Bold Moves

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The doorman wasn’t impressed. “You gotta understand, lots of guys show up here looking for Scarlett. She’s one of those femmes fatales.”

Jaime Croft was familiar with Scarlett Arbuthnot’s power. Seventeen years ago, back in their hometown of Musgrove, Virginia, she’d felled Jaime with a look. It had been like something out of a rom-com she would’ve mocked. But unlike in the movies, when she’d had him in her thrall, she’d ground his heart to bits.

Look, heartbreak was bad enough, but most of the time, you could lick your wounds and forget. Forgetting hadn’t been an option here.

Scarlett was a grand master, and while they didn’t exactly cover chess on ESPN, she played the game the way other people fought for heavyweight titles or chased Oscars. She walked red carpets; she gave blockbuster interviews; she even posed for tasteful nudes in Vogue . That last one ... it had been plain old cruel to remind Jaime of the glorious curves he wasn’t allowed to touch anymore.

The doorman’s smirk suggested he’d seen those pictures too.

“I realize this looks sketchy,” Jaime said, voicing the obvious. “But I promise I’m an old friend of Scarlett’s.” Friends revealed all their deepest secrets to each other, discovered how to give someone else an orgasm, and broke each other’s hearts, right?

They’d wrecked each other in the friendliest way.

“Could you call up and tell her James Croft is here? We can let her decide if she wants to see me.”

“Nope.”

Jaime had ... absolutely no comeback. An Upper East Side doorman had upended his brilliant plan.

Granted, the odds had been long here, but it wasn’t every day Videon told a showrunner that thanks to the surprising success of his supposed-to-be-obscure limited series, he could make whatever project he wanted next.

And what Jaime wanted was to adapt Queen’s Kiss , Scarlett’s memoir.

Not simply because she’d written it. No, he wanted to prove he had range. This wouldn’t be another gritty docudrama about drugs and lies in a small town. It would let Jaime show folks he could handle a big budget and classy drama too.

Besides, he could envision exactly how good her book would be on screen. The fearless working-class protagonist taking on the snobs of the chess world, making a fuss about sexism in the game and popularizing it in the process, and doing it all on her own terms. With the right writers, producers, and director, Queen’s Kiss was going to be amazing, and his was exactly the team for the gig.

“You tried her agent?” In New York, doormen probably knew all the ins and outs of the entertainment industry.

“Yeah.”

Her agent had been clear: Scarlett wasn’t interested in selling the rights. Not now and not ever. Undeterred, Jaime had gotten on a plane ... only to run into the force field that was her doorman.

“It sounds like you have your answer then, pal.”

Jaime’s career would’ve gone nowhere if he’d settled for the first answer—or even the tenth. When Dad had been arrested, it would’ve been easy to give up. To stop writing, to stop messing around with cameras. It would’ve been easy to sink into the pain of what his father had done and the loss when Scarlett had decided she didn’t want to stick around for the fallout.

But after a few weeks of hiding out with his mom and baby sister, Jaime had crawled out of the hole. He’d gotten a job, managed to get through school, and generally kept on keeping on. It wasn’t perseverance as much as goddamn stubbornness, but until this moment, that desire to be in control and to act like he was had served Jaime well.

Once again, Scarlett was the nut he couldn’t crack, which was poetic, if depressing.

“Guess I thought I might be able to make a good case in person. Could I leave her a message?” He was a writer, after all.

The doorman sucked on his teeth, considering. At last, he said, “Have it your way.”

Jaime fished a crumpled bagel receipt and a pen out of his pocket and tried to put into words his reasons for coming. He was tempted to go with the truth: I loved what you wrote in Queen’s Kiss . You can trust me with it.

Ha. Scarlett hadn’t ever trusted Jaime with herself. For all that he’d tried to break through her shell, to get her to see they could be a team, she’d never needed him. She’d never needed anyone . That independent streak had served her well—look at what she’d achieved. The only thing Scarlett and Jaime could share now was the adaptation of her book. She ought to have enough confidence in him for that.

