Catch a Falling Star (Second Chances Book 3) (13 page)

He leaned closer, slipping his fingers under her chin to tilt her face up to his. He lowered his lips until he could feel the softness of her breath against them. An electric current of desire ran riot through him.

Just a game. Don’t lose your head
.

Every fiber of him wanted her, for real, for keeps. He let his hand drop over the wool of her sweater, stretching his fingers possessively across her backside and pressing her into his hips. He’d played this scene out a hundred times before with dozens of different women, but not once had he been the one to lose himself to the fantasy.

You don’t deserve her. She’s far too good for you. You’ll bring her down with you
.

Pain radiated through his chest at the thought. He pulled back, pressing his lips into a tight line. Jo’s eyelids were almost completely lowered, the surrender flushing her face far more potent than any drug. She wasn’t acting. He could do anything he wanted to her right now, no matter how depraved, and she would let him. Every bit of power he’d ever lusted after was right there, in his arms, inches away from his lips.

“You must be…hungry,” he hummed, deliberately overdramatic. It was madness to think this was anything other than a game, a great, cosmic joke. He didn’t deserve this sweetness.

Jo blinked, coming to her senses. Confusion flashed through her, followed by a split-second of hurt. It resolved into playfulness, but not before sending a stab of guilt through Ben’s gut. Of all the times and all the people to fall in love with him. Of all the times for him to want to be selfish and take that love and more.

“I am hungry,” Jo murmured. She pulled out of his embrace, stepping to the table with a coy flutter of her lashes. “Spying for billionaires is hungry business.”

Billionaires and spies. Desperate losers and troubled angels. He’d really stepped off the deep end this time.

“Let me help you.” Still in character, Ben moved to the table and held out a chair for her. With a teasing grin, Jo sat. He pushed her chair in, then slipped around the corner of the table and took his seat. “Wine?” He lifted the bottle of red he’d found in a cabinet in the dining room and offered it to her.

“Please.”

Keeping his eyes trained on hers as much as possible, he picked up the corkscrew he’d found earlier and opened the bottle. The cork came out with a satisfying pop. Jo flinched, then grinned, lust and teasing in her eyes. God help him, he was the worst kind of fool for perpetuating this fantasy, but he couldn’t stop.

He picked up her wine glass and poured. An acrid stench wafted out into the glass, along with a few sickening clumps of something black.

“What the hell?” He reeled back, holding the wine glass at arm’s length. They both turned their heads, grunting in disgust, character utterly broken. “What
is
this?”

Jo stood and reached for the bottle, head turned away. She looked at the label, then snorted. “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I still have this. My cousin, Jeremy, went through a wine-making phase and gave this crap to everyone for Christmas. In 1997.”

Ben sputtered into a laugh, holding the back of one hand to his nose and handing the wine glass to her. “Not the kind of thing a billionaire would have in his wine cellar.”

“No,” Jo agreed, laughing. She rushed the bottle and the wineglass to the window on the far side of the room, set them down long enough to open the window, then threw them both outside. “Hopefully it’ll mellow out enough to deal with by the time the snow melts.”

There was no earthly reason Ben should have found the gesture so sexy, but by the time she skipped back over to the table, resumed her seat, and cleared her throat a few times to get back into character, Ben was on fire for her. And happy. He was actually happy.

Jo took a breath, fluffed her hair, resumed her role and said, “Perhaps, Mr. Rockwell, we should forego the eighteen year old bottle in favor of something that will not taste like rotten vinegar.” She leaned her arm on the table, resting her chin against her hand and batted her eyelashes.

It was all Ben could do not to drop to his knees and propose. He sat, mimicking her pose. “Tell me what you want, and it’s yours.” He wasn’t acting.

The flash of worry was back in her eyes. His heart dropped from his throat to his groin to his feet. If he could just conjure the money she needed out of thin air. If he could fill her mind with a thousand story ideas, each better than the next and guaranteed to make her a permanent fixture on every bestseller list. He would cut out his heart and give it to her wrapped in gold leaf if it would make her happy, if he could share that happiness with her. He would do anything to be good enough for her.

She leaned closer, eyes darting to his lips. As he had done before, she paused when they were so close he could drink in her heat. “There’s a new bottle in the pantry, next to the taco shells.”

He fought not to snort with laughter. His cock throbbed so hard that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get up without pain. He wouldn’t be able to stay where he was without pain either. His whole world was pain, and all he wanted to do was kiss her until she laughed and told him everything would be all right.

