Chapter Seven
Colbie Michaels and Brooke Jansen walked into the cocktail bar just seconds apart, and when they found Mia sitting in the back booth, they both immediately said, “What’s wrong?”
Mia barely stopped herself from dropping her head into her hands as they slid in on either side of her. “I got a call yesterday from a lawyer about an anonymous client who wanted to buy a ten-million-dollar house on the waterfront.” She could see from her friends’ expressions that they thought that was as strange as she had, but they didn’t interrupt. “Right away I knew something had to be up. I mean, what reasons could a super-rich guy have for needing to remain anonymous with his Realtor? But against my better judgment, I decided to set up a few showings for today.”
She picked up the new drink she’d ordered after James left and downed it in one gulp, though she already knew it wouldn’t do a darn thing to help her forget Ford...or the fact that she could still feel his lips on hers.
“When I got to the first house this morning, Ford Vincent was waiting for me.”
“Oh. My. God.” Brooke’s eyes were huge. “You’re working with Ford Vincent?”
“He is so sexy,” Colbie said, fanning herself. “Back before I met Noah, I actually used to fantasize that—”
“We slept together five years ago.”
The way both Brooke’s and Colbie’s mouths fell open would have been comical if Mia had been anywhere close to laughing.
“You slept with Ford Vincent?” Colbie asked in a shocked whisper.
“Oh. My. God,” was all Brooke could manage again. Until she had to find out, “How was it?”
Mia put her drink to her lips before realizing with dismay that she’d already emptied it. Slamming the glass down on the table so hard the stem likely got a hairline crack, she admitted, “Amazing.”
Oh hell, now that she’d started, she might as well tell them everything.
“Sleeping with Ford was the best sex you can possibly imagine. Being with him was so good it should have taken me hours to recover from each round, but before I could he’d start in on me all over again, and the next thing I knew a week had passed and I’d barely done anything but Ford the whole time.”
“I knew it would be like that with him,” Colbie said, but her elation at so accurately predicting Ford’s sexual prowess from a distance was short-lived as she realized something. “Why the heck didn’t you tell me?”
Mia felt terrible about it. Clearly, sleeping with one of the biggest rock stars in the world was a whopper of an omission between best friends. Colbie and Mia had been inseparable since they were in kindergarten. Colbie had told Mia about every guy she’d ever been with before her friend had fallen in love with Noah Bryant earlier that year, and Mia had told Colbie about every guy she’d been with, too...except for the one who had mattered most.
But before Mia could begin to explain why she’d kept it to herself, Brooke asked, “And why did you stop sleeping with him?”
Thank God, the cocktail waitress automatically brought over their regular drink orders just then. Needing to get another fortifying sip under her belt before answering, she put her new glass down more carefully. “At first, I didn’t tell you because it all happened so fast. We met at one of his shows, and it seemed like he was the guy I’d been waiting for my whole life. You should have heard the poetry he spouted between our sex sessions, the way he swore I was everything he wanted, too. He had a week off between gigs, and I called in to the office to claim some last-second vacation time I’d accrued so that I could spend every single second of it with him. I should have called you, Colbie, because then you would have had a chance to call me on my crazy.” Mia shook her head. “Which is exactly why I think I didn’t say anything to you or anyone in my family—because I didn’t want anyone to pop the fantasy bubble I was living in. God, I was so stupid!”
Colbie put her hand over hers and squeezed it gently. “What happened at the end of the week?”
“He asked me to come with him, out on the road. I’d known him one week, and he wanted me to give up everything in my life to follow him on buses and planes all over the world. And the thing is, even though I loved my work, loved my family and you guys, and the life I had in Seattle, I was so tempted—more tempted than I should have been. But I guess I paused just a little too long, and when I didn’t immediately jump up and down screaming YES as if I were the luckiest girl in the world to be wanted by him, Ford shut down. Completely. He said if I really loved him, I wouldn’t have to think about it. He said he couldn’t believe that he’d let me fool him into believing I actually loved him. Just that fast, he was gone.”
“Couldn’t he see that he was asking you to change your whole life for him—while he got to do exactly what he wanted?” Brooke protested.
