The sound of two women laughing caught their attention. They turned to look, and Michael recognized one of them as the production assistant he’d dated a couple of times.
“Gotta run,” Jack said, already striding toward the two women.
Michael walked outside of the gym, where he paused and stopped in the middle of the walk, his hands on his hips.
It had to be karma. Marnie, Eli’s girlfriend, was always talking about karma. If they signed a really great gig, she said it was karma. If they turned down a gig, she said it was karma. If they ordered pizza in, she said it was pizza karma. Okay, that was a little overboard, but if this wasn’t karma, then it sure was one hell of a coincidence.
Granted, the guys were always trying to set him up for a fall, to get back for their chief complaint that he took all the women out of the available women pool. Okay, so he had a reputation, but so what if he’d had a few flings? Variety was the spice of life. And honestly, no one was more surprised than him each time a woman would consent to go out with him. There was still a nerdy little kid inside him, wishing Candace Flores would notice him.
“I hate going anywhere with you and that romance-novel face,” Cooper had complained one night when they’d gone clubbing and everyone had been rejected—except Michael. Michael had met a young woman from Kansas who intrigued him and gave him her number. “It ain’t right, man. Five women walk up, and all five of ‘em are looking at you.”
Michael had laughed, but Jack had agreed with Cooper. “I don’t know what it is about you, Raney, but you always leave us out in the cold,” Jack said. “Women flock to you like flies to a dead cow.”
“That’s such a touching image, Jacko—I didn’t know how you truly felt,” Michael had responded with a grin.
“You know what I mean,” Jack had groused. “You just need to get your own bar with your own little throne and let them line up around the block. Coop and I will just hang out in pool halls with the rest of the rejects until we die.”
Michael had tried to tell these idiots more than once that he found the whole idea of his appeal extremely funny, but they didn’t want to hear any of that; they preferred to bitch about it. Nevertheless, it was the God’s honest truth that Michael Raney had once been the biggest geek on the planet. A nerd through and through, a stupid little moron growing up in the Illinois foster care system.
He’d passed through six foster homes in all, never truly integrating into a single one of them. His many foster siblings had glommed on to the tough kids and shied away from the science-loving nerds like him. And the foster parents? Forget it—they usually had so many kids to deal with that he’d been lost in the shuffle. He and his Erector set had been left alone.
Yet that wasn’t the thing that ate at his adolescent self. What ate at him was that he was essentially invisible to girls, too. He didn’t score as much as a kiss until he was nineteen years old. Hell, he didn’t get as much as a look before he was twenty-four. But then, by some miracle, he had morphed overnight from a nerdy, lonely kid into a man who women flocked to. Why or how, Michael had no idea. It had just happened, and he damn sure hadn’t asked a lot of questions. From that moment on, there had been no looking back.
The only thing that had really mattered to him was that it never end, because Michael Raney loved women. Absolutely loved them. Loved the way they thought and talked and walked and laughed. Loved the way they felt under him when he made love. Loved how delicate they were, how they smiled, how they smelled, how they always picked up after him and complained about his empty kitchen.
He’d been lucky enough to date women across the globe. He’d lived with a diplomat in Paris, an artist in Spain. He’d hooked up with a doctor in Ghana and a teacher in Australia. He’d had numerous flings with actresses at all levels, but the little nerd in him never ceased to be surprised when a woman was truly into him.
Now, here he was, coming full circle around to the one truth he’d figured out about himself: He really did want to cherish one woman above all others. He really did want to make babies with one woman and grow old with her. And out of the many women he’d been involved with one way or another, there had been only one who had stood out, only one he still thought of, only one for whom he wished he could go back in time and redo it all.
Leah.