No, that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted his show, his life back. He wanted the prestige and the power he’d lost. Right?

Her hand cradled his knee under the table, and every conflicted, tortured thought flew out of his head. He had to push to his feet to stop from coming right there. He was wearing her brother’s pants, after all.

That thought did the trick, knocking him off the cloud of lust he’d been ready to float away on. He laughed, using all of the acting skill he didn’t have to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary. “I’ll go get better wine. Sorry about that one.”

“It’s no problem.” She blushed like a girl, the spell broken for her too. “I really should have thrown it out before now. But, hey.” She shrugged, a fresh, clean smile spreading across her lips. “Maybe I can figure out how to use an old, spoiled bottle of wine in this book we’re writing.”

“See,” he replied, starting away from the table. “I told you a little improv would get the juices flowing.”

He dashed out of the room before she could take his words to mean more than they did. His juices would be flowing soon if he wasn’t careful. He ducked into the pantry, grateful that it was next to the mud room and the frigid air outside. If he was smart, he would step outside, scoop up some snow, and stuff it down his trousers so he could make it through the rest of the night in one piece.

Because he knew what his problem was now. It was bigger than his reputation being trampled and his career falling apart. Starlets and socialites who knew what they wanted and knew he could give it to them were one thing. Tender-hearted romance novelists who took his breath away and left him raw and bleeding and glad for it were another. And he wasn’t a big enough pig to seduce a woman for his own sake when her feelings were involved. Or were those his feelings?

Until he sorted out his life, and until she was in a better place with hers, he would be every bit the asshole Broadway thought he was if he so much as kissed Jo again.

Chapter Ten

Jo blew out a frustrated breath and finished the sentence she was typing. It sucked. No two ways about it.

“I can’t do this,” she whispered. She leaned back in her chair, twisting to crack her back, then hunched forward and pounded on the backspace key. It wasn’t working. Nothing was working. Two restless—almost sleepless—nights, and she couldn’t keep a single coherent thought in her head.

Two
restless nights instead of one, because instead of carrying their little improv exercise beyond the dining room and up to the bedroom to let it play out last night, Ben had pulled away. Sure, they’d enjoyed the rest of dinner, giggling as they slurped spaghetti and polished off a bottle of wine. But after that, before nine o’clock, even, Ben had confessed that his head was still pounding from the adventures of his horrible night before, and claimed he needed sleep.

Not tonight, honey. I have a headache.

It was bad enough that she was acting so far out of character that she wanted to have passionate, reckless sex with a man she hardly knew in the first place, but to have him then deny her that crazy, forbidden fruit?

Jo growled and settled her fingers over the keyboard. She shouldn’t be thinking about it. She should be focusing. Four days had passed since her conversation with Diane about branching out, and she had nothing to show for it but a girl-boner that wouldn’t go away. Not a word on the page. Not even about billionaires and spies and spaghetti dinners. She had half a mind to close this document and open up the tried and true historical she’d started before Frost Square had grown cagey about her optioned book. There wasn’t much chance of selling the fifth book in a series to another publisher now, but the lure of the familiar reached out to her. It was comfortable, it was predictable, it was routine. But as much as she loved her routine, she didn’t need the familiar. She needed the new, the exciting.

She needed Ben. Ben, who hadn’t so much as kissed her goodnight last night, let alone carrying her into the living room in front of the roaring fire, sitting her in one of great-grandfather’s vast, wingback chairs and spreading her legs over the chair’s arms so he could—

“Stop it,” she scolded herself out loud. Although she might have to store away the chair idea for another novel.

She pushed away from her desk and stood. It was January, she wasn’t supposed to be this hot. Neither was she supposed to be this bothered. Taxes were just around the corner. The bill from the tree company still sat on the corner of her desk. She needed to work, needed to write, not to spend all day envisioning all the different ways she and Benjamin Paul—scandal-ridden theater director and all-around bad news life-disrupter—could be doing the nasty on her family’s furniture.

If it was going to happen at all, it would have happened last night.

It hadn’t.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she needed to march out to the living room, where Ben was on the phone, fishing for anyone in Manhattan that would still give him the time of day, and demand that he do her until she got him out of her system.

Like that was going to happen.

Doomed. Her career, her house, and her life were doomed because she was horny for a bad boy.

The doorbell sounded, shaking her out of her fit of hyperbole.

