“Did you want some help?”

His eyes glued themselves to the patch of skin above her panties, where her hand toyed with the shirt hem.

Damn. Her.

How could Shannon play games like this when their split had nearly killed him?

“No, thanks,” he said, turning back to the makeshift shelter he was setting up. Seeing Shannon undressed had the power to make him stupid.

“Then I’ll just take my pilfered hotel soap and find someplace private to put this rainfall to work.” She waved a tiny white bar she must have picked up at the resort.

“Shannon?” he called as she started to walk away.

She turned, her wet hair sliding against her shoulder as she looked at him expectantly.

“You know you’re killing me, don’t you?”

Her sole response was a smile, before she and her pink panties disappeared into the darkness….

Dear Reader,

There’s something sexy about a rock ‘n roll hero. I think we love our musicians because they are a new incarnation of the poet/troubadour. Their lyrics touch our hearts and speak to our experiences, setting our lives to song. And at the most basic level, what woman doesn’t approve of the man who can move her hips?

For this book I decided to look beyond that cool rocker facade to the man beneath and see what it might be like to fall in love with a guy who is in the public eye. A guy women around the globe vie for. Of course, the story got a little more complicated when I gave my rocker a heroine who was every bit as in demand as him.

I hope you enjoy Shannon and Romero’s journey. And the next time your own life journey takes an unexpected turn, keep in mind that sometimes being lost is the only way to find yourself.

Happy reading,

Joanne Rock

She Thinks Her Ex Is Sexy…
JOANNE ROCK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Three-time RITA® Award nominee and Golden Heart winner Joanne Rock is the author of more than thirty novels for Harlequin Books. She is fascinated by what draws people together, and she finds inspiration for her books while studying Myers-Briggs profiles, astrology charts, Enneagrams and the occasional personal ad. Whether she is writing a medieval historical or a sexy contemporary story, she enjoys exploring the dynamics that create a lasting relationship. Learn more about Joanne and her work by visiting her at joannerock.com or at myspace.com/joanne_rock.

Books by Joanne Rock

HARLEQUIN BLAZE

108—GIRL’S GUIDE TO HUNTING & KISSING

135—GIRL GONE WILD

139—DATE WITH A DIVA

171—SILK CONFESSIONS

182—HIS WICKED WAYS

240—UP ALL NIGHT

256—HIDDEN OBSESSION

305—DON’T LOOK BACK

311—JUST ONE LOOK

363—A BLAZING LITTLE CHRISTMAS

“His for the Holidays”

381—GETTING LUCKY

395—UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

HARLEQUIN HISTORICAL

749—THE BETROTHAL

“Highland Handfast”

758—MY LADY’S FAVOR

769—THE LAIRD’S LADY

812—THE KNIGHT’S COURTSHIP

890—A KNIGHT MOST WICKED

To Arianna Hart, who adores those rocker

heroes the same way I do.

Thanks for being such a fabulous friend!

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

1

“EVERY SINGLE PERSON in this hotel is getting it on right now except me.” Shannon Leigh cradled her cell phone against one shoulder as she packed her suitcase in the exclusive Mexican seaside resort, her emotions in more disarray than her stale career. “It’s like the Cupid wedding theme ran wild and infected every employee and guest in the place. I just went to hunt down more towels, and even the maid is getting busy in the supply closet.”

“Eeeww.” Shannon’s agent, Ceily, was back home in L.A. She started her day at 6:00 a.m. so Shannon hadn’t felt terribly guilty about waking her at five to share the trauma of this Valentine weekend wedding from hell.

Shannon’s best friend had gotten married in a romantic private ceremony in La Paz on the Baja Peninsula and Shannon had been the maid of honor. Too bad she’d agreed to the Cupid fest before the best man—her rock-star boyfriend of almost a year—had broken up with her. She’d been stuck watching him charm his way through the wedding, with adoring female guests throwing themselves at his feet wherever he went. She’d been due to finally escape the night before—until her charter flight had been canceled because of engine trouble. A situation Romero had heard about during the reception, promptly and publicly offering to drive her back to L.A. the following morning.

Now technically today.

How could she have refused gracefully without drawing more attention to a breakup that still had the tabloids buzzing three months after the fact?

Shannon had no idea how she would survive the long trip ensconced in a small sports car with one of the sexiest men in the known universe. And that wasn’t just her opinion. Look up any poll on hot rockers and Romero Jinks topped the charts. She just wanted to get the hell out of the sex-drenched hotel and back to real life. Back to salvaging her imperiled career.

“Tell me about it. I was trying diligently to avoid any more romance references after the overexposure to pink roses, pink champagne and pink bridesmaid dresses. Then I have to stumble into a storage-room orgy.” She yanked the lemon-yellow dress she’d worn to the rehearsal dinner from the closet and tossed it onto the bed, trying not to think about how long it had been since she’d had sex. Three months without Romero had been—lonely. But even before that there’d been the fights and the nights alone in his king-size bed while he made love to his damn guitar instead of her.

Their relationship had been deteriorating for months from lack of communication and—often—lack of presence on the same continent. She’d needed to talk and connect with him, while he preferred long stretches of brooding alone time that fueled his music and left her frustrated. The whole precarious situation had imploded over the stupidest fight ever when he’d bought new hiking boots for his entire entourage but hadn’t bothered to toss a pair in her direction.

She’d been petty to erupt about something so superficial, but it wasn’t about the damn boots. She’d been tired of being a nonentity to him, while he’d meant so much to her.

“You should totally report her, and I don’t want you using those towels.” Ceily’s voice cracked, no doubt because she hadn’t had her morning coffee or her first cigarette of the day, which, bizarrely, seemed to clear her throat.

Shannon’s high-heeled slipper caught in the strap of her sequined bag and she tripped, twisting her ankle. And shouldn’t she know better than to march around the room in a snit? How many times had she cringed as a kid when her mother threw tantrums?

“Damn it!” She cursed the satin-and-rhinestone slippers and kicked them both off, sending them sliding along the terrazzo floor covered with Navajo rugs. “I can’t report her because I didn’t actually catch her boinking the night manager. I just saw her blouse all wrinkled and her hair undone while he pretended to look around a ten-by-ten storage room for his clipboard.”

She threw the sequined bag into her vintage canvas luggage and rubbed her leg, not giving Ceily time to comment before another thought occurred to her.

“Come to think of it, their act to cover up what they’d been doing was so good, you should be sending them on casting calls instead of me.” Her ankle throbbed, but not nearly as much as her heart aching at the thought of her career in a downward spiral along with her romantic life.

She’d received no serious offers for roles after her last part in a “B” thriller, a sure sign she was closing in on the end of her marginal profession as an actress. She had a backup plan to move to New York and try theater, but that hadn’t been her dream when she’d watched her movie-star mother throw away her own career to drug addiction and bad choices.

Shannon had always thought she’d be able to mold a stronger, healthier path through Tinseltown than her mom, but after almost fifteen years of effort, she hadn’t even come close to Bridget Leigh’s fame. Still, she wouldn’t be so blue about any of it if the career news hadn’t come so hot on the heels of her breakup.

