I wondered if you would ask him to call me? I met a producer who knows that I rep you, and he asked me about the possibility of getting Romero to play himself in a docudrama about his old band, Jinxed.”
Shannon dropped the bandage she’d found, the white wrapper slipping back into the uncharted depths of a purse filled with everything from her BlackBerry to a twelve-piece makeup brush set. Shannon’s current career choices consisted of a sleazy independent film about her actress mother’s life or a role on the smalltime theater circuit off Broadway, yet Romero didn’t even need to pursue acting to find film roles.
“You want me to ask him?” Shannon couldn’t help a quick mental image of herself pouring a pound of salt in the gaping wound of her chest. And, yeah, a bit of her ego smarted here, too. “Our careers became a bit of a sore subject for us, Ceily.”
Part of it was because they couldn’t find the right balance of work and romance. Part of it was because she struggled to get ahead in her job while everything Romero touched turned to gold.
Or maybe that’s just how she felt every time he touched her. Fortunate. Fantastic. Priceless.
And, oh, God, she couldn’t stand the thought of him touching another woman when he’d been her man just three short months ago. From his killer dark eyes to the shoulder-length, silky black waves that would have done an eighties hair band proud, Romero was seriously hot. Even better, he wrote music that was soul deep and complex. His lyrics had seduced her long before the rest of him did.
“If you talk him into it, I’ll slide you a finder’s fee,” Ceily offered while Shannon stared up at the tiled ceiling where a heavy mahogany ceiling fan spun on low speed.
Great. And Shannon could have a bit part in the “babes he’d banged” section of the docudrama. She yanked the headset off her ears to give it a shake.
“Given the way we broke up, I think I’m the last person he’ll want to talk to about his career.” There was a chance she’d been a smidge unreasonable about it in that final fight, telling him he always put his guitar before her. But she’d tried so hard to fit into his life for so long that all the frustrations she’d been stuffing down had bubbled up like red-hot, angry lava. “But for you, I’ll at least mention it.”
“Excellent. And from my memories of the two of you together, I’ll bet he pays more attention to you than you realize.” Ceily sighed with the dreaminess of someone who’d only seen the Shannon and Romero relationship from the outside. They’d fooled a lot of people into thinking they were wildly in love before the bottom fell out of a charade Shannon had nursed along out of pure wishful thinking.
She said goodbye to Ceily before hitting the disconnect button.
Ceily’s false impression of Romero still caring tweaked Shannon’s heart more than she would have liked after this long time apart from the man. And, coming on the heels of the sexual symphony in progress around her, the conversation hadn’t exactly improved Shannon’s mood. She’d really thought Romero could be the one, yet he’d looked as if the breakup was no big deal to him when he’d soaked up feminine admiration and the La Paz sunshine yesterday. He’d never given her reason to be jealous in the past, but she wasn’t foolish enough to think he hadn’t moved on. Women had always—would always—throw themselves at him.
Flopping down onto the pillow-top mattress with her hair wrapped in a towel full of deep conditioner, Shannon squeezed her eyes shut tight and prayed for the next twenty-four hours to be over with as fast as possible. Romero had told her to meet him at ten that morning, but she would be ready to leave in five minutes.
She just wanted to get back home so she could officially end this chapter of her life. Once she moved to New York, she would put her movie career and her too-sexy ex behind her for good.
“CAN’T YOU GO ANY FASTER?”
Romero Jinks tightened his grip on the steering wheel at his ex-girlfriend’s latest request, in a litany that had started at nine o’clock that morning with a wake-up call asking him when he’d be ready to leave.
Who woke up at nine after a wedding reception that had lasted into the wee hours of the morning? But that was Shannon. An early bird, a night owl, and all around too much energy for him to keep up with. At thirty years old, she seemed impossibly young to him even though they were only eight years apart. Blond, blue-eyed and built like a fifties pinup girl, she was too sexy by half, but that was only a fraction of her appeal. He’d been drawn by her energy and enthusiasm when they’d first met. She’d been a spark to his creativity and his life, pulling him out of a long writing drought with her vibrancy. He’d been crazy about her until she’d blindsided him with a wealth of frustrations about their relationship, culminating in the stupidest argument he’d ever been a part of.
How many women picked a fight because their guy failed to purchase a pair of hiking boots for her? When he’d offered for them to spend some time apart until she cooled down, she’d promptly pulled his clothes out of the closet and boxed up everything he owned in an all-night packing craze. After almost a year together, she’d created a drama the whole neighborhood had witnessed as she’d methodically carried the crates out to the curb.
“I’m not going any faster.” Romero checked the speedometer and slowed down—not to purposely piss her off, but because he was already doing eighty miles an hour up the Baja Peninsula to reach the California state line as soon as he could. The last thing he wanted was to extend their time in Mexico with a stint in a stink-hole prison cell.
They’d passed the last town, Insurgentes, long ago in the hunt for a shortcut home. He was seriously tearing up his new car driving this fast on pavement that hadn’t seen a road crew in a decade.
A small price to pay if it shortened the trip. Only a few more hours to go and they could split for good. No more saccharine sweet Valentine weddings to trap them back into pseudocouplehood. Playing the best man to her maid of honor, dancing that requisite dance with the woman who’d once meant everything to him, had been exquisite torture to a nerve that hadn’t fully healed.
Of course, he couldn’t blame this trip on anyone but himself, since he’d scrambled to offer her a ride when her flight had been canceled. He’d seen a chance to salvage her pride, knowing damn well her finances wouldn’t support a last-minute ticket out of Mexico. At least not easily. Shannon had tried to hide her dwindling movie prospects from him, but he knew the last couple of parts she’d taken weren’t worthy of her talents.
“Would you like me to drive?” She peered across the console of his new BMW coupe, a vehicle he’d picked up shortly before the Mexico trip. He’d ordered it months ago, thinking it would be fun to have for a trip up the coast to celebrate his first-year anniversary with Shannon.
An anniversary that never happened, thanks to her decision to launch World War Three. He’d postponed picking up the car, considering it now represented his failure. He’d been too blind to see what Shannon was feeling until she’d spelled it out in angry detail after it was too late.
“No, thanks.” He figured the less said, the better. That strategy wouldn’t make the time pass any quicker, though.
“What did you think of the ceremony?” she asked, her fingers clutching the silver Celtic knot on a chain around her neck and raking the pendant back and forth across the tiny links.
She looked incredible in her tight jeans and purple satin shoes with high heels that just barely brought her to five foot eight. She wore a lavender cotton tank top with an ivory satin blazer that had big purple rhinestone buttons in the shape
