Chapter 2
TWO
Lucas
Ellen Homer had a killer body. Everyone who worked in the inner circle did. It was one of the old man’s sexist ideas that persisted, as Bobby W persisted himself, in this otherwise politically correct world.
“Sorry to break in on you like this, but some reporter’s trying to reach Bobby W,” Ellen said.
Lucas guessed that Ellen would have looked this good regardless of where she worked. She didn’t have to flaunt what was obvious in spite of her respectable black-and-white jacket, striped like an awning, and her white skirt that stopped just above her knee.
Her fine blond hair, mostly bangs swept across her brow, was tucked behind her ears, making her look both innocent and professional. But not happy. Not at all happy.
“Female reporter?” he asked.
“Yes, and not a friendly one. Her name’s Rikki something.” She grimaced. “Rikki with an i, as she was quick to point out.”
“He’ll charm her,” Lucas said. “Always does. Might as well set up an interview.”
“Okay.” Ellen didn’t move toward the door, the expression on her face pure dread. This was worse than a reporter. “What is it?” Lucas asked.
“He’s at it again.” She gestured with her folder at the ceiling. “This time it’s Rochelle McArthur.”
“Here? Right now?”
“Upstairs. Door closed. It’s all we need.”
Lucas’s internal sigh stopped just short of being audible. “Where’d he find her, anyway? That TV show was canceled how many seasons ago?”
Ellen grimaced. “She found him. I’m afraid. You know what that means.”
“She wants something.”
“But just try telling him that.”
Lucas got up from his desk, took a fleeting glance at the Santa Barbara coastline, imagining the sailboat where he’d hoped to spend the day. Maybe he still could. Maybe this wouldn’t take too long. He opened the door of his office and nodded at Ellen. “Shall we?”
The walls of Killer Body, Inc. were plastered with photographs of Julie Larimore, the company spokesmodel.
The walls of Bobby Warren’s office were plastered with photographs of Bobby Warren.
The shots of the iron-pumping man in the posters had little in common with the Bobby W of today, who, although he still worked out, had to do it around the good-size paunch beneath his windbreaker.
Sitting on the chaise across from his cherry-wood desk, he held a glass of bourbon in one hand and Rochelle McArthur’s thigh in the other.
“Come in, come in,” he said, as if greeting a visitor to his home.
Apparently forgetting Rochelle, he rose to shake Lucas’s hand and greet Ellen with a kiss on the cheek that turned into an appraising gaze of her body.
He smelled of expensive cologne, like the ones that arrived embedded on the glossy papers accompanying Lucas’s credit card bills each month.
And bourbon. Yes, he smelled of that, too. And it wasn’t even noon yet.
“Care for a cocktail, Luke?”
Fifties word, fifties attitude toward liquor in a health-oriented organization.
“No, thanks. It’s a little early for me.”
Bobby W grinned, bringing his eyes, the same color as the bourbon, to life. Lucas couldn’t help giving in to a smile. He hoped he had half the old man’s stamina when he was his age.
“We were getting ready to have a little lunch out on the balcony.” Then it obviously hit him he’d forgotten the other half of that we. “Oh, please. I’m sorry. You know Shelly, of course.”
Lucas nodded, although they’d met only once in passing.
“Lucas is our marketing director,” he said. “My right arm. And Ellen here is my left arm.”
“The rest of that body belongs to you, I hope.” With an unstated defiance, Rochelle McArthur crossed her legs and didn’t bother to pull down the skirt of her shimmery knit dress, green as the contact lenses she wore.
Her voice was the way Lucas remembered it from her tele-vision series. The face and body hadn’t fared as well. Either hard living or plastic surgery left her looking drawn beneath her ironed-on tan and bleached-to-the-point-of-brittle hair.
Still, to a seventy-year-old widower, his vision dulled by Crown Royal and loneliness, Rochelle probably looked like one of the hotties draped like fur coats around Bobby W in the photographs on his wall.
“I’m always in the market for takers.” The old man sat down next to her on the silver-gray chaise, and Ellen and Lucas followed suit on the other side of the coffee table. Ellen perched on the edge of her chair, as if whatever had afflicted Rochelle were contagious and she didn’t want to catch it.
“So what we’re discussing is the Ass Blaster,” Bobby W continued, as was his way, as if they’d all been in on the conversation from the beginning.
“This aerobic stuff is shit, if you’ll pardon my French.
I’m not denying what it does for the heart, but what good is your heart if you’re hauling around an assload of lard? ”
“My point exactly, Bobbo.”
Damn. No one but his oldest buddies called Bobby W Bobbo. Yet, he didn’t seem to mind.
