His One Desire (4 page)

Two hours later she was looking at herself in the bathroom
mirror, wondering if she still had time to change.

It wasn’t that the dress Tom had picked out was bad. It was
good, in fact. Beautiful, even. But what if Luke thought she’d worn it for him?

She wriggled her shoulders to confirm that the silk chiffon
top wouldn’t slip and reveal any more cleavage than it already did. The cap
sleeves seemed secure, but the light material and low-cut bodice made her feel
half-naked.

Okay, that decided it. The black dress might be boring, but
it didn’t make her self-conscious. She was going to change.

She started to unzip it and then stopped, struck once more
by how beautiful the colors were. The dress was like a Monet painting come to
life, a shifting wash of moss green and sapphire and indigo and violet. The
colors made her want to wear it, even though the material clung to her upper
body and the light, floating skirt barely came to her knees. It wasn’t risqué,
exactly…just sexy.

And Kali Jones didn’t do sexy.

But as she stood staring at herself, uncertain, there was a
knock on the door.

Okay,
that
decided it. Tom was here to walk
downstairs with her, and she shouldn’t keep him waiting. Plus, he’d be
disappointed if she didn’t wear the dress.

Except that it wasn’t Tom standing there when she pulled
open her door. It was Luke Tanner, looking like every woman’s fantasy in black
dress pants and a navy blue silk shirt, a hint of stubble on his jaw and a half
smile on his face.

Her greeting to Tom froze on her lips.

But for once, Luke seemed more rattled than she did. His
eyes slid down her body and back up to her face, and he spoke one word into the
electric silence.

“Jesus.”

Luke’s reaction shouldn’t matter to her, but it did. In
spite of herself, a flush of pleasure warmed her skin.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, when she finally
trusted herself to speak.

“I—” his voice came out a little husky, and he paused to
clear his throat. “I ran into Tom. He said he was going to walk you down to
dinner, and I asked if I could, instead.”

His gaze slid down to her cleavage before jerking back up
again. “This doesn’t seem like your usual, uh, style.”

She shifted her weight. “Tom picked the dress out,” she
said, irked when she heard the defensiveness in her voice.

Luke smiled a little. “He did, huh? No wonder you trust him
to produce your shows.”

His blue eyes were warm, and for once his smile seemed
friendly and not mocking. He seemed less like a movie star and more like the
Luke Tanner she’d known so many years ago.

In this mood, maybe she could talk to him. Reason with him.

She took a deep breath. “Luke. I don’t know why you came
here, but please, please, go back home to L.A. I can’t believe you really want
to hurt me after all these years. That was all so long ago, and…I’m sorry.”

Instead of softening him, her appeal made his eyes harden.
“Sorry for what?”

He’d done that yesterday, too—challenged her to talk about
their past.

Well, could she? If that’s what it took to send him out of
her life?

Her stomach tightened at the sudden swirl of remembered
emotion—guilt, shame, grief, anger. All part of the hard knot of misery she’d
buried deep, never to be revisited.

The silence went on for a long time. After a minute, she
realized her hands were clenched into fists. She made a conscious effort to
relax them but tension still reverberated throughout her body.

“Kali,” Luke said after another minute, and she looked up at
him. His expression was neutral, his eyes opaque. “I’ve got a proposition for
you,” he went on, and her breath hitched in her chest.

“What is it?” she asked, her voice guarded.

“Do you remember that night at Joe’s house? The night we
played truth or dare?”

Of course she remembered. How could she forget? It was after
graduation and weeks after their disastrous prom night. She hadn’t wanted to go
to the party, knowing that Luke might be there, but her dad told her he was
sick of her ‘living like a nun’ and had insisted she go.

They’d played all kinds of silly high school games that
night, in a rush of nostalgia, maybe, for the life they were leaving behind.
She’d stayed out of most of them, standing in the shadows by the bookcases in
Joe’s living room. But when they’d started truth or dare after finishing spin
the bottle, Luke had looked right at her.

“Truth or dare?” he’d asked, his voice cold and hard.

