Seriously, if her heart didn’t stop pounding, it was going to pop right out of her chest.
But waitwaitwait just a damn minute, she thought as the world began to take sharper focus. This was totally unfair! How in the hell could Michael Asshole Raney show up here? How was it possible he could have made the leap from that successful career of a hotshot financier and ended up in L.A. at all, much less on her first feature film?
She abruptly looked at him again to assure herself that she wasn’t hallucinating and that he really was even better-looking five years later. Nope, she wasn’t hallucinating. It was Michael all right, and he still had that same sexy, quiet smile that used to reduce her to complete mush. And yes, apparently it was possible to be better-looking five years later.
“I got this,” Michael said to Cooper, without shifting his gaze from Leah’s face.
“Okay. Just drink some water, Leah, and you’ll be fine,” Cooper said. “I think I’ll go have a chat with Beth.”
Cooper walked away, leaving Leah alone with Michael. She stared blindly at the court, taking big sips of water to keep from talking. In the background, she was vaguely aware of Jack talking loudly about teamwork and safety and how it wasn’t very nice to fire dodgeballs at other people’s heads or something like that, and how Beth wouldn’t be playing any more dodgeball because of her disregard for the rules, but the whole thing was fading to background noise.
She was still having serious trouble catching her breath. It felt as if there was a vice around her heart. All the things she thought she’d say if she ever saw him again had vanished into thin air, and the only thing in her head now was one question: Why?
She definitely wasn’t going to ask him that. Okay, Leah, she told herself, do NOT be a wimp. So what if he is not seeing you exactly at your best? This is YOUR film and YOU can do this, you can do this, you can do this, she chanted in her head.
She wasn’t looking at him, but she could feel him, every single inch of him, strong and hard and warm.
“Leah . . . I don’t know what to say,” Michael said at last. “I didn’t notice your name on the list.”
Be fabulously successful! Be nonchalant! Be someone who is glad she moved on! “Oh,” she said, finally forcing a smile. “Well, that’s probably because it’s not Kleinschmidt anymore.”
“No?”
“No,” she said, screwing the lid back on the water bottle, her consciousness rousing from its fog of confusion to take hold. She had shortened it because she’d gotten such a bad rap for being a basket case after he’d left her, but that didn’t sound very glamorous. “It’s Klein. I shortened it for my acting career.”
God, that sounded even more stupid than the real reason. She’d been on top of the world when she’d last seen him, and now she could barely get a gig.
“It was a good move,” she added, upping the stupid quotient to moronic. A good move? she yelled at herself. Jesus, she couldn’t even act fabulously successful. No wonder her acting instructor said she didn’t know the meaning of the word spontaneous.
Okay, but it didn’t matter, because she didn’t owe this man an explanation about anything. Not her name, not her spectacular fall from the Broadway marquee—Nothing. If anyone owed anyone any explanations at all, it was him.
“This is so weird,” Michael said again with a funny little smile.
“Weird? I wouldn’t call it weird,” Leah snorted. “I mean, granted, it’s not every day you run into old, ah . . . okay, all right, you are definitely the last person I expected to see here,” she admitted. “But it’s not that weird.”
Okay, that was pretty good. Breezy, sort of like an old school acquaintance, nothing more.
Michael chuckled. It was a warm, familiar sound that slid all over her, trickling down her spine, reminding her of how he used to chuckle in her ear when they were fooling around. “You are definitely the last person I thought I’d see, too,” he said, and smiled fully, his teeth still white and straight and damnably sexy. “So how are you, Leah?” he asked, peering too closely. He was probably trying to figure out what he saw in her back then.
“Me? Great,” she said, nodding enthusiastically. “Oh yeah, I’m doing great,” she said, flinging one arm out to emphasize how great, and flashed him an I’m-doing-great! smile before turning her attention to the dodgeball game they had just started.
“I always knew you’d end up in Hollywood,” he said quietly.
The soft timbre of his voice dredged up a memory so deep that Leah’s heart sank a little deeper. She was instantly transported back to one snowy night high above the streets of Manhattan, when they had lain in his bed after making love, their naked bodies entwined, talking about the future. “I want to be a film actress,” she’d said. “Not Broadway. Film. Do you think that’s crazy?”