Calling His Bluff

“Get a grip, girl. You’re just two old friends sitting in front of a fire while drinking some wine.” She brushed a strand of long brown hair behind one ear and smiled at herself in the mirror. “Yeah, he’s an old friend who just happens to be a phenomenally hot man too injured to escape.”

Oh, for crying out loud. Now she was flirting with herself in the bathroom mirror. She shut her eyes, threw every fantasy of seeing Joseph David Damico naked out of her brain, opened her eyes and turned to the open-faced linen closet. The uninstalled door was propped against the wall next to it. Now that she knew he hadn’t changed as much as she’d feared, she saw this place a bit differently, too. It had gone from a barely habitable, starving-artist space to a cool, incomplete renovation. Reaching inside the open closet, she grabbed the first things she found and pulled them on.

“Where is the ex-Mrs. Joey, sorry, J.D. Damico, by the way?” she asked, determined to nail down details about the dreaded ex-wife. “All the lunchtime construction boys at the pub were hoping for her autograph.”

“Lost her in the Amazon,” was his reply, but she decided to wait until she returned to the living area for a translation. This place was like a cavern.

Leaving her own clothes neatly folded on the counter, she flipped off the light and padded back to the couch in her bare feet. She twisted one hand in the loose waistband of the silky running shorts and used the other to yank the wide neck of one of J.D.’s old baseball T-shirts back up her shoulder.

He was still sitting on the couch, two glasses of deep red wine on the table at his knees, watching her walk toward him. Her own gaze bounced around the room so she wouldn’t have to look directly at him. Even though only her legs and arms were bare, she felt like she was naked and under a spotlight. She was extraordinarily self-conscious about wearing his clothes, the scent of his laundry detergent rising all around her, the slippery nylon sliding between her bare thighs.

“That’s a nice look for you, Sarah Bearah.”

The childhood nickname had an unfortunate effect on her maturity level. She stuck out her tongue at him.

That’s twice now. What are you, twelve?

When she reached the couch, he patted the cushion next to him.

She didn’t even need her mind to protest, “Bad idea!” She was already sinking to the floor next to the couch. She patted the cushion herself. “Throw your gimpy leg on up there. You know you want to.” With a groan, he stretched out, leaving her face a less-than-comfortable twelve inches from his lap. She scooted a little closer to the head of the couch, and he pulled a pillow from beneath his head and tossed it to her.

“You’re so right. Sit on this.”

“Thanks.” She scooched the pillow under her butt and propped her arm on the couch. Manageable. Closer to his face, which was distracting, but much less so than his crotch, which would have made coherent, non-blushing, non-stammering conversation absolutely impossible. “Your ex-wife’s lost where?”

He grimaced as he handed one of the glasses of wine to her.

“She’s not lost. In fact, I guess you’d say she found herself.” He took a swallow of his wine and stared at the glass. “What I said was that I lost her in the Amazon. That’s where we broke up. She was filming, of course, and I was working on the scrapbook for the movie.”

Sarah snorted into her own glass at his use of the casual term. J.D.’s “scrapbooks” as he called them had started out as a private project and become all the rage, first with the filmmakers in Hollywood and then with the general public. The first scrapbook had been a gift for his friend, Ben, the director of a small but beautiful documentary about a Hollywood legend’s relationship with his daughter, who directed him in her first independent film. The documentary had explored the intense relationship between father and daughter, actor and director, during the shooting of the film. J.D.’s photos had captured slivers of private time away from the cameras, intimate moments with the cast and crew that made you feel like you’d been allowed to peek through a window on the set.

“I love that you call them scrapbooks,” she admitted and looked up at him. He had his head propped on one hand and was staring at her with unwavering dark eyes. “That makes it sound a little less like celebrity gawking when I buy one.”

His grin and chuckle had her stomach doing tiny flip-flops. Her cheeks felt like they were on fire, though she decided she’d blame that one on the heat of the room.

