The Good Girl's Guide to Bad Men (11 page)

By the time Jamie and I arrived in Cabo San Lucas for our post-engagement getaway on Friday night, I was more than ready for a vacation. The last two days had been filled with non-stop client meetings, and two nights in Mexico was exactly what I needed. Time away from everything and everyone. No cheating spouses. No wedding planners. Just me and Jamie and a suite at the Marquis Los Cabos. Everything had gotten so complicated in the last week and a half. It was nice to just relax and remember what was really important. And that was Jamie. Whether we had a wedding cake with cream or fruit filling didn't matter in Cabo San Lucas. All that mattered was the fact that we were together.

By Saturday afternoon, my skin was already a good shade and a half darker, and Jamie and I had claimed a cabana on the beach that had become our temporary home away from home away from home. We had our breakfast and lunch delivered there along with
several
piña coladas and bottles of Corona.

The sun was warm. The ocean was a brilliant shade of blue. And the waiters were extremely attentive. It was pure paradise.

Until my phone started ringing.

I groaned audibly as I pulled it out of my bag and answered, "Hello?"

"Look, I know you're on your pre-honeymoon, post-engagement whatever thing, but I
have
to talk to you and it can't wait." Zoë was speaking considerably faster than usual. And for Zoë, that was saying a lot.

"What?"

"Sophie has completely lost it. I think she's about to have a stroke. Everything is falling apart over here, and I don't know what to do."

I took a deep breath and flipped onto my stomach. "What seems to be the problem?" I asked diplomatically.

Zoë's piercing voice continued to melt my eardrums. "She's freaking out because Eric's sister, who's one of the bridesmaids, showed up at the dress fitting today with her hair dyed this obnoxious color, and Sophie claims it doesn't match the dress. But Eric's sister is refusing to dye it back."

I furrowed my eyebrows in disbelief. "She actually
asked
Eric's sister to dye her hair back?"

"Yup. And now they're in this huge terrible fight, and Eric's sister is threatening not to come to the wedding at all."

I pushed myself up onto my elbows. "Well, did you try to talk to her about it? And tell her very
nicely
that she was overreacting?"

"Yes!" Zoë cried, exasperated. "But she refuses to listen. She wanted to call you, but I insisted that she not ruin your weekend. I told her it would be much better if
I
called you instead. You know, calmer and less stressful."

I wasn't so sure about that.

"Uh-huh." I rolled over onto my back again and shielded my eyes from the sun. "Okay, what color is the hair?"

Zoë scoffed into the phone, "What does that matter?"

I was starting to get impatient. "Just tell me."

She sighed loudly. "Fine. It's like a red. But you know, not that strawberry blond red but
red
red. Almost magenta."

I thought for a moment. "Okay, here's what you're going to do. Call Sophie back, tell her you spoke to me and told me what the problem was. Then tell her that
I
said that I saw a model wearing her same bridesmaid's dress in a bridal magazine and she had the exact same color hair."

"Ahh," Zoë said, slowly coming around to comprehension. "I get it. A little mind trick."

"Exactly."

She sighed in relief. "Okay, thanks, Jen. You're the best. Go back to paradise."

I hung up the phone and tossed it back into my beach bag before resting my head back down on my towel and closing my eyes.

"What was that all about?" Jamie asked from his nearby chair.

"Not even worth repeating."

I was just drifting off into a nice little catnap when my phone rang again. I sat up reluctantly and pulled it out of my bag. "I should have guessed," I said, looking at the caller ID. "Hi, Soph."

"What magazine was this? I have every single bridal magazine on the newsstand, and I have never seen a girl with magenta hair wearing
my
bridesmaid dress."

I kept my eyes closed in an attempt to conserve composure. "I'm not really sure," I replied casually. "It was at the airport. I think someone left it in the terminal."

Sophie did not sound convinced. "People do not just
leave
bridal magazines lying around airport terminals."

"Sure they do," I said flatly. At this point, I could care less how persuasive I was sounding.

"You're lying."

"No, I'm not."

"Yes, you are!"

