What I Did for Love (Wynette, Texas #5)(74)

She leaped up. “I want a fake ring. I liked having a fake ring. Why don’t you ever do what you’re supposed to?”

“Because I can never figure out what that is.” He dropped the sink stopper and began washing off her not-fake ring. “When we get back downstairs, I’m going to pull Rory away. Don’t let anybody interrupt us, okay?”

“Georgie!” Meg called from the bottom of the stairs. “Georgie, you need to come down here. You have a guest.”

How could she have a guest with a guard stationed at the gate?

Bram grabbed her hand and slipped the ring back on. “Let’s be a little more careful this time.”

She stared down at the big stone. “I paid for this, didn’t I?”

“Everybody should have a rich wife.”

She jerked past him and hurried along the hall. Halfway down she stopped.

Her ex-husband stood at the bottom of the stairs.





Chapter 17




Meg tugged nervously on an amber earring. “I told him he couldn’t come in.”

Lance looked as bad as someone so buff could possibly look. He was apparently growing both a beard and long hair for his next action film because he had an inch of unkempt black scrub sprouting from his jaw, and his dark hair hung unevenly around his square face, not an attractive look, although one that was certain to improve after his hair and makeup people got done with him. His coffee-stained T-shirt stretched over the bulging muscles he spent several hours a day maintaining. Narrow braided bracelets, similar to Meg’s headband, but more frayed, hung at his wrist, and he wore sandals made of rope and canvas. Skillful dentistry had shaped his strong white teeth, but he’d never let anyone touch his slightly crooked nose. His press kit said he’d broken it in a teenage street fight, but he’d really tripped on the front steps of his college frat house and been too frightened of surgery to have it fixed.

“Georgie, I’ve left half a dozen messages. When you didn’t call me back, I was afraid—Why wouldn’t you call me back?”

Her fingers curled around the railing. “I didn’t want to.”

Like most of Hollywood’s leading men, he wasn’t exceptionally tall, barely five feet nine, but his granite jaw, manly chin-cleft, soulful dark eyes, and pronounced musculature compensated for his lack of height. “I needed to talk to you. I needed to hear your voice, to make sure you’re all right.”

More than anything, she wanted him to grovel. She wanted to hear him say he’d made the biggest mistake of his life, and he’d do anything to get her back, but that didn’t seem to be happening. She came down one step. “You look awful.”

“I drove here right from the airport. We just got in from the Philippines.”

She forced herself the rest of the way into the foyer. “You were in a private jet. How tough could the trip have been?”

“Two of our people got sick. It was—” He glanced over his shoulder at Meg standing guard behind him. She’d kicked off her orange boots, and the way her bare ankles emerged from her blue leopard-print leggings made her look as though she’d been dipped upside down into a tub of melted crayons. “Could we talk? Privately?”

“No. But Meg has always liked you. You can talk to her.”

“Not anymore,” Meg said. “I think you’re a creep.”

Lance hated not being adored, and distress flickered in his eyes. Good. “Send me an e-mail,” Georgie said. “I have guests, and I need to go back to the party.”

“Five minutes. That’s all.”

An alarming thought struck her. “Photographers are all over the place. If they spotted you driving in—”

“I’m not that stupid. I was driving my trainer’s car, and the windows are dark, so no one could see in. Somebody buzzed me through the gate.”

Georgie didn’t have any trouble figuring out whom. The kitchen had an intercom, and Chaz had to know how much Georgie would hate having Lance show up. Georgie slipped her thumb into the pocket of her chinos. “Does Jade know you’re here?”

“Of course. We tell each other everything, and she understands why I need to do this. She knows how I feel about you.”

“And exactly how is that?” Bram sauntered down the stairs. With his rumpled bronze hair, world-weary tanzanite eyes, and Gatsby whites, he looked like the jaded, overindulged, but potentially dangerous heir to a lost New England liquor fortune.

Lance moved closer to Georgie, as if he needed to protect her. “This is between Georgie and me.”

“Sorry, sport.” Bram ambled into the foyer. “You lost your opportunity for a private chat when you traded her in for Jade. You poor bastard.”

Lance took a menacing step forward. “Stop right there, Shepard. Don’t say another word about Jade.”

“Relax.” Bram rested an elbow on the newel post. “I have nothing but admiration for your wife, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever want to be married to her. Very high maintenance.”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Lance said tightly.

Even though Bram was considerably taller than her ex-husband, Lance’s perfect physique should have made him a stronger presence. But somehow Bram’s lethal elegance gave him an edge in the macho wars. She couldn’t help wondering how a woman like herself had ended up married to two such impressive men.