Lucas glanced past Rochelle’s crisscrossed high-heeled sandals, her long white-tipped toenails, at the pearl-inlaid coffee table and its conveniently available coasters.
She’d barely touched her drink. Catching his eye, she reached down and lifted the glass to her lips, deliberately.
“You know, Bobbo, someone needs to say it just like that. No mincing words.”
Now she’d done it. If anything glazed Bobby W’s eyes and good sense more than a semisexy woman looking his way, it was someone, anyone, agreeing with him.
Lucas winced as Bobby W shot him a look of pained superiority and ran his hand across the fraying remains of what had once been a full head of hair. “I’ve been trying to tell that to my good friend Luke, here, but every once in a while, we fail to see eye to eye.”
“But I’m sure not very often.” Without moving her gaze from Lucas, Rochelle reached for her glass once more. “Killer Body being your business and all.”
“Good business is good people, and I have the best.” Bobby W frowned at his empty glass, as if it, and not this troublesome conversation, were making him uncomfortable. “Ellen, honey, get me the Ass Blaster file, will you?”
Ellen stood, as if glad for an excuse to flee. “Which Ass Blaster file?”
“The marketing file. The photos, endorsements. Hell, why not bring in the prototype, too? Maybe Shelly would like to try it out, see if we can improve on perfection.”
“Sure,” she said in a voice that sounded like a sigh.
As Ellen left the office, Lucas hoped she wouldn’t return with her written resignation the way too many others with similar degrees, and similar good looks, had.
The door drifted shut behind her, and Lucas looked back at the sofa to see that Bobby W had moved to the window overlooking the harbor, a miraculously full tumbler in his hand. How had the old bastard wrangled that?
“Mr. Warren,” he began.
Bobby W turned from the window. “No need for formalities, Luke. We’re all friends here.” He smiled at Rochelle. “Isn’t she a beauty? Wouldn’t anyone kill for a body like that?”
Then Lucas realized what was going on, what the poor old bastard was thinking. Julie Larimore was bad enough. Bobby didn’t need two of them. And neither did he.
He moved toward the window, trying to pretend the woman in the emerald-green dress and matching contacts was not in the room. “Could we discuss this later?”
“Later’s an excuse for those who can’t take action now.” Bobby took another swig and stared past Lucas’s shoulder at Rochelle, smiling so hard he could injure his jaw. “What the hell is so wrong with having a spokesbody—what do you call it?”
“Spokesmodel, Bobbo,” Rochelle said from the sofa.
“Spokesmodel, right.” Then, he turned his gaze on Lucas, and the burn of those still brilliant brown-black eyes and the legacy they carried was stronger than any argument in the room. “Why can’t we have Julie Larimore for Killer Body, Inc. and another spokesmodel for the Ass Blaster?”
“Because, with all due respect—” Lucas shot Rochelle a look that he hoped conveyed just a smidgeon less than that. “Because we can’t confuse the public. Julie Larimore is our Killer Body. She’s in our ads, on our products, our posters. Bobby, it just won’t work.”
Not now. This was the last thing he needed.
Lucas’s collar felt suddenly stiff and itchy.
How bad could this timing be? They’d been to the mat, as Bobby W called it, before, and they always came away better friends.
Damn, he loved the old man. He could already see the sadness filling the brown eyes.
Could see Bobby W, like a kid in grade school, trying to remember a speech, getting ready to explain away this pseudo offer to Rochelle.
Then Lucas glanced at Rochelle and knew, just like that, as sure as there was sun lighting up the water of the Santa Barbara harbor, that she realized there was only one way this little meeting of her-against-him could possibly end.
“All I want is the Ass Blaster,” she said. “I love, love, love it, Bobbo.”
“That’s a lot of loves.” His grin bordered on giddy; the eyes were way too smitten.
“That’s how they say it now in Hollywood—New York, too. No one loves anything. They love, love, love it. And I love, love, love your wonderful Ass Blaster.”
“Sweetheart,” he began, tapping on her thigh with his pale fingers.
“You two talk, and we’ll catch up later,” Lucas said.
Then he left the room before he had to embarrass either of them one more minute.
On the balcony, breathing that sea-fresh air, he tried to control his temper.
So easy to tell the old man to stuff the job, to walk out the way he had on his own father.
No, he could never deal with that kind of guilt again. It was Bobby W’s company, and Lucas could do no more than offer an opinion.
He heard the glass door slide open. Smelled her perfume.
Lavender. Lots of it.
He didn’t bother to turn around. Just looked out on the ocean that calmed him as no person ever had.