One
If anyone had told him, back in his hormone-driven teenage days, that a guy could get paid sinfully big bucks for making love to the world’s sexiest women, Gabriel Broussard would’ve hightailed it out of South Louisiana’s bayou country a helluva lot sooner.
The morning after what would permanently be etched in stone as the worst night of his life, he’d loaded up his truck, just like the Clampetts had done in that old sixties sitcom, (though in his case it’d been a black Trans Am), and moved to Beverly.
Hills, that is.
Swimming pools.
Movie stars.
Okay, so technically this house wasn’t actually in the Hills, but on the beach at Malibu, which in Gabe’s mind was a lot cooler and still included its share of swimming pools and movie stars. Of which, though it still blew his own mind to think so, he just happened to be one.
Which explained the panties. Sort of.
“Six pairs,” Angela Moreno announced as she dropped the lacy undies in front of him.
Gabe morosely eyed the pile of silk and satin lace. They were all just like all the others this week—either red or black. Whatever happened to girly pastels? A soft, feminine pink? Or even a sweet virginal white? Though it’d been years since he’d had any interest in virgins, with the right woman, it could make a nice fantasy.
These were flat out forward.
Big fucking surprise. Like throwing underwear with pinned-on telephone numbers over his gate wasn’t?
He plucked a black triangle with two strings the width of dental floss from the pile and held it up to the scant bit of sunlight that was managing to slip through the storm shutters he’d closed to keep out of the range of the vultures—tabloid photographers—who’d been circling ever since Tamara Templeton had tearfully announced on Inside Edition that she was breaking their engagement because she could no longer deal with Gabe’s “addiction to kinky sex.”
That’s when the panty attacks had begun. This particular pair was as transparent as Tamara’s ploy. When the sight of his hand showing through the sheer black fabric didn’t strum a single sexual chord, Gabe wondered if he might getting old.
Christ, wasn’t that a fun thought?
“Six pair are less than yesterday,” he said.
“The day’s still young.” His assistant had to raise her voice to be heard over the whump whump whump of the rotors from the helicopter circling overhead. It was as if he was under siege. She dropped a blizzard of pink messages atop the underwear.
“Diane Sawyer’s already called three times this morning, Katie Couric twice, and Barbara Walters didn’t exactly come right out and say so, but I got the distinct impression that if you’d throw your interview her way, you’d be a shoo-in for one of her celebrity shows. If I were you, I’d hold out for the Oscar special.”
“If you were me, you wouldn’t be in this mess,” Gabe muttered.
“Good point. And one I was too polite to mention.” She ignored his snort. “Oh, and Leno’s producer called and suggested that coming clean on The Tonight Show could really help your damage control campaign.”
“I don’t have a damage control campaign,” Gabe ground out. Not being nearly as wild as his bad boy reputation made him out to be, he’d never needed one.
“Maybe you ought to get one. I vote for calling Barbara. Hardly anyone makes it through her interviews without crying.”
“And how would me crying like a girl on national television help my image?”
“It’d make you look sensitive. Women love that. Besides, you might pick up some sympathy.”
“I fail to see how accusing America’s sweetheart of lying would gain the sympathy vote.”
Tamara Templeton had literally grown up in viewers’ living rooms. She’d made her first appearance as a plucky orphan sent from New York to live with her aunt and uncle and numerous cousins on the family farm somewhere in the nameless Midwest when she was nine years old.
Amazingly, in a competitive business where the average television show had a shelf life between milk and yogurt, bolstered by its saccharine “family value” stories set in “simpler” times, Heartland—which, in Hollywood high concept terms, had initially been dismissed by critics as Little House on the Prairie meets The Waltons—was still running strong twelve years after its debut.
And Tamara was a multimillionaire several times over.
She had her own clothing line, a perfume label, a series of best-selling books about her fictional character’s adventures, and a doll whose period prairie dresses probably cost more than the average parents spent on their own kids’ clothes.
Her movies, which to Gabe’s mind were even more likely to give their young audience cavities than the damn TV show, were guaranteed blockbusters, and Gabe had heard tales of studios refusing to set a release date for their summer movies until her opening weekend was set in stone.
She was young, beautiful, rich, and appeared, to her legion of fans worldwide, to have everything any young woman could wish for. But there was one thing she was lacking. The respect of her acting peers.
Which is where Gabe had come in.
“Your mistake was letting her announce your engagement in the first place,” Angela pointed out what Gabe had been telling himself over and over again since this mess had started.
“Like I knew she was going to pull a stunt like that.” Gabe clenched his jaw. “Hell, we’d only been out twice.” Both “duty dates” set up by the agent they shared.
Angela shrugged. “Sometimes it happens that way. People meet, heartstrings zing, and the next thing you know, you’re in some Vegas chapel, pledging to love and honor until death do you part, while an Elvis impersonator belts out ‘Burning Love.’”
Knowing that Angela had actually done the Elvis impersonator wedding bit, Gabe refrained from pointing out that he’d rather go skinny dipping with gators.
“Read my lips. Nothing went zing. Nothing fucking happened. Period.”
Not that Tamara hadn’t tried. And she was a fine one to talk about kinky, leaning over and telling him, just as they’d left the limo to do the red carpet walk into the Golden Globes, that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.
There’d been a time when an announcement like that would’ve given him a boner the size of Alaska, but ever since his first movie, where he’d been cast in the starring role of the rogue pirate Jean Lafitte, a virtual Aladdin’s cave of gorgeous, available women had opened up to him. In the beginning, he’d done what any healthy male would do when gifted with such a scrumptious smorgasbord of female dessert—he’d feasted.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t taken him long to discover that even the sweetest desserts could become boring. And it was hard to value anything that came too easily.
“Hell.” He dragged his hand through the shaggy hair he’d been growing for an upcoming role as a borderline crooked, New Orleans cop. “I’ve got to get out of town.”
“Like there’s any place on the planet the paparazzi won’t find you.”
He’d spent a sleepless night thinking about that.
“There’s one place.”
Gabe had never planned to return to his hometown of Blue Bayou. Then again, he sure as hell hadn’t planned to end up in a mess like this, either.
Besides, it wasn’t as if he had anywhere else to go.