All of that would’ve been more than any written message could possibly convey, so Jaime simply jotted down his name and cell number. When that seemed too scrawny, he added, Please call me .

He stopped himself from underlining the please . Scarlett would understand he was begging. She’d always understood everything about him, especially the parts he most wanted to conceal from everyone else. In the end, he hadn’t been able to hide from her, and for a while, she’d made him feel as if he didn’t need to.

Jaime pushed the receipt across the desk, and the doorman gave him a pitying look.

As with so much of his history with Scarlett, Jaime should’ve known this was hopeless. He should’ve stayed in LA and kept pushing for a meeting through her agent and publisher. But when he turned to go, Jaime caught a break—or a blow to the solar plexus.

Just inside the doorway stood a familiar figure.

“Jaime Croft, is that you?”

“Hi.” He’d thought he was ready to see her again. He’d been wrong.

Scarlett wore a peacock green wrap dress, faded navy Chuck Taylors, and a white motorcycle jacket—because black would’ve been obvious, and Scarlett was never predictable.

What she was, what she’d always been, was extremely beautiful.

A pause.

Then she asked, “It’s been, what, fifteen years?”

In that instant, Jaime almost blurted out something stupid, like Seventeen years—but who’s counting? And you, you look exactly the same .

That wouldn’t be quite true, though. Scarlett had grown up, but the ways she’d come into herself had made her even more stunning. She still wore fire-engine-red lipstick, but now it didn’t seem like a put-on. Her hair was the same rose gold shade, the one that always seemed to catch all the light in a place until she was the only one in color. That was the thing about Scarlett—she was so much herself that everyone else wilted in comparison.

She was a bird of paradise in a world of faded crabgrass.

Scarlett pushed her sunglasses on top of her head, which made her hair frame her face perfectly. It was probably too much to ask for a few strands to be out of place. Or for her to be the least bit tripped up by Jaime’s surprise appearance.

Well, he’d always suspected he’d been in deeper than she’d been. Having that confirmed was a shot of phantom limb pain, years after the amputation.

They stared at each other for an ice age.

He finally said, “It’s been a while.”

“What are you doing here?”

Her question was perfectly neutral. Scarlett had always been difficult to read, which was probably why she was such a great chess player. Her ability to slam that shield in place made Jaime feel like a mess, since his own feelings refused to be hidden. Maybe if they’d had more time together, he could’ve learned the trick of it.

“To see how you’ve been.”

“That’s a lotta ground to cover.” For an instant, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. Maybe she was trying to keep a smile in.

He could hope, anyhow.

“Hmm. How have I been, taking into account all the scandals?”

“And the bestselling book and the women’s championship and the international celebrity,” he added.

Scarlett gave a half smile. She’d picked up on the fact that he’d been following her career. “Pretty damn good. You?”

“Less good.”

She almost winced, or maybe he saw it because he wanted her to. She’d been remarkably cool-eyed at the time, much more focused on what came next. Meanwhile, Jaime had been slack-jawed, trying to come to terms with how his father’s criminality had swallowed his world.

“How bad was it?” There wasn’t any doubt about what it she meant.

Scarlett’s mom had left town shortly after her daughter, and they hadn’t been from Musgrove in the first place, so Scarlett probably hadn’t gotten the full play-by-play.

For all that Dad’s arrest and incarceration had dominated the second half of Jaime’s life, Jaime frequently had to remind himself how small the fallout had been. It only felt as if everyone on earth knew the sordid details, when in reality, anything anyone outside of Musgrove knew was because of Jaime’s work. He was the one who’d hung their dirty laundry up on Main Street.

“It sucked.” Like a bruise cycling from purple to yellow, the initial shock had melted into mortification. How hadn’t Jaime and his mother known ? The humiliation, the shame, the hurt: those first days were a splatter painting of shitty emotions.

Those emotions were smaller now, but they were still there. They’d probably always be there. When your father—the person you had looked up to more than anyone else on earth—was convicted of trafficking prescription opioids; when every day you had to see the families of the folks whose lives he’d ruined; when you dug deep, trying to understand what drugs with names he could barely pronounce had done to your community, it was fitting to feel bad.

