Still So Hot!. Serena Bell

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      “He said the situation was too weird, right? Because of the boot camp weekend?”

      “Yeah.”

      “So let’s do the boot camp weekend another time!” Celine was excited now. She pulled out her iPhone and tapped open her calendar. “I can’t do the next three weekends, because I’m filming straight through, but I could do—no—I’m sure we could figure something out, though, right?”

      “Hon—no. We’ve got a videographer here, I did a huge push in the media, and I can’t get those people to take me seriously again if I bail now.” The thought made her cringe. There were no do overs in PR. No, for realz this time! Celine Carr’s dating boot camp weekend!

      “Yeah. That would kinda suck. For you.”

      Ouch. Elisa didn’t have to dig down far to read the subtext there. But I’m paying you for this weekend, and you can sit down and shut up, if that’s what I need you to do. And Celine’s unspoken chastisement was dead right. It wasn’t Celine’s job to win friends and followers for Rendezvous.

      “You wouldn’t have to go home. You could stick around and just be on vacation.”

      Elisa had to smile at Celine’s stab at generosity. “Sure. I could.”

      “I’m just saying, Brett’s only upset because you’re still trying to match me up. He’d come around if you were out of the picture. And like I said, not totally out of the picture, just not so visible.”

      “If that’s what you want,” said Elisa, with effort. “We’ll have to check in with Haven.”

      “Can we call her as soon as we land?”

      “Yes.”

      Haven was supposed to be on this trip, too, but, at the last minute, her mother had been hospitalized with appendicitis. Haven had wanted to cancel the trip—“Keeping Celine Carr in line is a job for a paid PR professional”—but Elisa had promised that she could handle Celine. Elisa had assured Haven that she’d manage the media according to the publicist’s directions, carefully watch out for Celine’s well-being and call “the instant she sets a toenail out of line.”

      Haven was going to have rabbits when she heard that Celine had showed up for her flight with Brett in tow.

      Elisa would worry about that later. She had bigger fish to fry right now, like making sure that her client didn’t get her heart broken instead of having her self-confidence built up.

      “Celine—” Oh, this was stupid and awkward. Whatever she said next would sound like sour grapes, but if she didn’t say it, she’d be a really crappy dating coach. So, screw it, she’d rather be sour grapes than drop the ball. “I know you probably don’t want to hear this right now, but Brett Jordan is—”

      Well, who was or wasn’t Brett, exactly? And what gave her the right to make that call? She’d had her own share of miscalculations about the kind of man he was. She was hardly an expert.

      “What’s the deal between you guys?” Celine’s voice was sharp.

      “There’s no deal.” She could see that Celine didn’t believe her. Smart girl. “We were friends. There was a time, briefly, when I hoped—but there was never anything.”

      God, she was full of shit. Never anything. Nothing except kisses that had made her limp and golden and floaty, nothing except for his hands on her in a way that had made her willing to beg for more. And what exactly did she mean by telling Celine she’d been hopeful “briefly”? Briefly, if briefly meant all through college and for years after that. Even now she wasn’t sure what she had wanted from him. Not anything he could give, that was for sure.

      “So you were in love with him,” Celine said.

      “Not in love with him, no, I wouldn’t— It was a long time ago. We were friends. He was—he dated a ton of women, just not me.”

      “But you’re not objective.”

      The night Elisa had met Brett, he’d come wandering through the dorm looking for someone to play Scrabble with. She’d leaped at the opportunity. He was cute, with pale green eyes, an intense gaze and symmetrically hewn features, but she’d mostly been grateful to find someone who was as much of a word nerd as she was. He had known all the two-letter words in existence, had produced seven-letter words multiple times per game and had constantly manufactured crazy plays, laying one word alongside another to spawn five new words for thirtysomething points.

      “I have an embarrassment of Os,” he had said midway through that first night, turning his tile holder to face her. There they were, four Os in a row, lined up. “They’re like four eyes, staring at me.”

      Back then, he had longish hair that fell over his face, and he shook it away periodically in a gesture that was too self-conscious for her taste but had made her palms a little sweaty anyway. “Only—they’re Os, not eyes.”

      His own eyes had sparkled and a dimple had appeared in his cheek.

      She’d started to laugh helplessly and he’d joined in. They’d stopped, gasping, and then started again until they rolled on the floor, and he’d said, “You’re the best Scrabble partner I’ve found since I’ve been here. Will you play again? Will you play whenever I want?”

      She’d shrugged, and because she had pride, she’d said, “When I feel like it,” but in her heart, she’d known she’d always play with him.

      That night she’d been pretty sure he felt about her the same way she felt about him. There were moments of prolonged eye contact and real flirtation, and when he had boxed up his game and gotten up to go, there was a long, awkward silence that afterward she thought of as a kiss that hadn’t happened. Over the next few weeks, they had become friends, playing Scrabble almost every night, roller-skating, seeing movies, frequenting the same drunken parties, studying together. Nothing had happened between them, and soon she had begun to understand Brett’s pattern. He liked to date beautiful women. Not cute or pretty or striking in an unusual way, but model-beautiful, the handful of women at their college who were truly glamorous. Or maybe “date” wasn’t the right word. He had collected them. He had wooed them and had worn them on his arm briefly and let them pass out of his life again, as though they were bits of flotsam floating by on a river. She had watched, and she had alternated between ferocious envy and gratitude that she wasn’t the one being used and discarded.

      From the first moment Brett Jordan had strolled down the dorm hallway with his Scrabble game in hand and poked his scruffy, beautiful head into her room, she hadn’t been objective.

      She wouldn’t lie about that, not to herself and not to her client.

      She looked up and saw with a jolt of relief that the flight attendant was headed toward them with a tray of champagne flutes. That would improve things. Not that they could really get much worse.

      She collected two flutes from the tray and handed one to Celine. “No,” Elisa finally answered.

      And when Celine tilted her head quizzically, she shook her own and said, “You could safely say I’m not objective about Brett.”

      4

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