I shot up in my seat, the frustration finally reaching a boiling point despite my previous efforts to keep it at a low, unobservable simmer. "Okay, Sophie. I'm on vacation. I don't really want to play these childish games with you. I'm not concerned with the hair color, and neither should you be. You should be concentrating on—"

"I know! I know! Myself! You've been telling me that for the past six months."

And here I thought she wasn't absorbing any of it.

"It's easy for you to say the hair color doesn't bother you because
you
haven't seen it!"

I inhaled deeply and reminded myself that there would be only
two
more weeks of this crap and then it would all be over. Well, until Sophie got pregnant, anyway. But for the sake of my own sanity, I was pretty damn close to walking over to one of the local churches in town and saying a prayer for Eric's infertility.

I decided to try a different approach. "Well, just think how much better
you'll
look walking down the aisle after everyone sees Eric's sister and her hideous bright red hair. You'll look like a goddess compared to that!"

I could almost hear the gears turning in Sophie's head. "Huh," she finally said, intrigued. "I guess I never thought of it that way. That does make me feel a
little
better," she admitted.

I fell back against the chaise longue with a relieved sigh. "Good, then I'm hanging up now."

And I did.

Afternoon faded into evening, the sun set spectacularly over the water, and after four more rounds of back-and-forth phone calls between Zoë and Sophie and one very unpleasant conference call among the three of us, Jamie and I packed up our stuff and headed inside for dinner.

He suggested that I leave my cell phone in the hotel room while we were eating, and after what had just happened on the beach, I couldn't think of a better idea.

The restaurant in the hotel was small and intimate, only twenty tables total, with soft lighting, taupe linens, and three-pronged candlesticks that reminded me of something from an old Hollywood mansion. We both ordered the fresh fish of the day, and it was exquisite. I had to hand it to Jamie. From hot dogs and Coke on the golf course to this five-star restaurant in Cabo San Lucas, the man definitely knew how to dine.

After cocktails, appetizers, wine, entrees, dessert, more wine, and endless conversation, what I had expected to be at most a ninety-minute dinner had turned into a three-and-a-half-hour dining experience.

By the time Jamie and I left the restaurant, it was already 10:45 at night and we were both wasted. Although it feels inherently wrong to use the word
wasted
when describing our state after such an elegant and lavish evening. So let's just say we were "luxuriously intoxicated."

There once was a time, not so long ago, that I would have had to fake this kind of inebriation. Back when going from sober to tipsy in a matter of hours was just another part of my unusual job description. But since I gave up my glamorous days of strappy black dresses and a different married man every night of the week, my tolerance to alcohol had fallen back down to normal levels.

We stumbled back to the hotel room in a clumsy, unchoreo-graphed dance of kissing, laughing, and playfully grabbing each other's asses. As soon as we were behind closed doors, Jamie backed me up to the bed and fell on top of me. He began to kiss the sides of my face, moving down to my chin and eventually landing directly on the small crevice between my neck and shoulders.

I giggled with pleasure, sliding Jamie's dinner jacket off his shoulders and unbuttoning his shirt.

His hand reached down and landed on my knee before wandering up the inside of my thigh and under the hemline of my dress. I shivered with delight. The wine was making every inch of my skin feel alive and tingling with desire.

With his other hand, he slid the straps of my dress off my shoulders and gently kissed my collarbone. I turned my head to the side and wrapped my arms around the back of his neck, pulling him closer to me.

My eyes opened for a second, and it was during that moment that I noticed my iPhone sitting on the nightstand. The screen was illuminated to alert me of an awaiting voice mail. I sighed and closed my eyes again, trying to erase the outside world from my conscious mind and just be in this incredible moment.

But I was quickly sucked out of it again by the sound of ringing. A shrill, high-pitched, unfamiliar noise that sounded like an old-fashioned rotary phone.

Jamie groaned and looked up at the nightstand. "It's your cell phone again."

"That's not my cell phone," I mumbled dazedly. "My ringer doesn't sound like that."

Jamie looked up again. "Yes, it is. I can see it lighting up."

And then I remembered. The wine haze slowly cleared from my head. "Oh yeah," I mumbled with frustration. "It's the ringer I programmed for blocked numbers."