“No, he obviously didn’t see that. And when I looked back on that week, I realized that while I’d shared everything with him, he really hadn’t shared anything more than his body with me. I didn’t know anything about his family or his past or his fears or dreams besides how he felt about his music. But, do you want to know the worst thing? Even though I should have felt like I’d dodged a bullet, I can’t even begin to explain how much I missed him. So badly that I decided I’d made a huge mistake by not immediately dropping everything for him. I decided I could figure out a way to have a career on the road, maybe not real estate, but something I could do while always on the move, and that I would just call you guys and my family all the time to make sure we didn’t lose touch. I decided to surprise him at a show in Miami.”
She closed her eyes at the wave of pain that hit her as she relived that horrible night. “The guys on his crew who had brought me backstage that first night in Seattle didn’t want to let me through to the back in Miami. I tried to tell myself it was because I had hurt him by needing some extra time to make my decision, but—” Her voice started to break, but damn it, she wasn’t going to cry over him again.
“You don’t have to relive any more of it,” Brooke said, squeezing her hand.
But Mia knew it was better if she did. If she reminded not only herself, but the people who loved her most, of exactly why she needed to stay away from Ford. “I don’t think I’ll ever get the picture of that girl on his lap out of my head. She was half-naked, and he had his hands on—” Oh God, maybe the full replay wasn’t such a good idea, after all. “For a few seconds I was frozen in the doorway and the girl was busy making all her fake porn-star moans, but he looked straight at me.” The breath she tried to take shook her lungs. “I picked up some drum sticks that had been left on a table by the door and threw them at him. And then I got the hell out of there.”
“The bastard didn’t even go running after you?” Brooke asked.
“No.” And that was how she’d known for sure that everything he’d said to her during their one week together had been a lie. Every sweet and sexy word of which she’d been stupid enough to believe.
“I hate his guts,” Colbie snarled. “I’m more sorry than you know that I ever had one single fantasy about that piece of dirt, and I’m pledging to you now that I’ll never listen to one of his songs again.”
“Considering they’re constantly on the radio and TV and playing in every single bar—” Mia pointed to the speaker on the ceiling, where they could hear Ford singing yet another one of his huge hits. “—that’s going to be pretty hard to do. But I love you for offering.”
“Well,” Brooke said, “we might be stuck listening to them from time to time when we can’t avoid it, but we won’t enjoy any of them. Excuse me for a second.” She walked over to the bartender and said something to him. A few seconds later, Ford’s song stopped and the acoustic version of Nico’s One Moment began to play instead.
Mia appreciated her friends’ solidarity, even though she knew how hard it would be for any of them to avoid Ford’s presence, not just on the radio, but in the media, too, which had always had a love affair with him.
“Did he ever contact you again?” Colbie asked.
“Nope.” Not only had he not come running after her in Miami, but he hadn’t called, emailed, or written her so much as a text begging her to forgive him. “And I certainly never tried to contact him.”
“So he waits five years and then makes sure you’ll show up at the house by dangling a huge potential sale in your face while not disclosing who he really is.” Colbie’s snarl curled her lips even tighter. “What a jerk. I double hate him now.”
This was why Mia had texted her best friends tonight. They always knew how to make her smile, even when she was feeling at her very lowest. But her smile didn’t last long, because there was one more thing she needed to confess.
“I let him kiss me. This morning. In the house I was showing him.”
Her friends both looked at her like she’d lost her mind before Brooke all but yelled, “You let him kiss you today?”
A dozen heads swiveled around to see what the fuss was all about, and Mia could feel her face turning even redder. “The kiss was supposed to prove how completely over him I was. You might double hate him now,” she said to her friends, “but I’m the two-time idiot.”
“The way he set you up this morning has made it way more than double hate now,” Colbie declared.
But instead of agreeing, Brooke said, “He’s obviously still hooked on you.”
Mia shook her head in denial. “Nothing is obvious with Ford. On the surface, he’s every girl’s sexy rock-god dream, but underneath—” She scowled into her drink, then took a long sip before finishing her sentence. “He never let me find out what was underneath. Every time we got close, he’d pull back. For a moment today, I actually thought maybe things had changed, but he wouldn’t even tell me why he hates being called Rutherford so much. And if he won’t tell me something little like that, I seriously doubt he’s going to spill anything else in his dark soul.”