“It was pure hero worship for me when I did that first one. I don’t think I’d ever admitted to anyone, myself included, that I wanted to be a photographer until I started working on that documentary, even though I made my parents pay for all those classes when I was a kid. But I’d been watching him in the movies my whole life.” He rolled his shoulders back and looked up at the ceiling. “He was always the good guy, you know? Even when he was playing an outlaw.” She saw his cheeks lift in a faint smile at the old memories. “I asked his permission the first time I took his picture. He laughed at that. The man has twenty cameras on him when he takes the trash out.”

“That was the picture on the cover, right? It’s a beautiful shot.” And it was. He’d captured the older actor leaning against the rough bark of an oak tree. You could tell from the tension in his face and the angle of his hips that he was in some physical pain. But his head was turned slightly away from the camera, as if someone had just called his name, and his shoulders were thrust back as if he was ready to step forward and shoulder the mantle of his role once more. “It shows that he’s still the good guy.”

“Yeah, he is. He’s the whole reason I have a career now. Him and Ben.” J.D.’s attention shifted back to her. He wrapped his fingers around the neck of the wine bottle and ignored her protests as he splashed more cabernet into her glass. Droplets of red wine puddled on the back of her hand where she’d tried to shield her glass. She licked the rich berry wine off her skin and rubbed her hand against her warm thigh to dry it.

“What do you mean?” she asked when he didn’t pick up the thread of their conversation.

J.D. seemed to have lost his train of thought. He was staring blankly at her mouth. When he blinked and lifted his eyes back to meet hers, she saw him reconnect with the conversation.

“He saw the book I’d made for Ben, my director friend, and he asked if I’d make him a couple dozen more so that he could give them as gifts to his daughter and some of the crew. Someone showed it to the director of this historical film that was being shot, and he called me.” He shrugged. “Everything else just fell into place.”

“And how did this lead to you losing your wife during filming in the Amazon?”

She stretched her arms over her head and recrossed her legs, seeing J.D.’s gaze wander again as his T-shirt rode up above the sagging waistband of his silky shorts on her hips. So she was watching as his eyes widened and his mouth fell open.

“Sarah. Tyler. Is that a tattoo?”

Shit. Talk about a reason to blush. She loved the delicate scrollwork of the old-fashioned ace of hearts playing card that rode her hip, invisible unless she was wearing a skimpy swimsuit.

Or saggy shorts.

But a tattoo was so not what people expected from her. It was just one little secret thing she’d done for herself, a reminder of a side of her personality that she kept hidden from almost everyone. But making a big deal about it would only intensify J.D.’s curiosity. And right now it was her curiosity that needed to be satisfied.

“Duh. A million people have them, Damico.” She tugged the hem of his T-shirt back down and hoped her casual dismissal would put him off. “The lost wife?”

He tore his gaze away from her waist.

“I thought the director told me it would be the chance of my life. Turns out I should have heard, ‘I want a chance at your wife.’ Lana’s part was a small one, but I was happy that we’d be working together for the first time.”

“And the director cast your wife just to get her to come to the Amazon with you and then hit on her?” Her mouth dropped open. “I mean, I know the movie business is supposed to be sleazy, but come on. Yuck.”

“To be fair, I don’t think the director even knew we were married. Lana and I didn’t exactly bring anyone to Vegas with us for the wedding. It was pretty spontaneous.”

“Okay, but surely everyone on set knew the two of you were together.”

“Not exactly.” He sat up abruptly and grabbed the thigh of his uninjured leg with one hand, kneading it. “Sorry. I get muscle cramps now that I’m using this leg so much.” He set down his wine glass and bent forward to massage his leg with both hands. “It was only Lana’s second role, and she didn’t want people to think she expected any special treatment just because she was married to a hotshot Hollywood photographer. She’s pretty cool like that. So she asked me not to let anyone know we were married.”

He winced again, and before she gave any thought to what she was doing, she waved at him to sit back and rest and started to knead the hard knot out of his thigh.

Talk about whoops.

His flesh was warm beneath her hands, almost hot, even through the thick cloth of his sweatpants. She could feel the long ridge of his quadriceps muscle flexing beneath her fingers as she applied pressure to the knot.

Right. Keep talking.

What had they been talking about?

The super cool ex-wife. Right.

“So, you, ah, fell for that one, huh?”

