Hitman's Hookup: A Bad Boy Romance (37 page)

Reckless thoughts.

Thoughts of Olivia. Her blonde hair, her curvy body.

“Get your shit together, Wilde,” I muttered.

This movie had to happen. It wasn’t going to happen if we had to re-cast the leading lady halfway through the first week of filming. I stepped into the shower and felt the water pounding my body.

My mind kept flashing to dangerous places. Hailey’s words of warning kept flashing through my head. I couldn’t even look at another woman without her knowing, she’d said.

But how would she know?

I shut the water off and grabbed a towel. I wrapped it around my waist but I didn’t bother drying off. I dripped on the marble tile and onto the low-pile carpet.

I sat on the bed, leaving a wet spot that would probably piss Harrison off to no end. I picked up the room phone and dialed reception.

They answered within one ring.

"Mr. Brando, how may I help you?" I marveled that they knew it was me. Although there was a more than small chance that Harrison had told them he would be out all night and to treat me well if I made any calls.

"I need to be connected to Olivia Martin's room," I said, feeling butterflies in my stomach when I said her name.
Fuck. What the hell is wrong with me?
I thought to myself. Then I grinned.
Nothing that a good, thorough fucking of the woman who got away wouldn't fix.

"Certainly. Please hold," said the quiet voice on the other end of the line.

My heart pounded as I waited to be connected. This was ridiculous. I felt like a middle schooler.

"Hello?"

I would know that sexy voice anywhere. "Olivia? It's me. Wilde.”

I heard a muffling sound through the receiver and then a quiet giggle and another voice.
Shit.
She wasn't alone.

"Yeah," she said in an even voice. "What is it?"

"Uh," I replied, running my hands through my hair and panicking.

I hadn't thought ahead that far. I never stumbled around women like this. I was supposed to be Mr. Suave and Sexy movie star. This was bullshit. This woman made me fall apart just from her voice alone.

"I wanted to know if you wanted to eat dinner with me. In my room tonight.”

Olivia sighed. “This is a joke, right?”

I felt like she’d slapped me. “A joke? What the fuck does that mean?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,
Mr.
Wilder
,” she spat. “Excuse me for assuming that an engaged man might not
actually
be asking a woman who isn’t his fiancée to be his private dinner companion.”

Fuck.

“I didn’t think about that,” I said honestly. Okay, that was a lie. I’d thought about it, but I’d thought she wouldn’t mind.

“You really have been in Hollywood too long,” she sighed. “I’m guessing most women wouldn’t care about that, would they? You expect me to drop my plans and just come running to you because you asked me? No.”

No
. There was that word again. I felt annoyance and anger rise up in me in equal measure.

"You know what, your highness? Never fucking mind." I slammed the receiver down, feeling deeply annoyed.

All I knew was that I had hormones and anger coursing through my body. I needed a workout. Immediately.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

OLIVIA

"He hung up on you?" Lydia asked me, spooning Nutella out of the glass jar in her hand.

"Yeah.
Mr. Roman Wilder
isn't normally ignored, I guess," I replied, absentmindedly folding up the dirty clothes I'd worn that day, not thinking that they just needed to be balled up and placed in the hotel laundry bag.

I felt like I'd been living in someone else's body since the announcement on set earlier.

“What did he want, anyway?” Lydia asked me.

“Wanted me to come have dinner with him in his room apparently.”

Lydia raised her eyebrows. “Without Hailey?”

I nodded. “Seems to be.”

“She’s eating at some five-star place a few blocks from here. Alone, according to Twitter, but with an enormous diamond on her hand.” Lydia held up her phone so I could see what she was looking at.

I couldn’t resist. Hailey was, indeed, eating alone at a candlelit table. A diamond the size of an espresso cup reflected outside light off of her hand.

“That’s nice,” I said, shrugging.

Lydia guffawed. “It’s enormous. Probably cost more than a house on the beach in Maui.”

“Well, between the two of them they have plenty of money to spare I would guess.” I got off the bed and bounced on the balls of my feet. I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin. “Can we talk about something else?”

