“Kleinschmidt?” someone echoed.
“Oh. My. God,” she said, squeezed her eyes shut, and wished she’d been knocked out cold.
Chapter Four
IT was no nightmare, unfortunately, because when Leah opened her eyes again, Michael had come closer. Cooper helped her up and sandwiched her between Michael and himself so they could walk her over to the bleachers and check her over.
As if the whole scene wasn’t bone-jarring enough, Trudy’s frowning head popped up over Cooper’s like a jack-in-the-box. “Hey, are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine, I’m fine!” Leah said, jerking back from Michael’s peering at her head. “This is so stupid. I just tripped and embarrassed the hell out of myself, but that’s it,” she insisted, swatting Cooper’s hand away from her jaw.
“Actually, it looked like you stopped and then tripped,” Trudy clarified. “Right over your own two feet.”
Leah wished someone would just shoot her now. “Thanks, Trudy.”
“You know, someone ought to do something about her,” Trudy said, tapping Cooper’s shoulder with her finger and pointing to Beth. “That chick was aiming for Leah’s head.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Cooper said. “You can go back to your army now. We’re going to start another game in a minute.”
“You better take care of it, pal, or you’re going to have a mutiny on your hands. They’re already talking about it,” she whispered, nodding fiercely in the direction of some of the Starlets. “Do you want me to stay?” Trudy asked Leah.
“No. I’m fine.” Leah smiled brightly to prove it, but she wasn’t fine, how could she be fine? She felt absolutely ill. A rush of old and long-buried feelings were gushing up and drowning her—hurt, anger, humiliation, to name a few.
Trudy shrugged, handed her a bottle of water before reminding Cooper to do something about that chick, and then disappeared behind him again.
Leah didn’t want water, she wanted a giant shot of tequila and a single minute with no noise, no one asking her how she was, just so she could think, because her mind was whirling hard and fast around the unbelievable coincidence that after all these years, Michael Raney would show up here, on this studio lot, of all the places in the universe.
It was so unreal that she glanced at him again out of the corner of her eye. His expression was full of concern, and he put a hand on the small of her back the way he used to do a hundred million years ago when they were together and he’d lean over to tell her something.
What made the whole scene outrageously bad was that while she probably had a huge welt on her head where she’d hit the floor, and was wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt and no makeup, he looked so damn good. He still had that sexy thick, collar-length black hair and penny-colored eyes. And he was nicely tanned, too, with little lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes. To top it all off, he had a dark stubble of beard.
That stubble had always been her undoing.
Dammit, had he always been so gorgeous? His lips that full? His jaw that square? This sexy? Her mind suddenly flashed back to a night he’d gone down on her with that stubble . . .
She couldn’t look at him. She glanced at the bottle of water Trudy had given her and pretended to read the label so he wouldn’t know it was official—that seeing him again after all these years had knocked her completely off her axis. She was spinning off into the universe without a net.
God, she was so unprepared. So self-conscious. The weird thing was, Leah couldn’t even count how many times during the years she thought she’d seen him—the way some guy would get in his car would make her think it was him, or she’d see the back of a man on the street ahead of her and know it was him. Worse, there were times she’d fantasize about seeing him again, but in her fantasies, she was gorgeous and skinny and fabulously successful and— here was the important part—always with another guy. That was really key to the casual encounter with an ex— she had to at least appear to be way better off without him. At that moment, she’d have given her life to appear to be better off without him.
After that awful night in New York when he’d dumped her, she hadn’t seen him again. Actually, no one saw him again. He just vanished. He’d gone off to Austria or God knew where and her life had been completely shattered by one simple phrase: I am leaving and I’m not coming back.
It had taken Leah a long time to get over him, but she really thought she’d done it—she’d been so sure she’d done it—yet judging by the fact that she was having to remind herself to breathe just now, it was impossible, even after five years, to see the man she had once considered the love of her life and not sink into despair with a sick sort of longing.