This weekend sure had rubbed Shannon’s nose in all of her failures. Her best friend had made her trip down the aisle the day before, even though Shannon had spent twice as long in a committed relationship as Amy. While she was happy for her bud, Shannon’s eleven-and-a-half-month stint with Romero had gone up in flames and it still hurt to be reminded of what she’d lost. She’d even had to close the French doors overlooking the ocean to drown out the chorus of orgasmic sighs drifting on the breeze.

Unfortunately, shutting the door didn’t shut down the conviction that one of the orgasmic sighs came from the woman her guitar-playing ex-boyfriend had danced with three times at the reception.

“Shannon, I will find you a great part,” Ceily assured her. “You’re good at what you do and you’re a professional. You know as well as I do how rare that is in this business.”

“Rare like women over thirty?” Rising from the bed, she stuffed her pink bridesmaid dress into her suitcase, remembering how fantastic Romero had looked in his tuxedo on the beach the day before.

“Honey, tell that to Goldie Hawn.”

“A glittering exception to the rule,” Shannon grumbled, in no mood to be placated when her life in Hollywood was very possibly over. Why did Romero have to prod their limping relationship into gasping heart failure right when the rest of her world was coming apart? Especially since she’d been so careful to shield his artistically sensitive self from her problems so as not to disrupt his all-important songwriting. “Although I have no business dragging all my problems to your doorstep. I just wanted to tell you not to worry about the dogs today. I’ll be home in time to feed Abbott and Costello tonight.”

Assuming, of course, she made it back to L.A. and her two Pekingese-Chihuahua mixes without succumbing to the temptation to drag Romero off to a Mexican hideaway and remind him exactly how good they’d been together. A juvenile move that would feel great in the short run and only hurt more tomorrow. She’d made it three months without him, hadn’t she?

She moved back to the closet and promptly stumbled on the slippers she’d tossed moments before. One pedicured toenail banged against a satin buckle on the discarded shoes and broke, tearing halfway across the nail bed. Pitching both slippers into the suitcase, where she should have put them in the first place, she hopped on one foot toward her purse to find a bandage for her injured ankle.

“Shanny, you don’t need to apologize.” Ceily’s voice went maternal and soft, reminding Shannon of how many ways this woman had filled the void in her life after her superstar mother had overdosed. Shannon had been celebrating her fourteenth birthday with friends when her mom had taken too many sleeping pills. She’d never figured out if it had been intentional or not, but even after all the fights with her mother, Shannon missed her moments of clarity. When Bridget Leigh wasn’t drugged up or foisting her own insecurities onto Shannon, she had been one of those bright light personalities that outshone anyone else in the room.

Shannon was clearing an unexpected lump from her throat when Ceily spoke again.

“Honey, since you’ve got that long ride home with your ex today, I wondered if you would ask him to call me? I met a producer who knows that I rep you, and he asked me about the possibility of getting Romero to play himself in a docudrama about his old band, Jinxed.”

Shannon dropped the bandage she’d found, the white wrapper slipping back into the uncharted depths of a purse filled with everything from her BlackBerry to a twelve-piece makeup brush set. Shannon’s current career choices consisted of a sleazy independent film about her actress mother’s life or a role on the smalltime theater circuit off Broadway, yet Romero didn’t even need to pursue acting to find film roles.

“You want me to ask him?” Shannon couldn’t help a quick mental image of herself pouring a pound of salt in the gaping wound of her chest. And, yeah, a bit of her ego smarted here, too. “Our careers became a bit of a sore subject for us, Ceily.”

Part of it was because they couldn’t find the right balance of work and romance. Part of it was because she struggled to get ahead in her job while everything Romero touched turned to gold.

Or maybe that’s just how she felt every time he touched her. Fortunate. Fantastic. Priceless.

And, oh, God, she couldn’t stand the thought of him touching another woman when he’d been her man just three short months ago. From his killer dark eyes to the shoulder-length, silky black waves that would have done an eighties hair band proud, Romero was seriously hot. Even better, he wrote music that was soul deep and complex. His lyrics had seduced her long before the rest of him did.

“If you talk him into it, I’ll slide you a finder’s fee,” Ceily offered while Shannon stared up at the tiled ceiling where a heavy mahogany ceiling fan spun on low speed.

Great. And Shannon could have a bit part in the “babes he’d banged” section of the docudrama. She yanked the headset off her ears to give it a shake.

“Given the way we broke up, I think I’m the last person he’ll want to talk to about his career.” There was a chance she’d been a smidge unreasonable about it in that final fight, telling him he always put his guitar before her. But she’d tried so hard to fit into his life for so long that all the frustrations she’d been stuffing down had bubbled up like red-hot, angry lava. “But for you, I’ll at least mention it.”

“Excellent. And from my memories of the two of you together, I’ll bet he pays more attention to you than you realize.” Ceily sighed with the dreaminess of someone who’d only seen the Shannon and Romero relationship from the outside. They’d fooled a lot of people into thinking they were wildly in love before the bottom fell out of a charade Shannon had nursed along out of pure wishful thinking.

She said goodbye to Ceily before hitting the disconnect button.

Ceily’s false impression of Romero still caring tweaked Shannon’s heart more than she would have liked after this long time apart from the man. And, coming on the heels of the sexual symphony in progress around her, the conversation hadn’t exactly improved Shannon’s mood. She’d really thought Romero could be the one, yet he’d looked as if the breakup was no big deal to him when he’d soaked up feminine admiration and the La Paz sunshine yesterday. He’d never given her reason to be jealous in the past, but she wasn’t foolish enough to think he hadn’t moved on. Women had always—would always—throw themselves at him.

Flopping down onto the pillow-top mattress with her hair wrapped in a towel full of deep conditioner, Shannon squeezed her eyes shut tight and prayed for the next twenty-four hours to be over with as fast as possible. Romero had told her to meet him at ten that morning, but she would be ready to leave in five minutes.

She just wanted to get back home so she could officially end this chapter of her life. Once she moved to New York, she would put her movie career and her too-sexy ex behind her for good.

“CAN’T YOU GO ANY FASTER?”

Romero Jinks tightened his grip on the steering wheel at his ex-girlfriend’s latest request, in a litany that had started at nine o’clock that morning with a wake-up call asking him when he’d be ready to leave.

Who woke up at nine after a wedding reception that had lasted into the wee hours of the morning? But that was Shannon. An early bird, a night owl, and all around too much energy for him to keep up with. At thirty years old, she seemed impossibly young to him even though they were only eight years apart. Blond, blue-eyed and built like a fifties pinup girl, she was too sexy by half, but that was only a fraction of her appeal. He’d been drawn by her energy and enthusiasm when they’d first met. She’d been a spark to his creativity and his life, pulling him out of a long writing drought with her vibrancy. He’d been crazy about her until she’d blindsided him with a wealth of frustrations about their relationship, culminating in the stupidest argument he’d ever been a part of.

How many women picked a fight because their guy failed to purchase a pair of hiking boots for her? When he’d offered for them to spend some time apart until she cooled down, she’d promptly pulled his clothes out of the closet and boxed up everything he owned in an all-night packing craze. After almost a year together, she’d created a drama the whole neighborhood had witnessed as she’d methodically carried the crates out to the curb.

“I’m not going any faster.” Romero checked the speedometer and slowed down—not to purposely piss her off, but because he was already doing eighty miles an hour up the Baja Peninsula to reach the California state line as soon as he could. The last thing he wanted was to extend their time in Mexico with a stint in a stink-hole prison cell.

