Leah picked up her martini and took a sizeable swig of it. “So is that it? Just the four of you?” she asked, still trying to wrap her mind around the notion that not only had the man she’d been so incredibly in love with been a globetrotting spy, but he knew who to call in the Middle East if she should ever need a camel. How was that possible? And more importantly, how come she didn’t get to know it at the time?
“There’s one more person. We were contracted to a do a wedding in conjunction with an extreme sports outing for a couple of high-profile movie stars last year. But none of us knew anything about weddings, so we had to hire a wedding planner. Marnie Banks is her name. The wedding ended up not happening, but she stuck around, mainly because she and Eli ended up stranded on a mountain, and . . . and it’s a long story,” he said with a slight roll of his eyes. “But now they are talking about getting married.”
“It sounds like a great job,” Leah said.
“It is.” He glanced down at his martini. “So . . . what did you do after I left?”
Talk about throwing a bucket of ice water on the party. What did he want to know? That she’d worn pajamas for weeks until Lucy made her change them? Or that she’d been almost incoherent for a month? That she’d felt like her heart had been ripped from her chest and smashed into pieces so small that she still couldn’t find them after five years? Or perhaps he wanted to know how many letters she had written him, some of them begging him to come back, some of them condemning him to a fiery pit of hell?
“Leah?”
The question made her angry—a whole lot of stuff was suddenly bubbling up, all the crap that had taken years for her to lock away. And then he showed up unexpectedly, and it was all erupting all over again. “Nothing,” she said brusquely.
“Did you get the sitcom deal?”
She stared daggers at him. A million retorts skated through her mind, but she said only, “No.”
He looked surprised by that. “So you stayed on Broadway,” he said.
“No.”
His brow furrowed in confusion. “So . . . when did you come to L.A.?”
“About a year after . . . Look,” she said suddenly, pushing the martini away from her. “It’s not fair of you to even ask. If you can’t tell me what happened to you, then I don’t have to tell you what happened to me.”
“Okay—”
“No, not okay, Michael,” she said, feeling, inexplicably, angrier. “None of this is okay. I don’t want to go back, all right? You should have left me alone when I asked you to,” she said, and abruptly picked up her backpack, suddenly desperate to be out of there. “This was a huge mistake.” She thrust her hand into her backpack and found her wallet.
“Why is it a mistake?” he asked as she took out her wallet.
“Please—It just is.”
“Wait—what are you doing?” he asked as she opened her wallet. He put a hand on hers to stop her, but Leah yanked it away.
“I’m leaving.”
“Leah, I am sorry,” he said, and damn him if there wasn’t a bit of exasperation in his voice, as if she were the one being unreasonable here. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that I’ve thought so much about you—”
“Right. Well you obviously didn’t think enough of me to answer my letters,” Leah snapped, and regretted the words the very instant they flew out of her mouth. That had been her problem all her life—speaking without thinking, always popping off before she could think.
“What letters?” he demanded.
“You know what letters.”
“No, I don’t know what letters,” he said, and this time, caught her wrist and held it firmly. Why that should remind her of sex, Leah had absolutely no idea . . . except that they had shared a mutual desire for experimentation, and there had been the time that he’d held her wrists high above her head—
“What letters?” Michael insisted, yanking her back to the present.
“What does it matter? You wouldn’t have answered them. You wouldn’t have written me back to tell me why—” Oh shit. Shit, shit, shit, this was her absolute worst nightmare because there were suddenly tears in her eyes. She could not let him see them, could not let him guess that there were times that she still ached for him, so Leah angrily jerked her hand away from his grip and fumbled in her wallet for money.
“Put your money away,” he said in a low, stern voice as he reached into his back pocket and withdrew his wallet.
“No. I’m going to pay.”
“Leah. Put your wallet away. I brought you here, and I will damn well pay for it,” he said, and fished out several bills and threw them on the table. He stood up, put a hand on the back of her chair, but Leah was already standing before he could do one lousy gentlemanly thing to upset her even more.
They marched out of the restaurant, Michael slightly behind her, Leah desperate to get away from him. “I’m going to take a cab,” she said, looking up the street.
“Don’t be ridiculous. A cab would cost you a fortune from here to Venice Beach.”
“I’m not being ridiculous.”
“Yes you are. Just relax. I’m going to take you home. I am not going to torture you or ask you a lot of questions, or touch you,” he said, and in a complete contradiction, he took hold of her elbow and steered her toward the parking lot.