Brooke held up her phone. “We could do a Google search on him to find out.”
Every one of the thousand times Mia had wanted to look up Ford’s past on the Internet, all she’d had to do was remind herself how pathetic it was to long for tidbits of his life from journalists and Twitter feeds.
“No.” She took Brooke’s phone from her hand and dropped it back into her soon-to-be sister-in-law’s purse. “Imagine how it would have felt for you to have to dig into Rafe’s past on Google. My brother cares so much about you that he dug deep and told you everything about his past and how much it had messed him up, even though it was really hard for him to do that.”
Brooke put her hand on Mia’s arm. “You’re right. And I’m sorry if I sounded like I was defending Ford when I said he’s still hooked on you. It’s just that—” Brooke shook her head. “No, never mind.”
“I’ve always hoped I could take the truth from my best friends as well as I can dish it out to them,” Mia said softly. “What were you going to say?”
Her friend sighed, as though she knew there was no getting away with a never mind this time. “We all know what Ford Vincent looks like, and I can imagine what poetry falling from his lips would sound like, especially if the sex really was as great as you said. Honestly, I don’t know how easy it would be for anyone to get over someone like him.”
Mia’s stomach twisted tight at Brooke’s words. She could always lie to herself. But to her friends? It was another one of the big reasons she’d never mentioned her week with Ford. Because she wouldn’t have been able to lie about what it had done to her.
“He’s the only man I’ve ever loved. And no matter how many times I look back and remind myself that I was young and foolish and still in a place where I believed that fantasies were possible, and that it was perfectly normal for me to lose myself entirely in him and his oversized life...” She sighed. “What I felt for him was still real, despite all of that other nonsense.”
“You know,” Colbie said slowly, “maybe there’s another reason why he was able to get past your defenses this morning. From everything you’ve just told us, it sounds like you never got a chance to give him a piece of your mind, not five years ago and not today either, because he made sure to take you by surprise. I, for one, would sure like to hear you rip him to shreds.”
Though Mia had already said what was supposed to be her final goodbye to Ford, she couldn’t help but feel that Colbie was on to something.
Brooke gave Mia a pointed look. “The only problem is, do you think you could give him a tongue-lashing without yours ending up in his mouth again?”
It was the same question Mia was already asking herself. Because she hadn’t yet figured out the honest answer to it, she said, “What has my brother done to you, Brooke? I never thought you’d talk about tongues lashing in any way.”
Her friend was flushing but grinning a wicked little grin as she said, “Don’t you mean, what have I done to him?”
Halfway through her friend’s sentence, Mia’s hands were over her ears. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you say that. Although it’s totally my fault since I keep forgetting how weird it is to think about my brother’s sex life. Especially when it’s with one of my best friends.” She made a show of scrunching her eyes up and shaking her head hard a couple of times as if to toss the vision away. Far, far away from her brain.
“Does that mean that it’s not weird for you to think about my sex life with Noah, since he’s not related to you?” Colbie teased.
“Are you kidding?” Mia replied, glad to feel like she was back in the normal world for a few seconds. “If you knew how many times I’ve thought about your fiancé na**d...”
The three of them laughed, but all the while Brooke’s unanswered question hung in the air between them. Mia had never been a woman who wavered. She had neither the time nor the inclination to waffle back and forth on important decisions. She wouldn’t start now.
“We’ve got Marcus and Nicola’s wedding in Napa this weekend,” she said to Brooke, who would be attending with Rafe, “which should give me a little rational distance from Ford’s sudden reappearance this morning. Monday morning I’ll call him and finally get it all off my chest.” Having a plan made her feel better, back in control of her life, the way she should be. “I’ll even let him make whatever apologies he feels he needs to make and then I’ll forgive—and forget—him completely.” She met her friends’ gazes, one after the other, before adding, “And I promise there will be absolutely no instances of my tongue going into his mouth during any of it.”
“Here’s to only putting our tongues into the mouths of the men who deserve us!” Colbie said as she raised her glass in a toast.
“To Mia, for being one of the most strong and amazing women I’ve ever known,” Brooke added as she raised her glass.
Mia lifted her glass to press it against those of Colbie and Brooke. “And to both of you for being the very best friends a girl could ever have.”