They’d passed the last town, Insurgentes, long ago in the hunt for a shortcut home. He was seriously tearing up his new car driving this fast on pavement that hadn’t seen a road crew in a decade.

A small price to pay if it shortened the trip. Only a few more hours to go and they could split for good. No more saccharine sweet Valentine weddings to trap them back into pseudocouplehood. Playing the best man to her maid of honor, dancing that requisite dance with the woman who’d once meant everything to him, had been exquisite torture to a nerve that hadn’t fully healed.

Of course, he couldn’t blame this trip on anyone but himself, since he’d scrambled to offer her a ride when her flight had been canceled. He’d seen a chance to salvage her pride, knowing damn well her finances wouldn’t support a last-minute ticket out of Mexico. At least not easily. Shannon had tried to hide her dwindling movie prospects from him, but he knew the last couple of parts she’d taken weren’t worthy of her talents.

“Would you like me to drive?” She peered across the console of his new BMW coupe, a vehicle he’d picked up shortly before the Mexico trip. He’d ordered it months ago, thinking it would be fun to have for a trip up the coast to celebrate his first-year anniversary with Shannon.

An anniversary that never happened, thanks to her decision to launch World War Three. He’d postponed picking up the car, considering it now represented his failure. He’d been too blind to see what Shannon was feeling until she’d spelled it out in angry detail after it was too late.

“No, thanks.” He figured the less said, the better. That strategy wouldn’t make the time pass any quicker, though.

“What did you think of the ceremony?” she asked, her fingers clutching the silver Celtic knot on a chain around her neck and raking the pendant back and forth across the tiny links.

She looked incredible in her tight jeans and purple satin shoes with high heels that just barely brought her to five foot eight. She wore a lavender cotton tank top with an ivory satin blazer that had big purple rhinestone buttons in the shape of flowers. A skinny silver scarf hung loose around her neck. The scarf didn’t serve a great purpose now, but he’d seen her tie that sort of thing around her head like a hippie-chick bandanna, or a wrap for a ponytail if she wanted her hair out of her face.

She was a first-class Hollywood diva on the outside, but there’d been a time when he felt as if he knew her better than that—the down-to-earth woman she could be with him at home. He hadn’t seen that side of her in a long while, but then again, he’d been on tour a lot. And he’d been in the music business long enough to know the people you cared about could change while you were out on the road. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d left one woman and returned to—seemingly—someone else.

He just couldn’t recall it ever bothering him this much before.

“Don’t you think that us having a conversation is a bad idea?” He wasn’t going to fall onto a land mine without an attempt to test the terrain first.

“While I realize talking to me is low on your list of preferred activities, what do you suggest we do for the next hundred and fifty miles of scrub and cacti until we start picking up cell-phone coverage again? Crank the radio and hear one of the sexy songs you wrote about me while I slowly became your untouchable muse instead of your living, breathing girlfriend?”

Romero blinked, trying hard to focus on the road while processing her words. He did not want to fight. Would not fight with her. She was clearly spoiling for another go-round but he had no desire to pick through this latest accusation he only half understood.

Untouchable?

He’d never been able to keep his hands off this woman when they were together, except for the weeks when he’d had to bury himself in his work. Writing drained him the way nothing else did, but he hadn’t realized she took it so personally until that night she’d let loose after the hiking-boot incident.

But, damn it, aside from those times when he needed to write, their relationship had always been hot. And Shannon had as much enthusiasm for sex as she did for everything else in life, a fact he’d better not dwell on now or he’d never make it back to L.A. without pulling over and reminding her how freaking touchable she was.

“How about a neutral CD with none of my songs?” He flipped open the tray in the dash where he kept his music, needing a diversion fast. “We can compromise with some old Aerosmith or Nirvana…” He dug deeper until he found one of her CDs, and even went so far as to offer, “Or we can play some Gretchen Wilson.”

Spearing one manicured hand into the CD tray, she retrieved the jewel case and shoved it into her pink faux-leather satchel. As a diehard vegan, she didn’t do real leather.

“You took Gretchen with you when you left? Bad enough you had to make sexy eyes all through the reception at the fawning groupie who swore she loved you since your days with Jinxed.” Shannon clutched her heart like a devoted fan and raised her voice an octave. “And I saw you in Dallas and Houston and Austin and Shreveport—Geez. I thought for sure she was going to whip off her double-D bra and fling it your way to make her point.”

Romero eased the accelerator down again, deciding eighty miles an hour would be a better option than more hours of this. Any minutes he could shave off this trip would be a good idea.

Besides, there was a VW van behind them that had been riding his bumper for the past five miles. Which was ironic as hell, since there wasn’t another vehicle in sight.

“Sexy eyes?” Having grown up in a household full of argumentative types, he took pride in the fact that he didn’t rile easily. He was a pro at avoiding conflict. But if she kept this up, he didn’t see how he’d keep a lock on his cool.

“Yes.” She made an expansive gesture with her hands that was automatic when she got excited. Or mad. “Men’s eyes turn all hot and bothered when they’re mentally undressing someone.”

The van behind them was still bearing down on the sports coupe, so Romero didn’t address the fact that there was no such thing as hot and bothered eyes.

“What the hell is this guy doing?” he muttered instead.

Shannon turned in her seat to peer out the back window, her long blond hair brushing his shoulder and pooling on the console where his hand rested on the stick shift.

“Can’t you outrun him?” She straightened to look at him, her body close to his the way it had been during that one electric dance they’d shared at the wedding reception.

If anyone made him have sexy eyes, it was this woman. Mentally undressing her was pretty much second nature whenever he couldn’t indulge in the real thing.

“What are we, sixteen years old?” He didn’t plan to drag race with some crappy vehicle a car owner would be only too glad to total for the sake of an insurance settlement.

The van swerved out into the other lane on the narrow road, and for a moment, Romero thought he would simply pass them.

“He’s going around us anyway.” Shannon’s eyes followed the vehicle as it pulled up beside them.

Romero slowed down to let the guy pass, glad to be getting rid of him. But the jackass in the van veered closer.

“Hey!” Shannon yelled, a moment before the van swerved hard into the driver’s side of the Beemer.

The scrape of metal on metal seared through him. Romero yanked the steering wheel hard to the right. His tires squealed and one popped as the rubber raked through rocks alongside the road. Scraggly Joshua trees appeared in front of the windshield and the car went airborne as they sliced nose-first down a steep embankment.

Shannon screamed. His predominant thought as the rocky desert rose up to meet them was that he’d give anything to make sure nothing happened to her. When the nose collided with the gritty ground at the bottom of the slope, bits of plastic and metal mangled and crunched until the impact reached the main frame. The steel encasing them fought back and the car bounced down onto its roof.

Romero reached blindly for Shannon, his brain scrambled and blood somehow in his eye as he turned to look for her. He saw a curtain of long blond hair brushing the ceiling and his heart lodged a little deeper in his throat.

“Shan?” His hand found her shoulder and came back sticky.

She was bleeding. The thin trail of blood seemed to originate at the back of her head.

“Shannon?”

He blinked to try to clear away the red haze in his vision. The scent of smoke and burned rubber stung his nose.

Smoke?

Like a bat out of hell he grabbed for his seat belt to free Shannon before the car caught on fire. He might not have lived up to her expectations as a boyfriend, but he damn well would never let anything happen to her.

