The Care and Feeding of Unmarried Men (11 page)

M
iddle age sucks,
Charlie thought, staring at the television screen and trying to ignore the throbbing bass line that was his face. The damn thing seemed to start up drum practice the same minute the moon came up.

That explained why he was in a bad mood and had been in a bad mood nearly to the day since he'd moved into the Kona Kai while recuperating from his face-lift. When he was healed, he'd be better.

Back to his old self.

Shit. The thing was, “old” was the operative word. He had to face facts: He'd never be better. Plastic surgery could only do so much. His knees would still crunch when he squatted to tie his shoes. Too many hairs would show up on his pillow every morning. At his Hollywood rec league basketball games, he couldn't
stop his buddy and agent, Larry, from going baseline any more.

Middle age
really
sucks,
he thought, flipping the channel selector on the remote. His thumb quickly clicked past an old movie he recognized from the late 1980s.
Honey Hunt
was a classic guy movie, heavy with sophomoric humor, gratuitous nudity, and a loud rock score. The inflatable breasts on the women who traipsed through its scenes could have been used to raise a shipwreck.

The piece of crap had banked 39 million gross in U.S. box office sales and made Mack Chandler a household name.

Sometimes Charlie despised Mack Chandler. While the movie star was the source of Charlie's own wealth, it was the demands of Mack's career that had led Charlie to Dr. Ajmil Singh, a reputed wizard with a scalpel. “I'll take a decade plus off your face,” the surgeon had promised.

But though you could erase the age from a man's expression, you couldn't erase it from his body or his mind or his heart.

Charlie was getting too damn old for this business.

He flipped the channels again, past an old rerun of his friend Tom in a
Bosom Buddies
episode and then to one of Bruce's
Die Hards.
Willis shaved his balding head now. With his free hand, Charlie ruffled his hair, wincing when even that gentle action made his healing sutures twinge. At least there was still plenty there to run his fingers through. He could spare the world a Kojack 'do for a few years yet.

With luck, by the time he had more hair coming out of his ears than remained on his head, he'd be long retired to his ranch in Montana. Hell, if he wanted, he
could get out of the business today. God knows he could afford it. He had more money than Harrison Ford and everyone knew Harrison Ford had more money than God. Charlie could walk away this moment and leave the field open to all the slick youngsters who were still secretly thrilled every time they were photographed—cuffs of dress shirt stylishly unfastened—strolling through a field of paparazzi beside six feet of skinny legs and implants who smelled like cigarettes and hair spray and whom they'd met a mere ten minutes before.

Maybe that was the answer. Chalk up the face-lift as a final stupid mistake and then make a few phone calls to clear his schedule for good. Back in Montana, he could use real high-country snow instead of ice packs of cocktail cubes to ease his aching face.

Yeah, that's just what I'll do,
Charlie decided. That was the solution to his problems. The old guy was going to give up the game.

He dropped the remote and rose from the couch to locate his cell and call Larry. And then, from outside his bungalow, he heard the scrape of chair legs against concrete.

“Damn,” he murmured to himself. “Jemima.” Back from her party. Apparently sleepless. Again. It was how they'd struck up their acquaintance, through their mutual insomnia. First it had been just an occasional comment or two through the wooden partition that separated their private patios. Then he'd invited her over for a game of gin rummy one night, and from there they'd developed a…friendship of sorts. Now when she couldn't sleep, she'd just as often choose to stretch out on his lounge furniture as her own.

When that happened, he'd never failed to join her.

But tonight…tonight he dropped back down on the couch, his gaze flicking toward the nearby sliding glass doors to ensure the curtains were completely covering them. Jemima couldn't see in, Charlie couldn't see her. Good. Because tonight, his ass was going to stay glued to the cushions. Jemima was just something else it was time to give up.

Over the past weeks he'd enjoyed her company too much. His near-jealous reaction to her confession about having the “hots” for Mack Chandler proved that.