“God, I had no idea you were
this
hung up on him, Liv!” Lydia exclaimed, putting her Nutella jar down on the bedside table and sitting up on her knees.

I shook my head. “I’m not. I’m really not. It’s just been a long week and I’m on edge. We were doing more script rewrites overnight.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you seem
exhausted
.”

I stopped bouncing and walked over to the closet and tore through my suitcase until I found the clothes buried in the bottom. I replaced my lacy bra with a Lycra sport bra.

I stepped into running shorts and pulled my hair back up into a ponytail, digging into my bag for the blue bandanna that I always wore to keep my forehead sweat from creeping into my hairline.

“I don’t get it. He was such an ass to you, Liv.” Lydia tilted her head to the side. “I mean I
do
get it. He’s gorgeous. He’s ripped. He was great at sex seven years and what must be about a hundred women ago. God, imagine how good he is now…” Lydia drifted off into a daydream.

“You almost done lecturing me?” I asked her, tying the bandana and digging through my purse for my room key.

She shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Great,” I replied shortly. “I’m going to go work out.”

"Bye!" Lydia announced to my back. "I guess I'll see you for breakfast tomorrow?"

"Yeah," I replied quickly. The door slammed behind me as I jogged to the elevator, mashing the button as hard and rapidly as I possibly could.

"Come on, come on, come on," I muttered. It dinged and the doors slid open. I stepped into the elevator and hit the button for the basement that had the word 'gym' on it.

I felt like my lungs were closing up in that tiny, airless elevator. It seemed to crawl at a pace of an inch a minute as it sank downward toward the basement.

As the doors finally opened and I smelled the familiar scent of sweat, sanitizer, and the rubber of the treadmill tracks, I felt like I had a touchstone. A foundation. Something to hold onto tightly.

It had been years since I could afford to go to a gym, but in college I went every single day. Part of me felt like I was stepping back in time to greet a long-lost part of myself.

I smiled at the desk clerk who handed me a towel. Then I hopped onto an open treadmill and stared at the touch screen. Technology had come a long way since I was in undergrad. I tapped the screen a few times and soon enough the belt was moving at a warm-up pace.

I closed my eyes and eased into the rhythm, finding my footing underneath me. I loved the controlled vertigo of running with my eyes closed. I always did it for the first few minutes until the treadmill picked up more speed. My breath found itself quickly, and my heart pumped steadily. I heard footsteps pass behind me but I kept my eyes closed.

Whoever it was could fuck off.

My feet pounded the moving track below me. I heard the beeping and whir of another treadmill start up. I ignored it. I just kept running.

When I was at my seven miles an hour pace, I opened my eyes. I blinked a few times as the world came into bright focus around me. That’s when I realized that I had an audience.

Twenty feet away, across the room, was Wilder. He was running on a treadmill exactly opposite from mine.

I thought about stopping the run, but instead I hit the screen to make the treadmill move even more quickly. He squinted his eyes at me and touched his own screen. His legs pounded faster against the bottom of the treadmill.

Fine.
We could have a little competition. This was exactly what I needed to get my anxiety out of my body.

My eyes traveled unbidden to the rest of his body. He wasn't wearing a shirt.

I felt my breath catch in my chest but I recovered quickly.
Breathe, Liv,
I thought to myself. But my eyes were back on his chiseled eight-pack abdomen. His tanned skin was glinting with sweat. And he had far more tattoos than he'd displayed in the last movie I'd watched him star in.

Or maybe the makeup team on that film had selectively covered up some of them; I couldn’t be sure. Thick, black ropes of ink twisted across his chest and down his arms. He had full sleeves of tattoos covering his rippling muscles.

I looked up and realized that Wilder was smiling at me. He'd caught me staring. I blushed, and then hit the screen four more times to bring up my pace. My legs were moving so quickly I thought the friction of my feet might start a fire.

My heart was pounding out of my chest, my breathing so heavy I felt like I might pass out. But I kept staring at his eyes and soon, my breathing found its place again.