“Do you want me to get that?” Ben called from the living room.

Jo sighed. “No, I’ve got it. It’s probably Nick, back from his photo shoot without his keys.” Although why he would use the front door instead of the kitchen door was a mystery.

It wasn’t Nick.

Jo pulled open the front door to find a handsome woman in her fifties wearing a sleek, grey trench coat—every hair on her head perfect, her make-up exact enough for a cosmetics ad—standing beside a large, black suitcase and a smaller silver one. A New York cab idled in the background.

Not another one.

“Josephine Burkhart?” the woman asked. Her voice had the crisp, sharp edge of a razor blade.

“Yes?” Jo replied.

The woman looked her up and down, eyebrows twitching in calculation. “Josephine Burkhart,” she repeated, with an entirely different set of inflections. Her thin lips curved in a smile. “You’re not at all what I expected.”

Footsteps thumped quickly into the hall behind Jo. “Yvonne.” Ben’s voice was a half-octave higher than usual. “I thought you were going to take my things down to Sand Dollar Point.”

The woman, Yvonne, turned to wave to the cabbie. He waved back through his closed window, then backed the car up and started down the driveway.

“Author Josephine,” Yvonne said to Ben.

Jo stepped back and gestured for her to come in out of the cold, which she did hurriedly. Ben had to hop out onto the porch to bring in the suitcases.

“I couldn’t figure out which author Josephine, of course, until I was in your apartment packing your things.” Yvonne glanced from Ben to Jo, then back to Ben with a grin. “I didn’t realize you read romance. So many things make sense now.”

She was sharp, a little too abrasive, and she marched into Jo’s house as if she owned it, but for some unholy reason, Jo instantly liked Yvonne. Even when she unbuttoned and shrugged out of her coat and held it up, as though expecting it to vanish. The woman had balls. Like Jo’s mother.

No, on second thought, her mother would have battled this woman for the spotlight within three seconds of meeting her.

“I’ll take that.” Jo chuckled at the image that thought brought.

“How did you find out where she lived?” Ben asked as Jo hung the coat in the closet.

“Probably the same way you did,” Jo called over her shoulder. She closed the closet door. “You never did explain that, by the way.”

Yvonne blinked at her. “He just showed up at your house?”

“Blind drunk and staggering.” Jo grinned at the mortified expression Ben was trying to rub off his face. “Puked in my bathroom, then I tucked him into bed.”

“Oh, Ben.” Yvonne sighed, shaking her head. “Well, I’m here now, and so are your things.” She paused, rubbing her hands together, and said, “Now. Where is your coffee? Everyone will be here soon, and until the caterers show up, it’ll just be coffee…and whatever treats you might have stashed away.”

“Excuse me?” Jo blinked. Her heart dropped to her knees.

“Yvonne.” Ben crossed his arms, staring at her. “What did you do?”

“Nothing.” She walked further into the house, taking in the hallway and its decorations as she went. “I invited a few people over for supper. Spencer and Tasha and the new baby, and Simon, Jenny, and their little tot. Oh, and Adelaide, and Moira, and Charles Rigley.”

Jo swallowed, her throat not wanting to work. Of all the times to suddenly be throwing a party. She needed to work, needed to write.

“I don’t know if I can host a party right now,” she started, hesitant—no, panicky would be a better word—glancing to Ben.

“She does this,” Ben confessed. “She just…does.”

“But I need to work.” Jo stepped closer to plead with him. “I’m having a hard enough time getting anything done without distraction, and this book—”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Yvonne interrupted, finishing her perusal of the front hall. “I’ve got everything taken care of.”

Jo managed a tight smile, though she had a feeling it smacked of desperation. “It’s only that I’ve got a deadline. And a sort of routine that I stick to. And I’m not used to having people over.”

“Really?” Yvonne gave her a look that was almost offended. “With a house like this, you don’t have people over?”

“Not everyone likes the social scene,” Ben argued for Jo. “I’m not exactly fond of it myself at the moment.” The hint of vulnerability behind his wry words sent a jolt of compassion straight to Jo’s heart. The kind that would rope her into doing anything for him. Like hosting a party of famous people.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Yvonne strode up to Ben, patting his cheek, then walking past him toward the hall and the rest of the house. “These are your true friends. They’ve heard all about the scandal, and they don’t really care. Charles wants to talk to you about a few things, though.”

Ben swallowed, then turned and followed Yvonne down the hall as she helped herself to a tour.