He focused his attention on the TV and resumed surfing through the channels. Celebrity poker, one of the four dozen incarnations of
Law & Order
,
South Park
's Kenny dying yet again. Nothing captured his attention, at least not enough to stop him from thinking of Jemima Cargill reclining on the lounge chair on his patio. He wasn't going out there, but he could see her as if he had, he could see her pale skin in the moonlight, baby-clear and baby-soft, her big eyes darker and deeper than the desert night.

Gritting his teeth, he thumbed to the next channel. On the screen, a boomer-dude trying to throw a football through a tire. Thunk.

Great,
Charlie thought. Something else he had to look forward to—erectile dysfunction. Maybe if things got too quiet in Montana he'd come out of retirement to do a Bob Dole or a Mike Ditka. Just another spokes-oldie for ED.

Damn, that idea was depressing. His gaze wandered toward the glass doors again, but he forced it back to the TV. Getting old sucked, but hanging with
twenty-nothing Jemima wouldn't stop the hands of time either. She didn't need his midlife crisis in her young-thing, rising-star world.

Then he heard a quiet sob.

The sound froze him. But it didn't come again, meaning he must have imagined it. Despite that, he muted the television sound, in silence watching the boomer-dude—thanks to a medical miracle you should ask your doctor about—now throwing touchdowns through that hanging tire. Jesus, could the pharmaceutical company get any more obvious with their imagery? Even
Honey Hunt
had thirty seconds' more subtlety than this.

Then he heard it again. Another choked-back noise. Jemima. Jemima crying.

As the trademark Levitra flame flared, he grabbed up his hat, sunglasses, and scarf and was out the sliding glass doors.

“What's the matter?” he demanded, staring at her through dark lenses from the foot of her lounge chair.

Her head lifted. “What?”

He remembered to add an Aussie inflection. “What happened at that party? Why are you crying?”

A pleased smile broke across her pretty, young face. “That sounded real?”

Charlie closed his eyes. “You're acting?”

“I was practicing. But I thought you were asleep. I'm sorry if I bothered you.”

You're always bothering me. Your pretty smile and pretty hair and pretty laugh. Your baby face and your sometimes cynical attitude.
“I was just going to bed.”

She tilted her head. “That's good to hear, Charlie,” she said, her voice soft. “You need your rest.”

“Because I'm an old man?” It came out more bitter than he intended.

“That's not what I said.”

“Mack Chandler is old too, you know. Too old to be playing your love interest, if you ask me.” Costarring with an actress less than half his age would make Chandler look like a fool.

Certainly the women he'd acted with during the last twenty years would see that. Likely they'd send Chandler hate mail for landing a leading role in a love story when they were now relegated to stage plays or mother-in-law parts. But Mack Chandler would pay for the privilege by being the butt of late-night jokes. Playing a much younger woman's lover was the punch line of a Leno monologue if Charlie had ever heard one.

So? Chandler would deserve it.

“You were right, by the way,” she said. “Mack Chandler wasn't at the party tonight.”

“I'm a goddamn psychic.”

“Maybe so.”

“I'm sure you found some young stud to dance with you anyway,” Charlie muttered, taking in Jemima's dress, a pretty thing in a color that matched her cast. Gauzy. It looked vintage, maybe.

Shit. Vintage, like him.

“I didn't dance, but I did think about the film.”

After Jemima took the role to Oscar level, Charlie would be in Montana, his satellite dish pulling in the Academy Awards ceremony, and as he watched her on his big-screen TV he would feel…

As if he'd done the right thing.

No regrets, no looking back. He'd decided retiring
was the prescription for his bad, middle-aged mood, and he was going to swallow it down.

“I'm thinking about quitting,” Jemima said.

Charlie stared. “What did you say?”

“Mack Chandler—”

“Is an egotistical has-been.”

“—cares more about this movie, this business than I do. I'm thinking of leaving it to him.”

Wasn't the aging process a vicious thing? Now his hearing was going. “What did you say?”