“Thanks. Yeah,” he sighed and leaned back against the arm of the couch. “Well, she was spending all of her free time in the director’s trailer between takes, but I figured what was the harm?”

“What was the harm?” she repeated in disbelief. She quit the massage and smacked him on the kneecap. “Is there something in the water down there that made you stupid?”

“The director’s name is Jane.”

“Ah.” She stared at him, struggling to keep her face expressionless. “I see.”

“Live and learn.”

A heartbeat more and she couldn’t help it. The giggles just spilled up and out of her throat until she had to cover her face, because each time she glanced at J.D. he just looked more offended.

“I’m sorry,” she said and snorted as she tried to stop laughing. “It’s not funny.”

“Funny? No.” But his eyes were crinkling up at the corners and he shook his head as he started to smile too. “Ridiculous? Just a little bit.”

“Poor J.D.” She smiled and hugged his knees sympathetically. “That must have been pretty painful, your wife sleeping with the director.”

“It was.” He toasted her with his wine glass. “Not quite as painful as when I walked in on them in our trailer, and then tripped as I was storming out. That’s how I got this.” He rapped his knuckles against the cast.

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. And even that didn’t hurt as much as finding out my leg hadn’t been set properly, so it needed to be rebroken and reset unless I wanted a permanent limp.”

“Ouch. Again.”

“Yeah, it’s frigging raining bad luck over here.”

She swigged back a healthy gulp of wine as empathetic shudders made her neck crawl. “I would’ve kept the limp.”

“Thought about it. And even though the cast comes off in a couple days, it’ll be weeks of physical therapy before I’m sure I won’t have one. But it did have one good side effect.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“By the time I was done cursing all doctors, both north and south of the border, I wasn’t that pissed off at Lana anymore. Maybe she broke my heart, but at least she only did it once.”

“Cheers to that,” she said and leaned forward to clink glasses with him, although she would have been happier to hear that he despised his ex and never wanted to hear her name spoken aloud again.

J.D. snagged her hand when she went to sit back. Braceleting her wrist with his thumb and forefinger, he rubbed the rest of his fingers against the skin of her arm.

“Enough about my drama. What about you? How’s your love life these days?”

She tugged against his grip, but he didn’t let go.

“Me? Oh, no. I’m off men completely.”

“You too?” He pulled her toward him, and since she was tired of leaning forward, she slid off the pillow and eased closer to him. “And here I was just thinking of asking you to climb on top of me.”

“Shut up,” she scoffed and reminded herself that he’d always teased her like this.

Okay, maybe there’d been a little less sexual tension when she was twelve.

Maybe a lot less.

“I am not climbing on top of anyone these days. Male or female,” she added in response to the speculative glint in his eyes. “I am officially a no-climbing zone.”

“Come on, Sarah Bearah—” he winked at her “—Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like?” He flipped her palm over and pressed his lips to the crease at the base of her thumb. She felt the warmth of his breath float over her skin and wondered if teasing shouldn’t be outlawed even if both people were old enough for consensual sex.

Ever wondered? It felt like she’d spent far too many years of her life wondering.

The breath she’d inhaled what felt like an hour ago burst out of her in a huff. She shook herself awake from what was essentially a sexual daydream. Time to put a halt to this little game.

Before she could open her mouth to say a word, a piercing ring blasted from a phone across the room, followed almost immediately by a click and a recorded message. A voice like maple syrup poured into the room after a loud beep.

“Sugar, I got your message. Now, get off your high horse and call me so I can say I’m sorry about Jane, okay? I didn’t fly to Chicago for my health. And are you seriously planning on staying here? It’s like two polar bears crapped a giant frozen poo and they built a city on it. I’m so cold my teeth are chattering. Right. So, that judge you saw in the Dominican Republic? He’s not, in fact, a member of the legal profession. So, you know, teensy problemo. And since we gotta deal with that, I wanted to talk to you about Ben’s new project, too. There’s a role that’s perfect for me, and you know he’ll do anything for you.” The slow sugar drawl dropped to a new level of husky. “Just like me, baby. Call me, husband.”