2

SHANNON BECAME AWARE of the burning odor slowly.

Her neighbor’s cooking was iffy, but she could never remember anything this acrid wafting from next door in the year since she’d bought a house with Romero. A house Romero didn’t share anymore. Besides, she couldn’t be at home, because her bed was way more comfortable than this. Hard objects speared into her back. Water dripped down onto her face. Her lips.

She ran her tongue along her mouth to catch the droplet, since her throat was dry. Only it wasn’t water. It was sweat.

“Shannon.”

“Romero.” Her whole mood shifted as she got her bearings.

She felt him stretched out over her, his hot male body drenched and hard. She couldn’t wait to open her eyes and see it for herself. See him. The man was sex personified.

She reached for him as she wrenched her eyelids open. And, oh, man, Romero Jinks rated high on a woman’s list of faces she’d like to see when she woke up.

He leaned over her, his dark eyes narrowed with concern. His angular face was drawn into stark lines, while a cut oozed blood just below his right eyebrow. He was part Irish and part Mexican, a heritage that had blessed him with inky dark lashes and silky black hair. Women around the globe lusted after him, but for this moment at least, Shannon had him all to herself.

Too bad her head was throbbing with pain at the time she’d managed to snag the honor.

“Are you okay?” His hand skimmed up the back of her neck and the grit against his fingertips made her realize she was lying on the dirt.

There’d been an accident.

Her fingers reached for her Celtic necklace, the only item she wore that meant something to her. She could replace the Louboutin shoes—although perhaps not too soon considering her new budget—but the necklace had been her mother’s. One of the few pieces of jewelry that hadn’t been all about the bling, since cinema sex icon Bridget Leigh had received it long before her life goals involved bringing the men of Hollywood to their knees.

Hollywood had turned out to be a bigger, badder enemy than even her mother could have predicted, driving her to her death before she’d had a chance to overcome her addiction to prescription painkillers. After dealing with a death that had turned into a media frenzy, Shannon had tried to step out of her mother’s shadow and be taken seriously as an actress, a dream that never really took off. And a dream that never would if she accepted film roles like the one Ceily had been waving in front of her nose. Another flesh movie about her mother’s life.

Shannon hadn’t even bothered to read the script.

“I’m fine. How about you? You’re bleeding.” She inched upward before realizing she was practically clinging to Romero for support. Shannon released him in a hurry—she wouldn’t let an adrenaline rush send her back to his arms. Not after he’d addressed her relationship frustrations by suggesting a trial separation. She’d been too devastated by the idea to argue. Besides, the man didn’t argue. He expected people to either be happy with him or, she’d discovered, to be out of his life completely.

“It’s nothing. But you’ve been unconscious for a few minutes. Are you sure you’re all right?” He cradled the back of her head and her nerve endings danced at his nearness.

How many times had he stroked those long, guitar player fingers over her body to elicit soft sighs until he hit just the right note? The temptation to arch up and kiss him, to drag him down to the hard ground with her, was strong.

But hadn’t that been the trouble with them all along? They’d always been so willing to lose themselves in sex, ignoring their problems until they were so monumental that the lack of a pair of hiking boots in a woman’s size six could detonate an entire relationship.

“I’m fine.” She struggled to sit up the rest of the way, needing to escape the touch that had the power to render her brainless in zero to sixty. “But what was with that guy in the van?”

Romero frowned at her, as if he didn’t believe for a minute she was fine, but at last his disarming fingers fell away from her scalp, and he dropped back to sit on his butt in the sand.

They were in the middle of nowhere. No houses or buildings, no signs or highways. Far above them Shannon could see the edge of the road they’d been on, but the embankment was so steep it would be hell to try to climb back up there. Besides, now that she thought about it, she hadn’t seen any houses or buildings on the route they’d been driving. Apart from the van that had run them off the bumpy back road they’d traveled in the hope of taking a shortcut, she hadn’t seen signs of civilization for miles.

“I don’t know, but he had a California state license plate, and you’d better believe I’m going to report his ass to the insurance company.” Romero drew in his long legs, dropped his elbows onto his knees and speared a hand through his hair. “But I don’t have a clue how we’re going to get help.”

“You tried the cell phones?”

“Not yours, but mine doesn’t work and the navigational system in the Beemer is out, so I’d say there’s no coverage here.”

Shannon patted her pocket for her phone and couldn’t find it. “Mine must have fallen out of my jacket when we flipped.” She started to stand. “I’ll go check—”

“No.” He gripped her arm tightly, holding her next to him. “The car smelled like something was burning. You’d better give it time until we’re sure nothing could ignite.”

Sinking back to the sand beside him, she tried to ignore the feel of his hand on her, the warmth of his palm penetrating her jacket to the skin beneath. The firm hold did something dizzying to her senses. She wasn’t some hard-core S and M chick, but she loved to be dominated. It was a fantasy she’d felt safe enough with Romero to share. A fantasy he’d been incredibly skilled at indulging to just the right degree.

Apparently, he’d been sharing some of her thoughts, because his gaze heated for one sizzling second before he released her, turning his attention back to the smoking car.

A wise woman would do the same.

She shoved aside images of Romero pressing her up against their bedroom wall and wrenching her clothes off in a fevered frenzy. Instead, she focused on the BMW perched on its roof, the front end smashed beyond recognition while the radiator hissed steam. A bold blackbird landed on one tire, undeterred by the potential for an explosive situation.

“Thank you for getting me out of there.” She couldn’t show her gratitude by covering his gorgeous mug with kisses, so she settled for the old-fashioned method. “I don’t remember us landing or you pulling me out, but you must have.”

Her heart squeezed at the thought of how close they’d come to death. If the car hadn’t been so well engineered they might not be sitting here right now.

“I’m glad you’re okay.” He shot her a sideways look. “Even if I am a self-absorbed bastard with no appreciation for anyone else’s feelings.”

She recalled the accusation, one of many she’d launched at him during their fight. One of many he’d simply accepted and hadn’t argued about. The fact that he didn’t care enough to argue, to fight for their relationship and her, that had hurt her far more than the lack of hiking boots, or his inconsistent schedule that dragged him away for months on end, then planted him back home for weeks straight, only to hide out in his basement recording studio.

“Yeah, well, clearly you’re having a good day.” She rose to her feet, unwilling to face more reminders of their breakup. The loss of him was still an open wound for her even though he’d been able to roll right on with life without missing a beat. “If that car hasn’t exploded by now, I’m not going to worry about it. I’ll see if I have cell coverage so we can get out of here.”

Shannon wobbled on her heels in the sandy terrain, her unsteadiness as much from her head injury as her impractical shoes.

“Are you in that much of a hurry to leave me?” he called after her.

“I’m not the one who likes to run away when the going gets tough.” She shot the accusation over her shoulder. “But I think you’d agree we’ll both be better off when this trip is over and we can go our separate ways.”

SHE HADN’T TOLD HIM anything he didn’t already know.

Romero was well aware that she’d had enough of him. That had been abundantly clear during the daylong rampage when she called his bluff on the trial separation idea and moved straight ahead to removing him from her life completely. She’d still been spoiling for a fight when he’d pulled out of the driveway with a bag in hand. But he couldn’t help a twinge of regret that she still harbored some resentment toward him even now, when they’d nearly died. Would she have shown up in front of St. Peter’s gate with her score sheet in hand of all the times Romero had ticked her off?

