Match Play’s photo spread for Golf Journal was scheduled to take place on the second weekend of July at Pebble Beach Golf Links, south of San Francisco in California.
Booking a photojournalism piece in Golf Journal, a top-tier, glossy golf magazine sent to millions of households, was a coup for Match Play and would increase the app’s stature and visibility. It was the kind of social proof that the brand-new app needed.
Arielle was just glad to get out of Phoenix in the middle of July, where the sweltering temperatures topped 115°F in the afternoons and rarely fell below a hundred at night. When Arielle left the Match Play office in the evenings, it was like opening the door to an oven and getting blasted in the face with rolling waves of heat. Her eyes dried out instantly.
A reprieve from the heat in the cool air near San Francisco was freakin’ heaven, even though her flight the afternoon before had been canceled due to excessive temperature at the airport. Airplanes aren’t tested to fly at ground temperatures above 125°F, so they closed the airport for six hours on Friday.
Mitchell’s flight had also been canceled on Friday due to a “bomb thunderstorm” on the East Coast. Airports closed all over New England in the whipping rain and lightning.
All night, they scrambled to find flights because GetJets was overbooked and canceled their reservations, so they texted each other with updates.
Mitchell’s running commentary on his misadventures was wry with his predicament, and she’d laughed at him despite herself.
He was only able to find a coach ticket on United Airlines, the horror, according to his texts, from Boston to San Francisco, middle seat, which meant he’d driven like a bat out of Hell to Boston in the middle of the night and then folded up his six-four frame like a grasshopper in the narrow airplane chair for seven hours.
Arielle had managed to book a nine o’clock flight to Los Angeles the following day on Southwest, where one of the flight attendants rapped the safety lecture, so she definitely got the better end of the deal.
However, LA is a five-hour drive from Pebble Beach Golf Links, so she’d fretted in the back of a limo Mitchell had arranged to pick her up, mentally encouraging the LA traffic to get the hell out of her way.
They both arrived at the course at five in the evening, disheveled and rushed, a mere seven hours late. The professional makeup and hair team rolled their eyes and went to work on them.
Arielle’s dress was a gauzy boho creation that flowed around her like the California sea wind.
Suitably attired, Arielle and Mitchell walked out onto a prominence over the sea near the tee box of one of the golf holes, and the sea air over the Pacific Ocean was so clear that it glistened.
The sun was still well above the ocean’s horizon, showering them with white light. As it was mid-July, they had hours of sunlight left.
“Fog’s coming,” the photographer said while screwing a lens onto her camera. “We’d better hurry.”
“Fog?” Mitchell said with a resigned chuckle. He wore one of his blue suits, tailored close to his athletic body. “But it’s lovely out.”
The photographer grimaced and shook her head, sending her thin braids flying. “Don’t lecture me about my hometown. Yes, fog. Soon. Let’s go.”
She told Arielle and Mitchell that she wanted them to be all over each other during the photoshoot.
Like, think romance novel covers. Clinch covers, not those cutesy cartoon ones.
Okay, the article's point was to inform people about Match Play, a dating app, so it made sense.
But Arielle was still pissed at Mitchell, even though his texts had been funny and he’d managed to arrange for a limo for her mad dash from LA.
Arielle’s white gauze dress billowed in the sea breeze when they stood on the cliffs, and in his exquisite suit, Mitchell looked like a modern lord surveying his lands.
“Okay,” the photographer hollered at them over the wind that plucked at Arielle’s skirt, her voice carrying over the boulders between them and the ocean. “Be all lovey-dovey for the camera!”
Arielle didn’t want to be all lovey-dovey. She wanted to rip Mitchell’s freakin’ head off and hurl it down to the putting green hundreds of feet below. Yes, that’s exactly what she wanted to do because so many people had been laid off from Match Play. Plus, the office was unbearable, what with the heat, the lack of office supplies, and the damn crappy vendoland coffee, let alone everyone’s morose expressions.
He’d managed to charm her again, but it was just another of his lies.
Everything came back to lying and dishonesty whenever she was around Mitchell Saltonstall.
Arielle’s crown of asters and other flowers slipped in her hair, but she caught it before it went flying into the Pacific. She tried to make an expression on her face that was a smile crossed with a swoon but was pretty sure she just ended up looking drunk.
Mitchell was holding her in a half-backbend over his arm and looking down at her adoringly. Damn, he was a good actor, which was just another form of lying unless you were on a set or in a play.
Arielle hissed at him through clenched teeth, “Are you trying to get everyone at Match Play to quit?”
“No, buttercup, I’m trying to make Match Play into a lean, mean, marketing machine so I won’t bankrupt my three best friends,” Mitchell said in a honeyed tone that would have been better suited for reciting a sonnet about love.
“Switch!” the photographer screamed over the buffeting wind.
The sun drifted downward toward the sea.
“Well, they are quitting,” Arielle said to Mitchell as he tossed her to her feet and then curled her into his arms while standing behind her. He bent so that his chin rested on her shoulder. “Only thirty people are left at Match Play!”
