a big break. Most of my roles have been bit parts or have landed on the cutting room floor.” She glanced at the GPS and turned on her blinker.
“What have you acted in?”
“A lot of different things.” Chelsea was used to that question. She got it a lot. “Did you see Juno?”
“You were in Juno?”
“Yeah. I was up in Canada assisting one of my B stars, who was working on a movie for Lifetime, when I got the call that the production company needed background people so I showed up.” She took the I–5 South exit. “I was in the shopping mall scene. If you look past Ellen Page’s big belly, you can see me talking on a cell phone.”
“That’s it?”
“For my part in Juno, yes. But I’ve done a lot of other films.”
“Name something. Other than blink-and-you-miss-it parts.”
“Slasher Camp, Killer Valentine, Prom Night 2, He Knows It’s You, and Motel on Lake Hell.”
Silence filled the car, and then he started to laugh. A deep rumble that came from his chest. “You’re a scream queen. No shit?”
She didn’t know that she could be considered a scream queen. More like a scream slut. Or the best friend of the scream queen. Her roles had never been big enough to be considered the queen. “I’ve done other things. Like walk-on parts on The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful. And on CSI: Miami, I played one of a series of dead girls that kept washing up on the beach. The makeup was really interesting.” She looked over her left shoulder and passed a delivery truck. “Most people assume CSI: Miami is filmed in Miami but it’s not. It’s actually filmed on Manhattan Beach and Long Beach,” she continued. “I’ve done a ton of series pilots that never got picked up. Not to mention tons of commercials. The last commercial I did was for Hillshire Farms. I wore a cheerleader’s outfit and yelled, ‘Go meat.’ That was about six months ago. When I was in—”
“Jesus!” he interrupted as he reached for the buttons to the radio and filled the inside of the Mercedes with “Slither.” The heavy bass vibrated the floor beneath her feet, and Chelsea bit the side of her lip to keep from laughing. He no doubt meant to be rude, but Velvet Revolver was one of her favorite bands. Scott Weiland was a skinny, hot rock god, and she’d rather listen to Scott than tax her brain in a futile effort to entertain a grumpy hockey player.
Too bad Scott was such a junkie, she thought as she tapped her fingers on the steering wheel along with the heavy beat. If she were alone, she’d bust out and sing along, but Mr. Bressler was already annoyed with her. And while Chelsea had near perfect recall of song lyrics and movie dialogue—kind of a hidden savant talent—she couldn’t carry a tune.
She glanced at the GPS and took exit 165A and merged onto James Street just as the trusty navigation system instructed. Within a few minutes, Chelsea pulled the Mercedes in front of the massive medical center.
Mark turned off the radio and pointed the handle of his cane toward the windshield. “Keep going. The clinic entrance is further down.”
“I’ll find the parking garage, then I’ll come find you.”
“I don’t need you to find me,” he said as the car pulled to a stop beside the curb. “I’ll have one of the nurses call you when I’m ready to be picked up.”
“Do you have my number?”
“No.” He unbuckled his seat belt and opened the door with his good hand. “Write it on something.”
Chelsea reached into the backseat and grabbed her purse. She pulled out an old business card and a pen. She wrote her new cell phone number on the back, then looked through the car at Mark. “My new number’s on the back,” she said as she handed it across to him.
The tips of his fingers bumped into hers as he took the card and glanced over it. He slid his legs out of the car and grabbed his cane. “Don’t wreck the car,” he said as he grabbed the top of the door frame and stood. He shoved the card into his back pocket and shut the door.
A taxi behind the Mercedes honked, and Chelsea eased her foot off the brake and headed toward the street. In her rearview mirror she caught a glimpse of Mark Bressler just before he entered the building. The bright morning sun shot glistening sparks off his aviators and shone in his dark hair. He paused to watch her—no doubt to make sure she didn’t “wreck the car”—before he moved within the deep shadows of the building.
She turned her attention to the road and figured she had a little over an hour to kill. She was in downtown Seattle. There had to be somewhere she could go to scrub her mind free of the past hour. She needed to find her happy place.
She touched the GPS screen and turned on the voice command mode. “Where to, Mark?” it asked. Clearly it didn’t know that it was supposed to address him as Mr. Bressler.
“Neiman Marcus,” she said. “I need Neiman Marcus.”
* * *
Mark glanced at the Neiman Marcus bags in the backseat of his car and buckled his seat belt. For her first day on the job, she sure was making herself comfortable.
“Where to, Chelsea?”
He looked at her, then at his navigation system. “What the hell?”
His “assistant” gave the GPS an address in Belltown, then looked across at him and smiled. “I didn’t think you’d mind if I programmed my name into the voice recognition. It kept calling me Mark, which was just confusing because I am clearly not you.”
“Turn right. 3.6 miles till destination.”
He leaned forward, brought up the menu screen, and turned off the sound. “Confusing for who?”
“The GPS.”
“The GPS doesn’t get confused.” He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He’d been right about her. She was nuttier than squirrel shit, and she was driving his ninety-thousand-dollar car.
“How was your appointment?” she asked, all cheery.
“Great.” Mark opened his eyes and looked out the passenger window at St. James Cathedral. But the appointment hadn’t been great. He hadn’t received the news he’d been wanting to hear. The doctor had seemed pleased, but the tendons weren’t healing as fast as Mark hoped and he had to wear the splint for at least another month. Which meant he couldn’t transfer his cane to his right side for better balance. It also meant he had to take the splint off to button his shirt or pants, take a shower, or eat a meal. Although he’d always shot left, trying to sign his name left-handed was like writing with a pen stuck in his toes.
A dull ache radiated from deep in the marrow of his femur and spread to his hip. At the moment, it wasn’t bad. Nothing he couldn’t handle, but in a few hours it was likely to get worse. He hadn’t brought any medication with him because he didn’t like to be doped up in public. He didn’t want anyone to think he couldn’t handle a little pain. He was Mark Bressler. He’d played hockey with a fractured ankle and a broken thumb. He’d played through concussions and torn and bruised muscles. He could handle the pain. If he was lucky, it wouldn’t get real bad until he got back home, where he could park himself in front of his big TV and knock back a bottle of his favorite medication.
The car turned on Madison, and Mark glanced across at his assistant. Despite her big sunglasses, two-tone hair, and hideous shirt, she was cute. Like a kitten was cute, but Mark didn’t like cats. Cats were sneaky. One second a cat looked all soft and harmless. All big blue eyes and innocence. One second you were just looking at it thinking, Huh, that’s kind of a cute kitten, then it sank its teeth into your hand and ran away. A sort of stealth blitz that left a guy stunned and wondering what the hell just happened.
Behind the mirror lenses of his glasses, he lowered his gaze down the side of her neck and shoulder to her breasts. She sure wasn’t built like a little kitty cat, more like a porn star. She’d said she was an actress. All porn stars thought they were actresses too. He wondered how much she’d paid for her boobs.
He closed his eyes and groaned. What had his life come to? Looking at a nice pair of tits and wondering how much she paid for them? Who gave a shit! In another life, his other life, he’d be thinking about how he was going to get face-deep in her cleavage. His only thought about kittens would begin and end with how he was going to get her little kitty cat naked and riding his lap.
For most of his life, Mark had been good at two things: hockey and sex. He’d only set out to be good at