“Truth,” she’d answered, terrified of what he might dare her
do.

He’d gotten up from the couch and gone over to her. “Why did
you stand me up on prom night?”

She’d stared at him for about five seconds before turning
and running blindly out of the house.

Until yesterday afternoon, that had been the last time she’d
seen Luke Tanner.

She smoothed her hands over the material of her skirt. “I
remember,” she said gruffly. “What about it?”

“Let’s have a game this weekend for old times’ sake. If
you’ll agree to that, I’ll leave for L.A. on Monday morning. And you’ll never have
to see me again.”

She sank her teeth into her lower lip as she pondered. Was
this as straightforward as it seemed?

“How many rounds?” she asked, finally.

“Two.”

“If I agree…will you tell the network people it’s not my
fault or Tom’s that you’re not doing the show? And that you still hope to work
with us sometime in the future?”

“Sure.”

“But you won’t. I mean, I want the execs to think you might,
but I don’t want to actually work with you.”

“I get it, Kali.”

“Then…okay.”

He slid his hands into his pockets and leaned against the
doorframe. “Truth or dare?”

“Dare.”

* * *

Luke’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. He hadn’t been expecting
that. He’d thought the game would be a way to navigate the tension between
them, to finally get an answer to the question that had eaten at him for ten
years.

He wasn’t quite sure what to do next, and he could see from
the satisfied gleam in Kali’s eyes that she knew it. He’d come to New York to
mess with her head, and she always seemed to end up messing with his.

God, she looked fucking incredible tonight. He hadn’t been
expecting that, either. But when she’d opened her door he’d almost passed out.

She was wearing a floating cloud of nothing much, a delicate
watercolor of a dress that made her skin look like alabaster. He was willing to
bet Tom had picked out her shoes, too, since Kali never wore high heels. Her
legs were bare and shapely and the neckline of that dress ended in a point just
above her belly button, giving him a mouthwatering glimpse of skin that seldom
saw the light of day—the skin on the inside of her perfect breasts, softer than
the softest silk.

She wore a blue headband in her short hair, holding the
waves away from her face. Her makeup, for once, had been beautifully applied.
Even her glasses seemed like the perfect touch—a visible signifier of the
bookish, hopelessly nerdy personality he’d once fallen in love with.

Once but never again, he thought with an odd twinge of
panic. He’d come out to the east coast to lay his old ghosts to rest, not to
make the same mistake twice.

“So what’s my dare?” she asked carelessly, obviously
relishing the fact that he was momentarily at a loss.

“I’m not sure yet,” he said, keeping his voice as careless
as hers. “I’ll have to think it over.”

She shrugged. “Well, you can’t take too long. I don’t want
you dragging this out. I’ll give you until midnight tonight.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

There was a pause while Luke tried to remember what the hell
he was doing here in the first place.

“We should probably head down now,” she said after a moment.
“The dinner’s starting at eight.”

“Right.”

The quiet elegance of the resort’s private dining room was
the perfect backdrop for Kali tonight, with her sylph-like dress and her
delicate loveliness. He was sure that every man in the room must be staring at her,
but when he took a look around, he saw that masculine interest was focused on
the gorgeous redhead who starred in
Roommates
.

She was stunning, no question. But as far as he was
concerned, she couldn’t hold a candle to Kali Jones.

She didn’t radiate the prickly, restless intelligence that
Kali did. She didn’t have Kali’s elfin grace. And she didn’t have the eager,
contagious passion that Kali had when she was talking about something she cared
about—like right now, as she answered a network VP’s question about
Ghosts
.

This dining room had been reserved for the network people,
and he and Kali had been seated at a back table by the far wall. Kali sat at
the end and Luke was on her right, with a perfect view of her as she spoke to
the man on her other side.

She used her hands to illustrate points, as though words
weren’t enough. She was so charming, so compelling…he didn’t understand how any
man in the room could keep his eyes off her. The woman next to him was
chattering away about something—his last movie, he thought—but all he needed to
do to maintain the conversation was nod his head once in a while. That left him
free to watch Kali…and to remember the first time they met.