“You’re a hard woman to please,” he muttered, and got up, unwilling to let her be blown up in the hunt for a cell phone that wasn’t going to work anyhow.

“I disagree,” she replied as she hunkered down near the open window of the Beemer and peered inside. “I’m an easy woman to please for people who are willing to engage in the occasional disagreement to work through problems in a relationship.”

Romero’s head pounded with frustration about the car, the accident and the long walk he feared was ahead of them, so Shannon’s latest slam seemed poorly timed.

He bracketed her hips with his hands and hauled her out of the way so he could find her phone for her. She huffed and puffed about it, but he knew damn well she wouldn’t want to crawl around in an upside-down car to retrieve her things.

“Do you have some kind of bionic hearing or what?” He couldn’t imagine how she’d heard him talking to himself twenty yards away from her.

“Hardly. My hearing just seems good to you by comparison because you don’t like to listen and, as a result, hear very little.”

He picked her cell off the visor and removed her purse strap from a bar it was caught on under the passenger seat. Handing both items out to her, he then grabbed his wallet out of the glove box along with some tissues and a first-aid kit.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he removed the keys from the ignition and brought them around to the back of the car.

Finally, words from her mouth that were not arrows aimed at him.

“I’m going to get our suitcases out so we can streamline what we need.” He pried open the trunk with considerable effort, since that had bent, too, but the moment he released the latch, all the suitcases dropped out to the ground with a thud.

“What?” Shannon paced in a nervous circle, her shoes kicking up dirt as she walked, so a dust cloud formed around her ankles. “I haven’t even tried my phone yet. And we don’t know that the car won’t work at all, do we?”

He sent a meaningful look toward the upside-down, torn-up automobile.

“But if we could flip it—”

“It would still have a blown tire, a bent front axle and a slew of engine parts that broke during the fall. Trust me, the vehicle serves no purpose.” He took his keys out of the trunk and didn’t bother to shut it.

“Do we even know where we are?” She bit her lip as she stared down at her phone, and Romero knew she couldn’t get a signal.

“Shannon, there’s no phone service.” He tugged the cell away from her and dropped it in her jacket pocket. “Something like twenty percent of Mexico doesn’t even have electricity, so there are definitely large pockets without cell coverage. We need to figure out which way to walk that will yield some sign of life first. Any guesses?”

“Walk?” Her fingers crept back up to the chain she liked to wear, the one with the Celtic knot, and began to slide the pendant along the links.

It occurred to him that he knew she loved that necklace, but he didn’t have a clue why. For all he knew it could be a bauble from another boyfriend—he’d never thought to ask. The realization tweaked his conscience until he reminded himself he’d been on tour for something like a hundred and fifty days in the past year. Was it any wonder they hadn’t ever really known each other?

The sun cooked the countryside despite the fact that it was February, the heat reflected back by the pale sand beneath their feet. A lizard darted over his boot and he noticed the profound silence that came with being lost in the middle of nowhere.

“C’mon, Shan.” He burrowed in his overnight bag and found a bottle of water to hand to her. “I’ve seen you rock the treadmill for ninety minutes and knock off almost ten miles. I’m sure you can manage a walk to the next town.”

She took the water bottle from him and he noticed two of her nails were broken and the back of her hand was scraped up, no doubt from the accident. He cursed the driver of that van all over again.

Damn it, he would find a way to prosecute that bastard once they returned to the States, no matter what a pain in the butt it was to chase someone down for a crime committed in another country.

“I’m usually a little better equipped for running when I hit the treadmill.” She cracked the bottle top and took a sip. The movement of her lips on the container transported him to other times and places, romantic dates when he’d watched her sip vintage champagne from long-stemmed crystal or purse her mouth around a Jell-O shooter when they went out with friends. Something about the way she moved those full lips reduced him to seeing her through a slow-motion lens, and he had to blink his way out of the encroaching sex fog. He’d lost the right to fantasize about her lips when he’d peeled out of their driveway.

Funny about that—their driveway. No house he’d ever lived in felt as much like home as when they’d moved in together. The pricey piece of real estate had become a haven in no time. And although the house had been a joint investment, he was in no hurry to sell it or see her move out. He’d been staying in a hotel until he figured out where to go next, but he didn’t want to think about living in a house without her in it. Her fashion-conscious dogs. Her frequent ventures into ethnic cooking, from Norwegian to Thai. Her impromptu parties.

“Romero?” She waved a hand in front of his eyes and he remembered how much it drove her crazy when he zoned out.

She figured he wasn’t listening, and maybe she was right, since he didn’t have a clue what they’d been saying. He’d worked so damn hard to shut out his overbearing family from an early age that he’d carried the habit into all his other relationships, including a failed quickie marriage before Shannon. The complaints of his ex-wife hadn’t been all that much different from the frustrations Shannon had expressed.

He just didn’t know how to fix it. A damn shame, since losing Shannon had hurt even more than the breakup of the marriage he’d rushed into. He missed the spark she’d brought to his life with her nonstop energy and her insistence that he enter the world now and then. Before he’d met her, he liked to hole up between tours, working on his music in solitude. But he’d discovered a new way to relax with Shannon, a way to hang out with friends and experience a quiet life without going to ground.

“How do you expect me to walk through the Mexican desert dressed in jeans and three-and-a-half-inch heels?”

Romero peered around at the scrub and patches of grass scattered around the landscape. A thick stand of low trees loomed fifty yards away from where the Beemer had crashed down the embankment.

“Actually, the Sonoran Desert is one of the more kind terrains as far as deserts go because—”

“That’s not the point!” She screwed the cap back on the water and thrust it toward him, her silver bracelets jingling with a resonant hum like a cymbal. The dull thump of her foot on the ground broke the melody. “Don’t you see that I’ve got nothing to wear for hiking around Mexico?”

He scowled, acknowledging this was a cause for concern. He’d brought comfortable clothes for traveling, but Shannon didn’t ever seem to dress that way. Even her exercise outfits looked like something she could go clubbing in at a moment’s notice. Not once in all their time together had he known her to put on a pair of cutoff sweats and a tee for a workout, but then, she’d been hounded by the paparazzi all her life as the daughter of a megastar. She’d confided in him once that she didn’t dare have an “off” day or she’d be roasted in the tabloids for weeks afterward, and with the number her mother had done on her, Romero gathered that she didn’t deal well with too much public scrutiny.

“I’ve got a shirt you can wear.” He wouldn’t have made the offer unless they were in dire straits, since seeing her in his clothes made him seriously hot for her. And possessive as hell.

Then again, looking at a woman in your clothes was only one step away from seeing her with your rock on her hand, and Romero didn’t have any intention of taking that kind of step no matter how possessive he felt about someone. He’d witnessed firsthand how marriage could change a person, with that ill-advised union in his twenties. For that matter, he and Shannon had probably started growing apart the minute he’d made the big leap of faith and asked her to move in with him. He’d try like hell to remember the fact once his Ramones shirt was hugging Shannon’s breasts.

She moved closer to him, frowning down at the contents of his overnight bag as he retrieved the worn black cotton.

“I’m not worried about my clothes so much as my shoes. I only brought high heels for the wedding.” She tucked his shirt into her bag, as if to put it on at a later date, then dropped down onto a flat rock near his leather satchel and stretched her long legs out in front of her.

