What I Did for Love

clean T-shirt and cargo shorts with what looked like a tumbler of scotch balanced on his chest. It wasn’t even two in the afternoon.

He swirled the liquid in the glass. “Your sleeping in here isn’t going to work. My housekeeper lives over the garage. I have a feeling she’ll notice if we have separate beds.”

“I’ll make the bed every morning before she sees it,” she said with fake sweetness. “As for my things…Tell her I’m turning this into my dressing room.”

He took a sip of scotch and uncrossed his ankles. “I meant what I said yesterday. We’re doing this by my rules. A regular sex life is part of the deal.”

She knew him too well to even pretend to be surprised. “This is the twenty-first century, Skipper. Men don’t issue sexual ultimatums.”

“This man does.” He uncoiled from the bed like a tawny lion getting ready for the hunt. “I’m not giving up sex, which means I can either screw around on you, or we’ll do what married couples do. And don’t worry. I’m not nearly as much into S and M as I used to be. Not that I’ve given it up entirely…” His light mockery seemed more intimidating than the surly scorn she remembered. He took a lazy sip of scotch. “There’s a new sheriff in town, Scooter. You and Daddy don’t hold the power card any longer. We’re playing with a fresh deck, and it’s my deal.” He lifted his glass in a mock toast and disappeared into the hallway.

She took a dozen deep breaths, then half a dozen more. She’d known turning herself into a woman of purpose wouldn’t be easy. But she held the checkbook, didn’t she? And that made her up to the challenge. Definitely, absolutely, positively up to the challenge.

She was almost sure of it.

At the bottom of the stairs, Bram’s cell vibrated in his shorts’ pocket. He moved into the farthest reaches of his living room before he answered. “Hello, Caitlin.”

“Well, well…,” a familiar throaty female voice responded. “And aren’t you just full of surprises?”

“I like to keep life interesting.”

“Lucky I turned on the television last night, or I wouldn’t have heard the news.”

“Call me insensitive, but you weren’t at the top of my contact list.”

As she went off on him, he gazed out through the French doors onto the veranda. He loved this house. It was the first place he’d lived that felt like home, or at least the way he imagined home should feel, since he’d never before had one. The luxurious mansions he’d rented during Skip and Scooter had been more like frat houses than real homes, with at least four guys living with him at a time. Video games used to blare in half the rooms, porn in the others, beer cans and fast food everywhere. And women, lots of women-some of them smart, decent girls who’d deserved to be treated better.

As Caitlin ranted on, he wandered through the back hall and down a few steps into the small screening room he’d refurbished. Chaz must have watched a movie last night because it still smelled faintly of popcorn. He took a sip from his drink and sank into one of the reclining armchair seats. The empty screen reminded him of his current state. He’d blown the opportunity of a lifetime with Skip and Scooter, just like his old man had blown every opportunity that had come his way. A family inheritance.

“I’ve got another call, sweetheart,” he said as his patience ran out. “I have to go.”

“Six weeks,” she retorted. “That’s all you have left.”

As if he’d forgotten.

He checked for messages, then turned off his phone. He couldn’t blame Caitlin for being bitter, but he had a much bigger problem at the moment. When he’d heard that Georgie was going to spend the weekend in Vegas, he’d decided to follow her. But the game he’d set out to play had taken a lunatic twist he’d never anticipated. He sure as hell hadn’t planned on getting married.

Now he had to figure out how to turn this farcical situation to his advantage. Georgie had a thousand excellent reasons to hate him, a thousand reasons to exploit every weakness she could find, which meant he could only let her see what she expected. Fortunately, she already thought the worst of him, and he wasn’t likely to do anything to change her opinion.

He almost felt sorry for her. Georgie didn’t have a ruthless bone in her body, so it was an uneven match. She put other people’s interests before her own, then blamed herself if the same people screwed up. He, on the other hand, was a selfish, self-centered son of a bitch who’d grown up understanding he had to look out for himself, and he didn’t have a single qualm about using her. Now that he finally knew what he wanted out of life, he was going after it with everything he had.

Georgie York didn’t stand a chance.

Georgie showered and scrounged up a turkey sandwich. She ended up in his dining room searching for a book to read. A massive round, black, claw-footed table that looked Spanish or maybe Portuguese sat on an Oriental rug with a Moorish brass chandelier overhead, but the dining room was both a place to eat and a cozy library. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined every wall except the one that opened into the garden. In addition to books, the shelves held an eclectic mixture of artifacts: Balinese bells, chunks of quartz, Mediterranean ceramics, and small Mexican folk paintings.

Bram’s decorator had created a cozy space that invited lingering, but the diverse collection showed his decorator either hadn’t gotten to know him well or didn’t care that her high school dropout client was unlikely to appreciate her finds. She carried a lushly illustrated volume of contemporary California artists over to a leather easy chair in the corner, but as evening approached, her concentration faded. It was time to get down to business. Maybe Bram didn’t see the need for the two of them to have a cohesive plan for dealing with the press, but she understood it. They had to decide fairly quickly when and how to handle their reappearance. She put aside her book and set off to track him down. When she couldn’t locate him anywhere, she followed a crushed-gravel path through a stand of bamboo and some tall shrubbery to the guesthouse.

It wasn’t much larger than a two-car garage, with the same red barrel-tiled roof and stucco exterior as the main house. The two front windows were dark, but she heard a phone ringing from the back and followed a narrower path toward the sound. Light spilled through an open set of glass doors onto a small gravel patio that held a pair of lounges with chartreuse canvas cushions and some potted elephant-ear plants. Vines climbed the walls around the open doors. Inside, she saw a homey office with paprika-colored walls and a poured-concrete floor topped with a sea grass rug. A collection of framed movie posters hung on the walls, some predictable like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, but others less so: Johnny Depp in Benny & Joon, Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda, and Meg’s dad, Jake Koranda, as Bird Dog Caliber.

Bram was on the phone as she entered. He sat behind an L-shaped wooden desk painted a dark apricot, an ever-present drink at his side. Built-in bookcases at one end of the office held a stack of the trades, as well as some highbrow film magazines like Cineaste and Fade In. Since she’d never known Bram to read anything more challenging than Penthouse, she tagged them as another of the decorator’s touches.

He didn’t look happy to see her. Tough.

“I’ve got to let you go, Jerry,” he said into the receiver. “I need to get ready for a meeting tomorrow morning. Give my best to Dorie.”

“You have an office?” she said as he hung up.

He hooked his hands behind his neck. “It belonged to the former owner. I haven’t gotten around to converting it into an opium den.”

She spotted something that looked like a copy of the Hollywood Creative Directory near the phone, but he flipped it shut when she tried to get a closer look. “What morning meeting do you have?” she said. “You don’t do meetings. You don’t even do mornings.”

“You’re my meeting.” He nodded toward the phone. “The press discovered we’re not still in Vegas, and the house is staked out. We have to put up a set of gates this week. I’ll let you pay for them.”

“There’s a surprise.”

“You’re the one with the big bucks.”

“Deduct it from the fifty-thousand a month I’m paying you.” She gazed toward the poster of Don Cheadle. “We need to make plans. First thing tomorrow we should-”

“I’m on my honeymoon. No business talk.”

“We have to talk. We need to decide-”