"Well, do you want to get it?"

I wrapped my hands around the back of his head and pulled him toward me. "No," I cooed. "It's probably a wrong number. Besides, no one who would need to get hold of me at this hour has a blocked number."

Jamie was happy to oblige and leaned in to kiss me again. I moaned, and his lips pressed deeper into mine. I started to unbutton his shirt.

The phone rang again. And for some reason, this time it seemed even more insistent. Maybe that's because this time I was even more annoyed than the last.

"Okay," I resolved, sitting up and pushing Jamie off to the side. "I'm shutting the damn thing off."

I grabbed the phone and jabbed at the red "Ignore" button on the bottom of the screen. The piercing sound finally stopped, and my ears had never been more grateful. "I'm gonna have to change that ringer," I vowed as my finger reached for the power button. But just as I was about to hold it down, the screen switched over, revealing my list of missed calls. Ten in the past fifteen minutes. All from that same blocked number.

"That's strange," I muttered as I stared down at the phone.

"What?" Jamie asked, rolling onto his back and letting out a displeased sigh.

"Ten missed calls." I tapped over to the voicemail screen. Five voice mails, all without a caller ID. "This better not be Sophie blocking her number," I grumbled as I selected the first voicemail. But just as I was about to tap "Play Message," the phone rang again. The sound startled me, and I nearly dropped the phone as I fumbled to press the "Talk" button with drunk (and somewhat anxious) fingers.

"Hello?"

A hysterical voice came on the line, and I struggled to keep up with the influx of words that were pouring into my ear faster than I could make sense of them, let alone place them in any comprehensible order. "And I don't know how they . . . I'm sure it was one of . . . I swear it's not . . . can't believe . . . really scary . . . dirty . . . cold . . . smells . . ."

After a few seconds, I was finally able to recognize the woman's voice. And it wasn't Sophie calling to discuss various shades of red hair color.

"Shawna," I asserted softly, "you need to slow down. I can't understand you."

Panic started to tighten my chest, and I could feel my breath quicken as I remembered that she was juggling not one, but
two
assignments tonight in Vegas. I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was eleven
P.M.,
ten
P.M.
in Vegas, which meant that right now she would be in the middle of her first assignment—a Halloween party at MGM Grand with subject number one, Ken Littrell—and would be getting ready to relocate to the Palazzo to commence her assignment with subject number two, Benjamin Connors, in a few hours.

My mind flooded with all kinds of possible worst-case scenarios for what could go wrong on a double-booked night, and I scolded myself for leaving the phone in the room. I had been so anxious to escape Sophie's pre-wedding dramas for one night that I had completely forgotten about all the people who might really need me.

". . . with the bachelor . . . suddenly I'm . . . won't listen . . . took my phone . . . so sorry . . ." Shawna continued to babble incoherently into my ear, and I reached out and switched on the lamp by the bed. As if
light
could possibly help me
hear
better.

"What's the matter?" Jamie asked, sitting up and holding his head to steady the room, which was undoubtedly spinning from all the alcohol. It was spinning for me as well, but I was too pissed off at myself to notice.

I shook my head back at him and pulled the phone away from my mouth. "I don't know. I can't understand her. She was double-booked tonight. Something must have gone wrong.

"Shawna," I repeated again, my voice slightly less calm this time, "take a deep breath."

She stopped talking abruptly, and I heard the irrefutable muffled hissing sound of air being blown into the phone. It was honestly the first thing I understood.

"Good, now tell me what's going on."

When she spoke again, her voice still trembled, but at least her pace was finally clear and comprehensible. "I'm so sorry to bother you, Ashlyn. I didn't know who else to call."

Despite the warm, tropical ocean breeze blowing through the open window of our suite, the terror in her voice chilled me to the bone.

"It's no bother," I stated numbly, my body frozen in fear. "What happened?"

As I listened to her speak, I could swear I heard the soft splashing sound of her tears falling against the receiver. Her usual sweet, light-hearted voice sounded tiny and scared, like a small child's. Even though my heart wanted to leap into my throat, I urged myself to remain calm and composed. I knew that any unnecessary emotion from me would only send her into another round of hysterics.