“A jellyfish. Thank you so much.”
“No, not a jellyfish. Those little silver fish you can never catch because they’re too fast. An apt metaphor, I would say, for someone who runs away and chooses work over doing the horizontal boogie with Mr. Come As You Kiss.”
“Ow.” Lauren winced. “I hate when you do that.”
“What, tell the truth?”
“You and Mikki. Between the two of you, I can’t get away with a single thing.”
“My purpose in life is to keep you honest,” Viv said virtuously. “You’ve got to stop doing this, you know.”
“Doing what?”
“Backing away when things get interesting.”
Lauren was beginning to feel a little cornered, but if she showed it, Viv would pounce. “I had to work. Besides, it puts me in control. Leaves him wanting more.”
“Leaves him wondering what the hell happened, you mean. What are you going to do now?”
“I’ll call him, of course.”
“He gave you his number? That’s a step in the right direction.”
“Not exactly.” She’d been so dazed by what they’d done and had had such an attack of second thoughts that she’d dashed off. “I left before I got it.”
“That’s okay. He’s probably in the book.”
“I didn’t get his last name, either.”
Viv raised her eyebrows. “Geesh. And here I thought you were the detail girl. The one with all the sources and resources. The one who follows up her follow-ups. What happened?”
Josh had happened. Like a tsunami or something that had tossed her around and thrown her up on a strange beach, with no footprints on it to guide her.
“I was busy coming,” she said airily. “Besides, he works at Left Coast. I know exactly where they are. How hard can it be to find him?”
MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, Josh didn’t know what to do with an in-between kind of day like Saturday. As a venture capitalist, he’d scheduled them much the same as he might a regular weekday. He’d rent a boat and take a client sailing out of the Santa Cruz yacht harbor, or he’d book a conference room at an airport hotel and catch an Asia-Pacific exec between flights to negotiate funding. Sundays were reserved for family, such as it was. His mother cooked a roast beef on Sundays, with regal disregard for heat and mad cow scares alike. But Saturdays were still a loose end.
He’d come home from the party horny and unsatisfied, but with the same sense of triumph as when he’d inked a deal. Call him kinky, but making lovely Lauren come in public had been one of the high points of his life. He wanted to do it again. Well, maybe they could choose their locations better, but a repeat was definitely on the agenda.
As soon as he could find her.
He couldn’t remember a single day in his life when emotion had gotten in the way of rational behavior. Getting a name and phone number would have been rational. But amid the laughter and noise of Maureen Baxter and her crowd surprising them in the private room, Lauren had taken the opportunity to disappear. And though he’d hung around for an hour afterward, trying to find her, he’d had no success.
Yes, it was clear he was rusty in the romance department. It wasn’t that he hadn’t had his opportunities. In fact, Elena Vargas had made it more than clear that she and her winery had no problem taking him on as a partner in both business and love.
He had thought she was “the one,” and given that relationship his best, but he’d been wrong. Still she had taught him what his limits were. And when it came down to giving all you had only to have a woman as emotionally exhausting as Elena demand more time, more money, more attention, more sex, he’d realized that there had been nothing left for him. After that he’d found himself pulling back when he started to get to know someone better. He’d been briefly interested in one of the developers in a little company that he’d funded, but even though Maddie was smart and fun to be with, it seemed that Elena had sucked out of him all the desire to get close to a woman again.
Until Lauren. He hadn’t felt this sense of excitement and anticipation in a long time. Maybe never.
He stretched in his chair and tilted up his coffee cup, only to find it empty. The fog that shrouded the windows of his condo told him it would be sunny later, but he didn’t mind fog. It helped him focus, and he needed to do that if he planned to put together three thousand words for Left Coast.
He poured the last of the coffee into his mug and rinsed the carafe, dumping the old grounds into the trash. Then he padded back to his desk and the laptop that hummed happily on it.
Buying an interest in the magazine had been easy. Being one of its contributors was not. His managing editor had told him once that part of what made him successful was his voice—a little cynical, a little deadpan, like Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” Readers ate it up, and he was proud of the stories under his byline.
This one was a little different, though, probably because it was turning out to be permeated by a certain long-legged blonde in a black skirt. Oh, he wasn’t telling tales or anything. But the key party was a kind of test case for a pet theory he had about a society with what he thought of as “Social A.D.D.” A society that went for short-term solutions such as speed dating and Internet clubs instead of good, old-fashioned relationships that took a long time to develop.
Right, his inner cynic scoffed. That little interlude with Lauren sure took a long time to develop.
He still could hardly believe he’d done it. Maybe that was why he was thinking about her so much. She’d driven him into behavior that was so unlike him it was almost freeing. And the problem with things that set you free from your own constraints was that sooner or later you landed with a thud.
But he wasn’t going to think about the thud. What he needed to do was to finish up this story, ship it and break out his research skills to find her.
At noon he saved the file up to the magazine’s server in John Garvey’s review folder. His managing editor had a blurry definition of “weekend,” too, and would appreciate having a look at the copy in advance. Then he picked up the phone.
“Garvey.”
“Hey, it’s me. I just put my story on the server.”
“That’s what I like about you, McCrae. You, like me, have no life.”
“I have the perfect life. And it just got better.”
“What? I heard the lottery was up to eight million.”
“Nah, not that. You should have come to Clementine’s last night.”
“Oh, right. A meat market by any other name is still a meat market.”
“It isn’t a meat market. It was a charity function with benefits.”
“And you got some, from the sound of it. I heard they were giving away some nifty prizes. Maureen