“Splendid, my sweet rose,” Mitchell said, his dreamy smile crinkling his clear green eyes as she looked up at him from under her eyelashes. He said, “I’ll only have to lay off ten employees instead of fifteen at the beginning of August.”
Her forced grin was beginning to cramp her cheeks in slices of pain from her molars to her ears. “Jesus, Mitchell. People need those jobs.”
The photographer crept closer with her huge-barreled camera, the clicks audible over the ocean below them. “Close-ups! More lovey-dovey!”
Mitchell ran his hand down her cheek, and Arielle didn’t mean to, but she closed her eyes and leaned her cheek into his palm. He said, “Evidently, your friends don’t need those positions, not if they’re getting other ones so readily. Speaking from the evil-venture capitalist perspective, there are more jobs than qualified people for them in the last few years. Workers have more leverage now than at any time since the nineteen-fifties, my darling girl with the soul of lavender.”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“I don’t know, but it makes my sister laugh.”
He ran his hand down her neck, a stroke over her throat on her skin, and Arielle’s breath caught as she whispered, “Well, still! You shouldn’t do this to my friends!”
Mitchell ducked his head and ran his teeth up the side of her neck, growling, “This isn’t about friends, princess. This is business.”
Her head felt light in the whipping wind. “You keep saying stuff like that, but friends are more important than business.”
“Ah, my cute little hamster,” he said, his breath fluttering over her pulse on her throat, “when you have four hundred million dollars on the line, nothing is more important than business.”
“Switch!” the photographer yelled.
Mitchell spun Arielle again and pinned her against his chest with one arm. She stared up at him, and he swooped down, capturing her lips with his in a kiss.
The kiss burned through her, a crackling fire that began where their lips met and spread through her body to her fingertips and toes. The crackle through her soul heated her blood, and her heart pounded with it.
He broke away and stared at her, blinking and searching her eyes. His mocking smile was gone, replaced with a tentative softness she hadn’t seen before. He ducked his head to kiss her again, but he hesitated halfway there, his bright green eyes flicking up to meet hers again, so she stood on her toes and kissed him back.
Mitchell’s arms firmed around her, holding her closer to his chest as his lips moved on hers.
The world fell away except for where it touched them, the velvet grass under their feet, the sunshine on their skin, and his arms and the wind pressing against her back and crushing her against his suit.
The scent of the ocean filled the air and her nose, the roar of the waves crashing below the cliff mixing with her heart pounding in her ears.
Mitchell pulled away and studied Arielle’s eyes again. Her breath rushed in her mouth and chest because she didn’t know what he was looking for and feared she didn’t have it. He grabbed her again, cinching his arms around her waist and shoulders, and crushed her to him as he kissed her like he couldn’t get enough of her.
Arielle embraced him in return, giving her breath and mouth to him.
The strength of Mitchell’s body against hers sent a thrill through her chest that pooled in her belly.
The world swirled and condensed to his lips on hers, the sweet taste of his breath, and his hands stroking her skin over the thin gauze of her dress.
His hand, the ocean-side one away from the photographer, stole up her side, and his thumb caressed the underswell of her breast and slid across her nipple, sending a shiver through Arielle.
She shuffled her feet closer to his, and he half-stepped around her. He crushed her so tightly against his muscular torso that it felt like their skin was fighting to press through their clothes to touch.
“Hey! Hey, you two!” the photographer yelled. “Keep it PG-13, huh? This is a family magazine!”
Mitchell lifted his mouth away from hers, and he backed off, still staring into her eyes.
Arielle should make a smart-ass comment or elbow him away from her or something, but her mind fizzed with passion and her lips felt swollen and oversensitive.
Mitchell grabbed her again, his hand sliding up into her hair and pressing the side of her face against his chest.
His chest rose with his deep breaths, and under her ear, his heart raced like the thundering hooves of wild horses.
Arielle wound her arms around his trim waist and laid her head on his shoulder, watching his muscular pecs inflate and descend right in front of her nose as he breathed.
Mitchell kissed her forehead, pressing his lips to her hairline for a long moment until the photographer yelled, “Jesus Christ on a cracker, smile, you two! You’re supposed to be happy that you found each other on that app!”
When she glanced up, a hint of a smile tugged at Mitchell’s mouth, and a dimple creased his cheek.
Arielle spread her hand over his jaw and ran her thumb over his dimple, which she didn’t think she’d ever seen before.
His smile reached the green in his eyes, but it was softer than before.
Behind the dark blond of his hair, the sky turned gray, and the sun winked out.
Arielle looked around them.
Tendrils of gauzy fog glided down the higher hills and collected over the sea, turning the waves monochrome.
“Dammit,” the photographer said. “I knew we’d only have an hour before that fog came in. Let’s resume tomorrow at ten o’clock, depending on the weather. Thank the goddesses that we booked the golf course for a two-day shoot, or else we’d be SOL.”
Mitchell ran his hand down Arielle’s arm and wove his fingers in hers. He hadn’t looked away from her eyes. “I have a car waiting to take us to the hotel.”
“Okay,” Arielle said, panting. “Okay, good.”