The last drawled word seemed to echo through the open warehouse space.

Holy. Shit. She was holding goddamn hands with Joey Damico, at last, and he. Was. Married.

Of course he was. And to a woman who talked like a frigging porn star. Way to make a regular woman feel inadequate.

“She’s such a drama queen.” J.D. squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, but he was sort of grinning with one side of his mouth, like he was more exasperated than angry. She realized that he was still holding her wrist in his hand. His fingers began to move against her pulse, which jumped like a rabbit as heat pooled in her belly. Still, her brain locked onto that one word—married—like a heat-seeking missile. “Where were we?”

She tilted her head down and gave him a stern look from beneath lowered brows. “Stop it. You’re a married man. Maybe.”

“I’m really not. Lana’s sweet—morally challenged but sweet—and the ins and outs of the Dominican legal system aren’t her strong point. She doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about.”

When his fingers stroked higher on her arm to the sensitive skin inside her elbow, she broke out the big guns, “Stop teasing, or I’ll get my big brother to beat you up.”

“Hmm.” After a moment, he let go of her wrist with a rueful grin. She scooted back a bit, needing a little breathing room. On second thought, she leaned forward and grabbed the wine bottle.

“Tyler would actually kick my ass, wouldn’t he?”

“That’s right,” she said and nodded as she poured. More wine might not be a good idea, but she’d never been this thirsty in her life. Still, she stopped at half a glass.

“Ah, well. Maybe next time.”

She could have tossed the wine all over him when he winked at her and sat back as if it was no big deal. When she opened her mouth and the words she was thinking rolled right out, she realized that any wine, in fact, might have been too much while sitting half-dressed on the floor next to the man on whom she’d had a massive crush for most of her formative years. One who’d left town, married some wannabe starlet, and hadn’t even had the courtesy to get a real divorce.

“I wouldn’t sleep with you for all the yen in China. Or Japan. Or wherever, Joey Damico. You were the first in a long string of guys to steal my heart and hand it back to me in pieces.” She shook a finger at him. “And since you started the trend, I figure you should get the blame for every jerk and jackass who followed.”

“Me?” The shock on his face looked genuine but she refused to feel sorry for him. “What did I do?”

She pushed her head forward and stared him down, but his look of confusion didn’t even hint at any guilt.

“What?”

“You kissed me,” she enunciated with precision, just in case his hearing was as defective as his conscience, “and then five minutes later you were making out with Jessica Blackwell in the bathtub.”

“I never—when?” he demanded, swinging his legs over her head and dropping his feet on the floor by her side with a thud. He set his wine glass on the end table and turned back to her. “When did I kiss you, and who’s Jessica Blackwell?”

The last three words did nothing to improve her impression of him. She waited for him to remember.

After a minute of their glaring at each other, it became clear that that was not going to happen.

With pleasure, she enlightened him.

“July, 1995.”

“July ninety-five…” His forehead wrinkled and then smoothed as she saw the memory return to him. She sat up straighter and waited for his apology. It had been a long time coming.

“But you were only, what? Twelve!”

She could hear from the disbelief in his voice that she’d be waiting for that apology forever.

J.D. ran his fingers through his hair, dislodging a few loose strands that fell against his chin as he shook his head.

“You were twelve, and I was saving you from kissing Tad Kipling, who I believe you referred to as ‘that sweaty-palmed toad from square-dancing class.’ You kids were playing spin the bottle in your mom’s basement and I pretended the bottle was pointing at me when I came downstairs to check on you, because I could see you squinching up your face at the thought of kissing him. I rescued you!”

She had forgotten. He was a man, and men never understood anything.

“You kissed me, and then two minutes later you were sucking face with Jessica Blackwell!”

Apparently she’d lost all control over both her brain and her mouth.

“Let me repeat. You were twelve. I was fifteen. Jessica Blackwell was sixteen. She had her own car and wore a 36D bra.” He nipped the wine glass out of her fingers before she could throw it at him. “I’m sorry, honey, but you never stood a chance.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” she muttered and threw herself down onto the concrete floor so that she could stare morosely at the far-off ceiling. “I was twelve. Don’t expect rationality from a preteen.”