The same long legs she used to wrap around his waist. Or twine around his in bed when she wanted him to touch her. He could see the outline of her thighs in the taut fabric of her jeans, long slender muscle neatly defined from all those hours on the treadmill. All that time in his bed.

“I can’t help you with the shoes,” he admitted, determined to focus on the problem at hand and not give in to another slow-motion inventory of the ways Shannon Leigh was sexy.

“Yeah. I guess you can’t help me with the shoes.” Her voice went flat. Cold. “Pretty damned ironic that this would have been the perfect time for me to have a pair of freaking hiking boots.”

Okay, so he’d walked right into that one. But if she thought he was going to engage in her war of words when they had hours of walking ahead of them, she had another think coming. He wouldn’t do the argument thing on a good day. And frankly, today sucked monkey butt.

He just hoped they found civilization faster than he feared they would, because while Shannon might have reached her boiling point with him, she had yet to see his. But, sure enough, it was building.

And the fallout wasn’t going to be pretty.

3

UN-FREAKING-REAL.

Big, ugly birds screeched overhead, and Shannon wondered if they were vultures as she pounded out random combinations of numbers on her cell phone. Maybe she could somehow jar the unit into working before the scavengers started to close in. How could she be in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of noisy birds, no real walking shoes and a man who’d put her heart through the wringer? They had no phone, no map, no navigational system, no car. Thankfully, Romero had traveled with two cases of water in the trunk, since he refused to drink any liquid besides alcohol while south of the border.

He unpacked bottle after bottle from the shrink-wrapped carton now, loading up his overnight bag with Evian. His movements were sharp, quick. Angry. His obvious decision to take the higher ground and not engage in an argument with her about the hiking boots might be admirable if he hadn’t taken that route every single time she’d ever had a bone to pick with him. How could they ever solve their problems when he refused to acknowledge them, let alone discuss them?

Residual frustration simmered inside her, but what was the point of rehashing old terrain? He obviously hadn’t thought their relationship was worth fighting over three months ago, since he’d lit out of town on two wheels. She’d heard he’d gone to stay with friends out on Catalina for a few weeks, then he’d taken up residence at a posh Beverly Hills hotel. And in case she wanted to know how he was faring, the supermarket newspapers posted pictures of him tooling around town on his motorcycle or attending glitzy music awards shows. She had no reason to think he’d want to defend his decisions or talk through their issues now.

She’d be better off focusing on getting out of Mexico and back to civilization, away from scrubby bushes and carnivorous birds. She would put Romero behind her. And with any luck, she’d make him eat his heart out at his loss, to boot.

Not that it would be easy while trekking through the desert in jeans and a blazer, since she couldn’t wear his T-shirt without getting seriously turned on. The scent of him lingered in that cotton, as did memories of other times he’d worn it. Other times she’d taken it off him. Hence the need to stuff the thing directly into her bag. But she would find a way to make him regret that he’d left her. Wasn’t that a woman’s best revenge? To have her ex realize he’d made a colossal mistake?

Sauntering over to the spot where he worked to strip down the contents of his bag now overflowing with purified water, Shannon figured she’d better follow his example and sort through the stuff she had to bring with her.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” she asked, just because she hated pronounced silences.

Her mom had been either depressed or bored with her life for as long as Shannon could remember, and her silences had always meant trouble was brewing. Usually that she’d overstayed her welcome wherever her mom was filming and that Shannon would be on her way back home with a nanny before long. She’d worked damn hard to keep her mom too entertained to fall into the long silences and then send her away, but she’d had even less success as a daughter than as a serious actress.

“I tried to take a shortcut off Route 1 back in Insurgentes, where the interstate veers east before coming back west. But I stopped seeing signs a good five miles before we were run off the road.”

She recalled they hadn’t noticed any other vehicle besides the van once they’d left the main route, so even if they could scale the embankment they’d fallen down, it wouldn’t do much good to wait for traffic on a road that had looked more geared to ATVs than real cars. “So we can either backtrack to the highway or try to cut northeast and see if we can meet up with it ahead of us.”

She unzipped her biggest suitcase, the vintage trunk, one of her favorite pieces of luggage, and wondered how she would leave anything behind. Even though they couldn’t see any other signs of two-legged life right now, that didn’t mean looters wouldn’t crawl out from the bushes to make off with her stuff.

“Right.” Romero dug a knife out of a tool kit that had fallen out of his trunk, and stuffed it inside the bag he apparently planned to bring with him. “But if we backtrack, we know the phone won’t work for the whole trip. Whereas if we move forward, we at least have the possibility of finding some kind of cell coverage.”

Shannon glanced at her bridesmaid dress, her curling iron and her hot rollers. None of them would be helpful on a journey through the Mexican desert, but she couldn’t see herself leaving all of it behind either, especially as the dress was the single most expensive item in any of her suitcases. Romero’s trunk latch had broken when he forced it open, so they couldn’t lock it up again. Tugging out the pink garment, she rolled it up tight to pack in the medium-size carry-on bag.

“You’re not bringing that with you.” Romero seemed to be cutting the carpet out of the BMW, for no real purpose that she could see.

“Did I tell you what to pack?” The sun overhead went behind a cloud and she noticed for the first time the day turning overcast. The ugly birds that had been stalking them had taken off, but she didn’t know if that meant impending bad weather or that the carrion-eating rats with wings had gotten tired of waiting for them to die.

“No, but that’s because I have the greater good in mind instead of thinking about what to wear tomorrow.” The carpet he’d been sawing at flopped on the ground, the underside stiff and rubberized.

“I’m not wearing this dress tomorrow.” In fact, she’d never wear it again, since the first thing she had to do when she returned home, after feeding her dogs, was post the garment on eBay to try to make a little money back on the ridiculously expensive piece. “But it’s Vera Wang. I can’t bloody well leave it in the desert for thieves.”

Any woman of Shannon’s acquaintance—and most of the men, for that matter—would have understood. A vein in Romero’s temple throbbed so hard it looked like it might well explode.

How could he walk out on her without a fight, and yet a dress brought out the ferocious beast in him?

“I think thieves are the least of our problems. Put the dress back and take the rest of the water I couldn’t fit in my bag.” He exaggerated the articulation. Clearly, he thought she was a moron.

“You know I may not have all the right survival skills to make it in the Mexican desert.” It looked like a freaking desert to her, damn it. She tossed bottle after bottle of water on top of the Vera Wang as a compromise. “But I’ve lived in Hollywood on my own since I was fourteen, becoming an emancipated minor at sixteen after my guardian aunt spent all my mom’s fortune.” Not that her personal history wasn’t known by every Hollywood insider, outsider and tabloid, considering her mother’s fame. “That means I’ve been surviving for over a decade in a jaded jungle full of people who wanted to tear me down, or at the very least, expected me to turn into my druggie mom. And not only have I managed to have a successful career—” okay, so she’d fudged that part, but this was her rant “—I’ve also never been photographed naked, never threw up in a nightclub, never got in a fight with the paparazzi, and not once did I cave to addictions that spit people out by the dozens every day in Los Angeles. The mere fact of my existence speaks to my intelligence, don’t you think?”

When she had all the bottles of water in her bag, she zipped it up and stared at him, daring him to tell her what to do again.