“Who’s Charles?” Jo asked, trailing behind. There didn’t seem to be any point in protesting the inevitable. She mentally ran through the cast of
Second Chances
.

“Charles Rigley,” Yvonne answered. “He’s one of the show’s executive producers.”

“Is he coming here to fire me?” Ben asked, voice loud and harsh enough to make Jo squint.

“No, honey,” Yvonne assured him with a wave of her hand, “But he wants to talk to you about the Times article.”

“Him and probably a dozen other people who I’ve ignored these last couple of days,” Ben grumbled as if talking to himself. “I never should have let you convince me to stay here. Now is not the time for a vacation, even if—” His eyes flickered to Jo, and he was silent.

Yvonne glanced over her shoulder as she swept into the open space of the living room, a sly grin pulling at the corner of her mouth. A moment later, she faced forward and gasped. “Would you look at this?” She slowed her steps as she walked further into the room.

Ben held back until he was at Jo’s side. “I can get rid of her if you want,” he murmured. “Everyone else too, for that matter.”

“It’s okay,” Jo sighed, half laughing, still not adjusted to the surreal situation. And here she thought she was a steady, normal writer whose closest friends were all online. So much for that theory. “I like her.”

“You like her?” Ben balked. “She barged into your house and invited a bunch of people you don’t know over.”

“Yeah.
Famous
people I don’t know. There’s that much, at least.” She rubbed her forehead between her eyes nonetheless. Be nice, be social, make Mom proud.

Ben’s sober look of frustration melted to a fatalistic smile. He shook his head, taking her hand and squeezing it. Jo’s heart caught in her throat. It may have been going down in flames around him, but Ben’s world certainly was interesting. It was like something she might have written about. Maybe if she called this surprise supper “research,” she could justify ignoring work.

Yes, there it was. She forced her shoulders to relax, shook her hands out. This
was
work. This wasn’t shirking her duty or falling behind. There was a story here, if she could find it.

“Did you see this fireplace, Ben?” Yvonne asked, studying one of the photographs on the mantel.

“I’ve been warming myself by it for the past day and a half,” he said. With a covert motion, he slipped his hand to the small of Jo’s back and nudged her over to join Yvonne. One simple gesture, and it had Jo feeling like this was
their
house, not her house.

Of course, if it was
their
house,
they
could probably afford to pay all the bills and keep it around for a while. It couldn’t have been as expensive as Ben’s Manhattan penthouse.

“And the ceiling,” Yvonne went on, spinning as she looked up. “They don’t make them like that anymore.”

“May I show you the view?” Ben dropped his arm from Jo’s back so that he could gesture to the windows, like a docent in a museum.

Yvonne gasped and held a hand to her chest as she completed her turn and stopped to stare out the picture windows. Jo got the distinct impression that few things impressed the woman, but her house had. Forget everything else, that was something to grin over.

“This house,” Yvonne said at length. She blinked at the view one more time before turning back to Jo and Ben. “This house.”

“Yes, I know,” Ben drawled.

“It’s been in the family for four generations.” Jo shifted into her own tour guide mode. She gestured for Yvonne to follow her down the hall. It wasn’t the first time she had shown the house off as if it was an historic building. “My great-grandfather built it in the late nineteenth century with the profits from his glass ventures. He was a huge fan of the Arts and Crafts movement, which was part of the same movement that inspired the Pre-Raphaelites.”

“You don’t say,” Yvonne hummed as they walked down the hall toward the library. She glanced on to Ben. Something in her look had the flash and shine of an award being handed out.

“We’ve done our best to maintain it. I live here full-time, and my brother, Nick, is here off and on. It’s pretty expensive to maintain, though.”

She ushered Yvonne into the library, then stole a glance at Ben. Whatever Yvonne had communicated to him with that last look, he was mulling it over now. Jo had the feeling of being left out of an inside joke. Well, if not a joke, then at least a secret handshake.

When Ben caught her curious stare, he shook his head and stepped closer to reassure her. That in itself said something. For years, Jo had lived and worked behind the walls of this house, pouring everything back into it. Now she had the eerie feeling that her whole life was about to change.

Yvonne’s idea of ‘a few people’ was half the cast of
Second Chances
and a few of the crew members. Yvonne’s idea of ‘catering’ was a high-end feast, delivered from one of the finest restaurants in Portland. Who knew what other ideas Yvonne had up her sleeve?