A light flashed.

She propped herself up on her elbows and glared at him as he dropped a camera into his lap. When did he bring that out?

“Hey! Don’t take my picture when I’m pouting. Jackass.”

He smiled at her and she felt herself blush. Damn it.

“Sorry. If it’ll help, I apologize for handing your heart back to you in pieces. In my own defense, I have to say that I wasn’t aware that I had it.”

“Yeah, you’re forgiven. I got over it in my twenties.” She waved a hand in his general direction. “I’m thirty-one. Old enough to know that the kiss wasn’t that good.”

She rolled onto her side, ready to laugh at the end of a good joke, the same way he’d done earlier after pretending to hit on her. Of course, she knew she was kidding herself when she called it joking. A part of her still felt like that twelve-year-old girl watching her crush drive off with the beautiful blonde girl who had the car and the boobs.

She smiled at her own foolishness and was about to sit up when two glowing gold eyes flashed out at her from beneath the couch.

“Hey,” she lowered her head back to the floor, “there’s a cat under here.” When she popped back up, J.D. was looking at her with raised eyebrows. Suddenly she remembered why she’d shown up on his isolated doorstep in the first place. “Right, you have a sick cat. What’s wrong with kitty?” She ducked back down to peer under the couch.

“I can’t believe you’re a vet, by the way. You couldn’t stand the sight of a bloody skinned knee when we were kids.”

“Yet another thing I got over,” she said and snapped her fingers at him. “The cat, J.D.?”

“How should I know what’s wrong with the stupid thing? It’s been under the couch ever since it walked in off the street a few days ago. The only time it came out was when it got cold in here. I found it sleeping in the ashes of the fireplace, so I stoked up the fire, cranked the heat up to eighty, and I’ve been sweating my ass off for two days while it hides out.”

Half an hour and two cans of tuna later, she had the cat in her lap, willing to trust her for the moment. She ran her hands over its body and looked up with a grin.

“Congratulations, J.D. You’re gonna be a daddy.”

Over his protests that he “couldn’t have a cat let alone kittens,” she explained that she’d send someone over with more food and some special vitamins the following morning. Meanwhile, she changed back into her suit and gathered up her things, having decided that it was definitely time for her to get going. She left him with some last-minute instructions.

“Keep her warm. That was a good idea. Give her all the tuna she wants tonight and refill the dish of water I put out if she finishes it. And J.D.?” She stopped at the door and turned back to look at him. He was standing in the middle of the room, leaning on his crutches, backlit again by the glow of the fire. Even now, with muscles that weren’t there when he was a teenager and longer, straighter hair that was still escaping from the blunt ponytail, there was no mistaking the graceful and supremely controlled kid she’d watched and wanted for years.

“Yes, Dr. Evil?”

“Better find something to call her instead of ‘stupid cat.’ She’s yours now.”

She stepped outside into the frigid March air and headed toward where her Jeep was parked at the curb, leaving him to muscle the door shut behind her. Plastic bags and old newsprint pages blew past her ankles in the winter wind.

“Hey Sarah.”

He was standing in the doorway, one hand outstretched as if to hand her something she’d left behind. She opened the car door and slung her bag into the backseat before jogging back up to the building.

“What, did I forget some—”

He grabbed the collar of her coat and yanked her up against him, his other arm a tight band across her lower back, pressing her hips into his. She thought she’d go cross-eyed as he bent down toward her, his mouth a hairsbreadth from hers. She could smell the cabernet on his breath and felt the warmth of it feather over her.

“I didn’t want you to go off thinking you’d had my best effort at kissing all those years ago.”

Then he lowered his mouth to hers and she closed her eyes as J.D. kissed her for the second time since she was twelve years old.

Chapter Two

Two weeks later, she was still feeling that kiss. She’d nearly rear-ended a canary-yellow VW Bug at a stop sign because she was daydreaming about the taste of his mouth.

It wasn’t fair.

She’d been waiting her whole life for someone to match the slow roll and tumble in her stomach that she’d felt when she was twelve and her brother’s best friend kissed her on the lips.