“I hope you’ve got everything you need in there, since you don’t have an ounce of space left.” He glared meaningfully at her bulging bag.

She didn’t. She had to have her face cleanser and a few other toiletries. But she could stuff those in the side pouches, couldn’t she? She was about to fire off a sharp retort when she remembered the movie script. Even though the treatment was for some crummy indie film cashing in on her mother’s fame, her ass would be grass if someone else got their hands on the screenplay and leaked it.

“Crap.”

Romero was at least wise enough to go back to peeling the carpet out of the trunk instead of gloating. Maybe that was a benefit to being with a man who never argued. He didn’t jump down her throat when she messed up, either. Sighing, Shannon sank to her knees to retrieve the one item she couldn’t jam into some tiny side flap. The padded manila envelope contained the project that represented Shannon’s only offer to stay in Hollywood. Not that she was taking it.

From Ceily’s description, Shannon knew the movie was about her poor mother’s arrival in Tinseltown, and her rise to fame that had included nude spreads in a variety of men’s magazines and rumors that she’d used sex to get some of the industry’s juiciest roles. Later, she’d descended into drugs, alcohol and depression. Nothing the public hadn’t heard about before.

Baby Doll would be a movie about a woman’s use of sex to get her way—a theme Hollywood producers loved. But Shannon had managed to have a sixteen-year career without taking her clothes off or playing the sexpot. Her mother had been famous for both, blazing through Hollywood with studio directors and producers panting at her heels. Bridget Leigh had elevated sensuality to an art form.

No, Shannon didn’t want to do a movie focused on all the things she resented most about her mom, the things that took Bridget away from her daughter before they could fix their dysfunctional relationship. But the script couldn’t stay here, either. Vera Wang would have to go.

“Is that the proposal for the film about your mom?” Romero had set aside his knife and rolled up the carpet tightly with a bungee cord around it.

He stuffed the long roll into an elastic side strap on his overnight bag, which was more functional than label conscious. Romero had never been about high fashion or glitz, even in his days with bandmates who wore eyeliner like it was going out of style. Hence his decision to invest a few grand in a new brand of hiking boots to help give the fledgling company a PR boost. He liked to fish on the weekends and take a boat out to Catalina.

“Yes.” She hadn’t wanted anyone to know she was desperate enough even to consider this kind of film. Especially not a man she wanted to eat his heart out. “I’m probably not going to do this project, since I have a lot of other things in the works.”

Like a play so far off Broadway she’d probably be playing Staten Island.

“But it’s important enough to sacrifice the Vera Whatever for it.” He retrieved some energy bars from his glove compartment before moving to where she bent over her suitcase, firing water bottles out onto a thin brown patch of grass.

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

His nearness rattled her far more than the threat of a downpour. They were even closer than they’d been in his car. His knee grazed hers. The veins on his bicep bulged from his battle ripping out the carpet. The scent of clean male sweat mixed with the bay rum of his soap in some kind of alchemy wizardry that created an instant aphrodisiac. Or maybe that was just because thinking about sex was easier than picking through her reasons for saving the script over the monetarily valuable bridesmaid’s dress.

“It’s not my script to leave in the middle of the desert.” She dodged further argument, stuffing the treatment into her suitcase and packing the pink dress back into the larger of her suitcases, which would have to remain with the ruined automobile. “Much as I might like to line a few birdcages with some of the tripe I’ve read about my mom.”

Shannon watched his broad hands wrap around one water bottle after the next as he repacked her smaller bag, her body remembering the feel of those warm fingers stroking up her back in the night. He’d told her once that the length of his fingers made it easier to play guitar. Musician’s hands. But she’d been as impressed with the way he played her body, always able to coax a response from her no matter how tired or overwrought she felt from the daily grind of life on the set.

God, she’d almost forgotten how great those days had been. She’d spent so much time alone while he’d been on tour. Then, even after he’d come home, she had lost him to his music all over again while he’d worked on a new CD. Maybe she’d put too much emphasis on talking, since right now she could picture herself being damn content with not speaking at all and just…touching.

“You don’t like the film because it’s low budget.” Romero zipped the bag, his forearm brushing her knee. The contact made her eyes flutter and threaten to close. She loved that sensation.

“Among other things.” She forced herself to focus on what he was saying. The film script. “Even the pictures I made that went straight to DVD were at least produced through major studios. Distribution was assured.”

And she’d been assured her performance would at least be viewed by more than a few hundred people. She didn’t need huge financial rewards from her work, but she dreamed of her skills being appreciated. Her talents shared.

Another clap of thunder made her shove the large suitcase beneath the protective shelter of the overturned car. If there was any chance thieves didn’t steal her stuff, she’d rather not have it water damaged.

“In the music business, great work is usually produced by people who have more freedom to follow their vision. Maybe that script you’re afraid to read will surprise you.”

She rocked back to sit on her heels just as the first raindrop kissed her cheek.

“I’m not afraid to read it.” Liar. That’s why it had been shoved in the back of a drawer since she’d received it a few days after Romero walked out. She’d known the project was coming, and had discussed it with him briefly in the days before he left. She was surprised he even remembered, since he hadn’t commented much at the time.

He’d been in his quiet, brooding musician phase.

“Whatever.” He got to his feet and held a hand to her to help her up. “If you don’t want to take a risk on something more artistic, I understand.”

Shannon nearly fell right back on her butt. Then the heavens opened up and doused them, saving Romero from seeing the smoke pour from her ears at the insult he’d just sent her way with so little thought. He pointed east, apparently showing her the direction they’d be taking on this hike from hell to get back to civilization.

He understood if she didn’t want to make a more artistic movie? Like the rest of her pictures had been total dreck? Besides, this would be a skin flick, wouldn’t it?

Her feet moved alongside his, her toes already protesting the three-and-a-half-inch heels, which sank into the sand with every single step. He thought she didn’t have the creativity to collaborate with a screenwriter? Or did he think she didn’t have the acting chops to pull off the kinds of sexually aggressive scenes she would have to play as the notorious Baby Doll Bridget?

She was no damn prude. And she could act, by God, or she wouldn’t have been offered some theater opportunities in New York, even if they were a little removed from Broadway’s mainstream.

“You think I can’t do something artsy? Assuming I’d have the creative freedom to add some depth to this script?” She stopped in her tracks, unable to stew silently the way he could.

Rain ran in rivulets down his face as he turned to look back at her, the drops chasing each other along the stark angles of his chiseled cheekbones.

“It’s not that—”

“Then you think it’s too sexy for me.”

He was silent for a beat too long.

She could hardly believe it, after she’d fought for so many years to prove she wasn’t her mother, and no one in the industry had bought it. Apparently Romero bought it.

“You’ve always said you didn’t want to be remembered for your cup size.” He reached for her, smoothing aside a section of hair the rain had plastered to her forehead. “Those are your words, not mine.”

Yeah, and they were still totally true. So why was she up in arms about him thinking she couldn’t play the kind of role some would believe she’d been born to play? But then, she’d always been the feeler, reacting on instinct, while Romero was the thinker. Maybe he had a point. And she would have some input into a film about her mom? She hadn’t even considered that, yet it could be a chance to add some substance to the popular vision of her mother.

But that realization didn’t stop her from being just a smidge miffed that he thought she couldn’t carry off the role of a screen siren.