I was running as fast as he was. I didn't think about the fact that he had clearly logged twenty times the hours in the gym as I had. I just kept running.

I was going to beat him, dammit, even if it meant being carried out of here on a gurney.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

WILDER

She was trying to fucking kill me.

That was the only way to explain it. I had no idea how a woman with so many curves could possibly outrun me. She had zero visible muscles.

But she
was
outrunning me.

She was kicking my ass.

In my head, I heard the annoying voice of my trainer. "It's not all about muscle definition, Wilde. It's about endurance. You have to put in more cardio."

But cardio did not give a guy a six pack. And that's all I'd ever wanted.

When I'd achieved that, I moved on to adding bulk. I lifted weights at the expense of nearly everything else. I had figured I wasn't Tom Cruise; no director was going to require me to run much further than a few yards in an action sequence.

They hired me for my face and my body, not my agility and ability to run a mile. But now, this beautiful, sexy woman was going to kill me.
Me
. The most famous man on planet earth.

In a running contest.

I stared at her face, trying to determine if there were any signs of fatigue. But no, there weren't. She was sweaty, yes. She was breathing hard, yes. But I felt like my lungs had shrunk to the size of acorns.

My eyes fell down to her chest. Her tits were bouncing hard in her sports bra, and her tiny waist made me want to grab her and fuck her against the wall.

Focus
, I thought to myself. I never lost any competition. I was going to win.

Suddenly, a sharp pain gripped my side and I nearly fell back across the treadmill and onto the floor. I had to grab the railing and hold on so I wouldn’t be dragged to the ground. I pulled the emergency cord and the treadmill jerked to a stop.

"FUCK!" I yelled, standing up and panting. The desk clerk looked more amused than concerned.

I saw that Olivia was calmly turning down the speed on her treadmill to a nice, easy, cool-down pace.

"You alright there, Mr. Hollywood?" she called out to me.

"How...the fuck...are...you...able...to talk?" I spluttered out, feeling absolutely ridiculous.

I grabbed my towel and wiped down my face, still panting. Then I squirted half my water bottle over my head. Olivia calmly turned off her treadmill, grabbed her own towel, and walked over to me.

"I think you need to sit down," she said, putting her hand on my arm.

I felt my skin burn where she touched me. God, she was so close. And the smell of her musky sweat was like the best aphrodisiac in the world.

They could bottle that shit and make a billion fucking dollars. Easily.

"I think I might be dying," I said to her, still standing up. "Where the fuck did you learn to run like that?"

Olivia laughed. "Broke people like me only need shoe leather and a good road to get our workout done," she replied, putting her other arm around my waist and leading me over to a weights bench. "Here, this should be a familiar spot for you."

I looked up at her and realized she was making fun of me. "Fucking
ha ha
," I replied.

"Have you ever heard of cardio? You know weight lifting might make you pretty, but it's endurance that's the most important." Her eyes flashed.

Was she suggesting
...She raised an eyebrow at me.
Oh God.
I felt my heartbeat start up again, and a growing sensation in my pants.

"You're going to kill me, Liv," I said to her with a smile.

She laughed. It sounded like music.

She was so close. I could see every drop of sweat on her perfect stomach. I reached out without thinking and pulled her waist to my face, kissing her stomach. I felt drunk in her presence and high on endorphins.

She pushed me away and laughed. “Oh, I see. You think I’m not okay with
dinner
with an engaged man, but sex? Sure, anything goes.”

I heard a clearing of a throat and looked over. The desk attendant was busying himself with straightening the towels.

"Hey Gio!" I called out.

"Yes, Mr. Brando?" he asked without turning around.

"Can you give us a few moments?"

He nodded and replied, "I'll lock the door to give you some privacy."

After he left, I looked up at Olivia. She looked bemused.

"Sorry," she said, snorting out a laugh and covering her mouth with both of her hands. "
Mr. Brando?
Are you serious?" she was laughing so hard her breasts were jiggling. It was distracting.

"It's the name I use when I check into a hotel. So people can't find me," I said, feeling my ego bruising slightly.