“I’m sorry. I thought about you ... a lot.” Scarlett didn’t seem to want to admit that. “I wondered how you were.”

“My mom’s house still has the same phone number.” After leaving him, Scarlett had never used it.

Something flashed across her face, so fast Jaime would’ve thought he’d imagined it if he hadn’t been watching her so closely.

Except he was, so he knew the truth: she’d thought about calling him. Which maybe meant he had a shot here.

“So you came to New York to play catch-up?”

“Not quite. I wanted to ask you for something.”

“You okay here?” the doorman asked Scarlett.

Jaime startled. He had clean forgotten that they had an audience for this reunion.

“It’s okay, Francis,” Scarlett replied. “Jaime and I go way back.”

That they did.

Scarlett crossed the lobby, taking her time about it too. That was fine with Jaime since it gave him more of an opportunity to appreciate the roll of her hips and the way the light played over her hair and her skin. So many things about the last two decades didn’t make sense to Jaime, but he had no trouble grasping why and how he’d fallen for Scarlett.

She was good looking, sure, but she was also like some twisting modern sculpture in a museum. Something that looked different from every angle, turning in on itself and confusing all your expectations about what a piece of art ought to be. Scarlett was messy and controlled, fresh and familiar, empathetic and ruthless all at once. If things had been different, Jaime would’ve spent a lifetime trying to untangle the double-knotted shoelaces of her.

But things weren’t different. So he’d have to settle for the next best thing: putting her story on Videon.

Scarlett stopped inches from him. The last time they’d been in the same room, the last time she’d been this close, she’d been telling him goodbye.

“Your book. I’d like to adapt it for Videon. I’m here with ... well, pretty much a blank check from them. All you have to do is say yes.”

Maybe because Jaime wasn’t as controlled as Scarlett, he could sometimes feel the mood in a room shift with the inhabitants’ emotions. It was like when music was playing down the street, and you couldn’t quite hear it but the beat still made your gut twitch.

Right now, Scarlett was trying to pretend she wasn’t, but he knew some part of her was curious . “I saw The Devouring Sun .” She gave a little shrug. “It was pretty good.”

Pretty good? It had won a pack of Independent Spirit Awards. Jaime had been a finalist for Time magazine’s Person of the Year and had been interviewed by seemingly every news outlet in the country. Except pretty good were the same words she’d used to describe herself, and her own life had been ... incandescent.

“I was hoping we could talk about it.” Jaime knew he sounded overly eager, but he’d flown across the country for this. There was no use in pretending he had any chill when it came to this project. “Maybe we could grab a coffee—now, if you have time, or tomorrow. But I’d like to pitch my vision to you.”

Jaime had an entire presentation worked out. It’d be a miracle if he could remember a word of it, though. His eyes needed a few more minutes to adjust to seeing her again.

“Hmm.”

Scarlett gave Jaime a long perusal, from the tips of his shoes up his jeans to his jacket, until finally, she met his gaze. Today, her eyes read the same saturated green as her dress, but he’d seen them gray and blue, depending on the weather and her clothes. When she’d wanted him to, which hadn’t been often, he’d seen everything there: pleasure, pain, wonder.

The thing about teenage love affairs is that you didn’t know how to hold your emotions back. You weren’t smart enough to keep each other at arm’s length.

At least that was what Jaime had told himself in the last two decades. The scars that he still carried from Scarlett under his skin, those were part of first love. Anyone would feel them. Hell, he’d heard Taylor Swift’s lyrics. Lots of people did feel them.

But now, breathing the same air as Scarlett and with her gaze spearing him, it was difficult to believe that what he’d felt had been some universal thing. She’d always made him feel like a butterfly pinned by a collector. He hadn’t minded that before, but today, he might as well have been undressed.

You’re a smart, accomplished professional in your thirties. You only think that she’s the most beautiful woman on earth and that you’ll never get over her.

“What do you say?” he asked, his voice low and husky. “Will you hear me out?”

“Better not.”

The rejection was so firm, so sudden, that Jaime was amazed he managed to remain upright as he walked out of her lobby.