It was the summer before freshman year, at a theater arts
camp in L.A. Kali was there as a member of the Hollywood elite—the daughter of
actress Meredith Michaels and her equally famous husband, director Henry Jones.
Luke was there on scholarship.

He hung around with the cool kids, both rich and poor, while
Kali stayed by herself most of the time. At one of those
let’s-get-to-know-each-other campfire things, she revealed that she was
homeschooled, which he figured helped explain her total lack of social skills.

He’d dismissed her in his mind as a solitary weirdo, and was
already waiting to hear from the next person in the circle—a gorgeous blond
girl—when she answered the question about her favorite movies and TV shows. “
Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Chasing Amy, Edward Scissorhands,
and
Dazed and Confused
.”

He stared at her. The girls so far had given completely
predictable answers—
Titanic
and
Braveheart
and
Dawson’s
Creek
. The girl next to her went with those, adding
Casablanca
to
the list to show off her classic movie chops. But Luke barely glanced at her.
He was staring at the pixie-faced girl with the long dark hair who had already
withdrawn back into her own private world, gazing off into space and talking to
herself like the solitary weirdo she was.

The next morning, he got up early to go for a swim. Kali was
there before him, doing some strange kind of undulating stroke. When she caught
sight of him she swam immediately for the side of the pool and got out,
grabbing her towel without looking at him and drying herself off in a hurry.

“What were you doing?” he asked, walking around the pool to
meet her. “What kind of stroke was that?”

She pulled on her tee shirt and shorts over her bathing suit
before answering him. She had a pixie body to go with her pixie face—small
breasts, a tiny waist, and slender hips. Cute but not spectacular.

“Oh, it’s just this stupid thing I do,” she said
dismissively, starting to walk past him without meeting his eyes.

“What stupid thing? Tell me.”

She stopped, shrugging her shoulders. “I pretend I’m a
mermaid,” she said, clutching at the damp towel around her neck.

He laughed, but not in a mean way, and after a moment she
started to smile. “I know it’s dumb,” she said shyly.

“No, it’s cute. I bet you used to do that horse thing, too,”
he said, noticing for the first time how big her eyes were.

“What horse thing?”

“You know. That thing girls do, where your lower body is the
galloping horse and your upper body is the rider.”

Now they laughed together. “Yeah, I did,” she admitted.
“When I was, like, six.”

“You wrote that play about the mermaid, didn’t you?” he
asked suddenly. The kids who were in the writing program submitted their work
to the kids in the acting and directing programs, and her play had been a
hundred times better than anything else they’d read so far. “The one about the
teenage boy who goes to the ocean and meets a mermaid.”

She nodded, her cheeks pink.

“It’s one of the ones we picked to produce. I’m going to
audition for the lead.”

Her big eyes got even bigger. “You are?”

“Yeah.”

From that point on, they’d been friends. He didn’t make a
move on her—at fourteen, he’d still been focused on blond hair and big boobs as
his criteria for that kind of interest—but he liked her more than anyone else
at camp. They talked for hours about books and music and movies, and their hopes
and dreams for the future. She knew he was poor and he knew she was rich, but
for that one golden summer it didn’t seem to matter.

When camp ended, she went back to homeschooling and he went
to high school—a private academy he’d gotten into on a full academic
scholarship. They emailed each other a few times freshman year but he’d gotten
busy fast, with schoolwork and his first real girlfriend. He also had to deal
with the rich assholes who took every opportunity to tear him down, and a
father who drank and lost jobs and told his son he’d never amount to anything.
Within a few months, he’d stopped emailing the odd, interesting girl he’d met
at camp.

And then, senior year, she started going to his school. Her
parents had divorced that summer and her mother had gone into a treatment
facility for mental illness. She’d been the one who’d insisted on homeschooling
her only child, and once she was out of the picture her father decided it was
high time his backward daughter got a taste of ‘normal’ life.