“I'm pretty certain I'm going to quit.”

“This film?”

Jemima shook her head. “The business.”

He dropped to the end of her lounge chair, her small bare feet just inches away from his thighs. He put his hand over her cold toes. “What the hell are you talking about?”

She shivered, and he gentled his voice. “Jemima, I don't understand.”

“This is not what I want.”

Thinking she meant his touch, he jerked his fingers away. “Sorry—”

“No! I don't mean you. You, I want…I mean…I don't…” Her voice trailed off, and though he couldn't detect a blush through his sunglasses, he could feel her embarrassment in the air.

He drew her feet onto his lap and curled his big hands around them. She gave a tiny flinch, but he continued to hold them, warm them. “What's going on, Jem? A minute ago you were practicing your tears and now you're talking about quitting.”

“Okay, I admit I'm confused. About a lot of things. But I never chose this profession. My mother took me to auditions before I could talk or walk. She managed
my career, she managed
me.
In interviews she says it was my ambitions she supported, but a nine-month-old doesn't have ambitions, a nineteen-month-old doesn't, a nine-year-old doesn't have an ambition to not go to regular school, to not play with regular kids, to not
be
regular.”

“But…you're good. You know that you're better than good at acting.”

She shrugged delicate shoulders that glowed like pearls in the darkness. “It seems to me I'm good at being something I'm not, Charlie. But now that my mother is looking the other way for the first time in twenty years, perhaps I should do what I want instead.”

Did that really mean quitting the film? Charlie felt an upsurge of optimism that he hadn't experienced in weeks. With Jemima out of the picture—literally—he could go back to Hollywood. For some reason he didn't want to think about, it wouldn't bother him to go back to the business if it meant no potential run-ins with Jemima.

He could forget about this hellish slide toward middle age.

Though he loved his place in Montana and could imagine himself happy there for the rest of his life, it would seem so lonely now. No friends…no Jem…

So back in Hollywood, his forty-something body now wearing his former thirty-something face, he'd also be back to those good ol' days when his only future plan was the next party and his only worry was remembering said party's address.

“Aren't you going to ask me what it is I want, Charlie?”

His head turned toward Jemima. She was sitting up now, her silky hair tousled about her bare shoulders,
the cut of her dress just revealing the slightest hint of young, unenhanced breasts. She looked fresh and near-ripe and untouchable, all at the same time.

And maybe he wasn't so old after all, because his body reacted to the sight in a way that made Viagra, Levitra, and Cialis completely unnecessary. He decided this was stupendous news. Hurray. Hoo-wah. It showed he was still young. It meant middle-age crisis was just a term made up to sell magazines and self-help books.

His mood had been just a temporary, very temporary, aberration. And though her lithe body was turning him on, his interest in Jemima herself had been a temporary aberration too. Any second it would go away.

Beneath his scarf, he smiled at her in great relief. “What is it you want?”

She leaned closer. Thinking she wanted to whisper it to him, he leaned toward her, too.

“This,” she said, and then her mouth found his, right over the thin covering of the silk scarf he wore.

Stunned, Charlie didn't bolt away. He meant to. He should have. Instead, his hands left her bare feet to cover her bare shoulders. They gripped her, hard, in preparation for pushing her away.

But he didn't do that either.

Instead, he let her kiss him, her mouth warm and mobile and incredibly arousing even from behind that veil between them.

His pulse thudded in his ears, louder and faster than the ache in his face that he couldn't even remember now.

Jemima Cargill was kissing him. Young, twenty-nothing Jemima Cargill.

And God, if that didn't prove that he was definitely sliding into the second half of his life after all. Because he liked her kiss. More than liked it.

The truth of that had him rocketing back, shooting to his feet, running for the sliding glass doors to his bungalow and locking himself behind them. It wasn't a mature reaction, but, damn it all, it was a certainty that he was.

Because, cliché of all clichés, Charlie had just proved himself to be most decidedly middle-aged—by falling in love with a much, much younger woman.