“Then maybe I need a little more practice being sexy.” A flash of indignation had her stepping out of his reach to peel off her satin blazer. The slick fabric was soaked anyhow. Or maybe she was just looking for a way to make Romero suffer the way she suffered around him.

Shannon let the jacket drop on the ground, where she stood and faced the rainstorm in her lavender-colored tank top. Let him feast his eyes on that for a little while and tell her she wasn’t sexy enough.

HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN able to look away if it hadn’t been for the rhinestone bra strap.

He’d been semiprepared for the unveiling of those incredible breasts that she’d inherited directly from her bombshell mother. Shannon had one of those bodies that made men go dumb with sex thoughts—it was just an immutable law of nature. She often wore jackets and blazers or the occasional sweater to deflect the inevitable head-turning stares her body brought her way, so Romero had forced himself not to look south of her chin when her little satin jacket came off.

But damned if the glitter of a cheeky bra strap didn’t catch his eye. It peeked out from under the cotton tank top now molded to her skin, the shimmering stones wrapping around her shoulder and disappearing under the top just above the start of a bra cup. And, yeah, he could see that, too, since her tank top had turned utterly transparent with the rain.

With an effort he raised his eyes, since he’d never been the type to ogle a woman. He’d been brought up better than that, for one thing. His family may have driven him crazy with the constant bickering, but at least they’d instilled good manners. Plus, he’d been solicited by enough beautiful women over the course of his lifetime that he considered himself fairly immune to something as fleeting as looks. But Shannon had always had a unique effect on him. He’d wanted her for reasons that included sex, yet went above and beyond.

When he met her gaze, her blue eyes flashed with a laser intensity he could only describe as insolent. She’d pushed him and pushed him to fight with her—for the past few hours, three months ago, all freaking year. And now she wanted to taunt him with something he craved very, very much.

Big. Mistake.

He shrugged his bag off his shoulders and stalked toward her, rainwater pooling around his feet before being absorbed by the sand.

Her eyes widened.

Two more steps brought him toe to toe with her, invading her personal space and making his presence damn well-known.

“Romero?” She bit her lip as she peered up at him. Her breathing came hard, each inhale bringing her breasts into the barest of contact with his chest. A teasing caress that only added to the fire inside him.

A fire she’d damn well started.

“I don’t think being sexy is your problem.” His hands gravitated to her waist. He knew the layout of her body better than his own, having memorized the spatial relationships of her curves long ago.

He noticed she didn’t have one of her smart-mouth comebacks for him now. A good thing, since he had a better idea for putting her mouth to work.

Inhaling the scent of her, which was intensified by the combination of rain and heat, he bent forward, brushing his lips against hers. He speared his hands up the back of her tank top, splaying them over her skin. Her eyelids fell to half-mast and he moved in for the full taste, his mouth as hungry for her as every other part of him.

If she wanted to play sexual instigator, he planned to show her exactly what she did to him.

4

TOUCHING SHANNON TRIPPED a switch inside him.

No, her peeling off her clothes was what had done him in. The challenge in her eyes as they’d stood in the desert downpour had proved even more difficult to resist than her body, and that was saying a lot considering the woman in his arms.

Her flesh felt hot against him, the warmth of her skin coming through her clothes despite the cooling rain streaking over them. She wrapped her arms around his neck, drawing him close while she arched up on her toes. Her hips gravitated to his, his blood running thick and hot through his veins at the feel of her soft curves against him.

He wanted to take her.

The desert fell away along with the rain, the cacti and the totaled car. All that mattered was getting Shannon out of her clothes and all over him, quenching the burning that fired his skin.

He deepened the kiss and lifted her off her feet, needing to touch every part of her within his grasp. She made a hungry sound in her throat, a soft cry that he recognized all too well as her personal litany of desire—a precursor to a sweet chorus of sighs and moans that were better than any music he’d ever written.

“Shannon.” Her name fell from his lips between kisses, as if he needed to confirm the fact that the woman coming undone against him was the same one who’d churned up more emotions in him in a year than he’d experienced in a whole lifetime before meeting her.

“You make me crazy,” she whispered back, clutching his T-shirt in one hand and a fistful of his hair in the other.

She edged back to look at him while he still held her in the air, suspended off the ground a good couple of inches. His heart slugged hard against his chest, against the softness of her breasts pressed against him, the heat steaming off them where their bodies melded together.

“You make me want to have sex in the middle of the desert.” Which was the same as making him crazy, since he’d never do something like that out here in the open during the middle of a flash flood.

He leaned in to kiss her, to take that mouth of hers and have the last word in this argument between them that never ended. At the last second her hand reached up, applying the slightest pressure to his chest.

“I know it’s no business of mine now that we broke up. But since you just kissed me, I have to ask—did you sleep with that groupie from the wedding?”

It took him long, drawn-out seconds to process her words, since he was so hot he thought he’d explode. When the meaning finally sank in, the icy chill of reality forced him to set her on her feet.

“What are you talking about?” He shook his head, wondering what had happened to the self-confident, devil-may-care woman he’d fallen in love with. She’d never been the jealous type, leaving him to pursue his interests while she went after hers.

Did she honestly still care who was in his life?

“You danced with her a lot last night.” Her eyes were no longer passion-fogged, but clear. Worried. “I saw you walking down to the beach—”

“To get away from all the questions I fielded about you the whole day.” He released Shannon completely, his hands twitchy with sexual frustration, especially when he considered how he’d feel if the tables were turned and it had been her dancing with some other guy the night before. Ouch. “And even though you haven’t asked, I’m going to tell you—there hasn’t been anyone else for me since we split up.”

Plucking his bag up off the ground, he turned on his heel and began walking, figuring any direction was a far cry better than being next to a woman who tempted him beyond reason. A woman he hadn’t come close to forgetting.

“NO ONE?” Shannon couldn’t resist asking for a small point of clarification as she hurried to catch up with Romero, shocked that he had confided something so personal. Something that touched her in spite of everything they’d been through.

“You’re a tough act to follow.” He didn’t even turn to look toward her, his feet trudging to the northeast as the rain pelted him from the right. “And give me credit for having a little more respect for you than to pick up a stranger and take her back to my hotel room when I was staying right across the hall from you. After what we shared.”

Shannon didn’t know if she felt more relieved that he hadn’t been with anyone else or sad that she’d blown an opportunity to get naked with him herself. Probably a mixture of both.

Adjusting the strap of her bag, she followed Romero, her thoughts confused. Her feet sank in the mud as she walked, the skinny heels of her shoes disappearing into the wet sand and somehow becoming vacuum packed into the muck so that the earth made a sucking sound each time she pulled her foot out.

“Well.” She didn’t have a clue what to say to him, her heart still skipping wildly from his touch even while her brain told her she ought to have a little more restraint where he was concerned. He had wanted to separate from her, after all. “Thank you for that. I haven’t been dating, either, but I know men seem to rebound faster.”

Excluding her mom, who had gone through men as fast as she made movies. Maybe that’s why Shannon wanted so badly to get her relationships right. She’d seen firsthand how much it hurt her mother to lose each consecutive boyfriend, never realizing how her own actions had played a role in the revolving door in her life.

“I think that’s just an illusion.” Romero didn’t even look back, his long strides eating up the rain-soaked sand. “And I never pictured you as the type to jump into new relationships anyhow.”

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