“I imbibe on occasion.” He suddenly leaned forward, his arms on the table, grinning. “Do you remember the night in Cape Cod? Remember we had that punch—at least we thought it was punch—and we got so bloody drunk?”
“Don’t remind me,” Leah protested with a wince, flicking her wrist at him. “All I remember is waking up the next morning with my head hanging off the bed, wishing I was dead.”
“Believe me, I wanted to put you out of your misery,” he said with a laugh. “I never heard such moaning in my life, and I was feeling pretty miserable myself.”
“I was dying,” she reminded him, tapping her fist on the table to emphasize just how close to dying she’d really come. “And you were laughing at me!”
“I wasn’t laughing, baby, I was just trying to help.”
That small term of endearment rolled off his tongue as if he’d never stopped saying it, and it hit Leah broadside, right upside the head, leaving her speechless. But one look at Michael’s face, and it was obvious that not only had he stopped saying it a long time ago, to hear it now had been as bone-jolting to him as it had been to her. “Sorry,” he muttered, and shoved a hand through his hair, forcing that lock out of his eyes. “Some habits are hard to break.”
She nodded, wished to hell the waitress would appear with that second martini. “So what about the CIA thing, Michael?” she asked lightly, changing the subject. “What did you do?”
He hesitated. “Not a lot. Just some surveillance, that sort of thing.”
“Oh come on. Surely you did more than that. I’ve seen all the Jason Bourne movies, so I know what goes on.”
“Those movies are nothing like reality. The truth is, I filed a lot of paperwork and not much else.”
“No!” Leah scoffed. “Come on, really—what did you do?”
“Just that. What? Do you want me to say I hung out with opium dealers and arms traders and terrorist types?”
“Yes, I want you to say that. Give me something here. Did you have all the cool gadgets? Talking shoes and camera watches? A gun?”
“No, nothing like that,” he said with a grin. “Just me. And a very deep cover. And a lot of paperwork is about all I can say.”
“Come on, please don’t tell me you dumped me for paperwork.”
The smile bled from his face.
“Sorry,” she said, holding up a hand. “But you did dump me.” She was not going to cut him a break on that front.
“I know,” he said, and looked around for the waitress. She was making her way across the room, two martinis on her tray.
“So?” she persisted. “At least tell me where you were.”
He smiled enigmatically; it was extremely annoying.
“Can you at least tell me how you ended up in the movie business? I mean, as a casual observer, it doesn’t exactly seem like a natural career path. You know, spy,” she said, putting one hand down on the table. “Stuntman,” she said, putting the other hand down on the other end of the table.
“I met Jack on a mission,” he said. “We became friends. And then I reached a point where I was sick of living lies and watching my back all the time. I was ready to end that part of my career, but I figured I would end up at a desk job in Langley.”
If only he had. She would have been spared this entire, mind-boggling emotional course. “So why didn’t you?”
He shrugged. “Jack and I became friends because we both loved adventure. We’d hang out, doing some crazy things.” He paused as the waitress set the two martinis down and thanked her with a smile that probably made her melt.
“Anyway,” he said, as Leah took the martini and sipped, “about the time I got ready to quit, Jack had learned to fly anything with wings on the government’s nickel and had retired from the Air Force.”
“So . . . you guys decided to start your own stunt agency?” she asked, becoming less and less disinterested in what had happened to him.
“They did. I came in later. Essentially, Eli, Cooper, and Jack go way back. They grew up together in Texas and developed a love for sports—football, baseball, basketball, rodeo—whatever sport they could play, they played. But when regular sports got to be too easy, they began to create their own sports. They went swimming in mining holes, created dirt-bike trails through the canyons that apparently rivaled the professional circuit. They made a game out of breaking horses without using a bit, and built motorized conveyances that they would race across fallow cotton fields.”
“Wow,” Leah said, impressed.
“By the time they finished college, they were into the extreme side of sports in general. They were experts in white-water rafting, rock climbing, canyon jumping, kayaking, surfing, and skiing—a person could name a sport, any sport, and they had tried it. After college, Jack went into the Air Force. Cooper and Eli weren’t as interested in flying as they were in jumping off buildings and blowing things up, so they headed out to Hollywood to hire on as stuntmen. They got their start working on some of the biggest action films in Hollywood, and before long, they were choreographing huge action sequences.”