One Night with the Sexiest Man Alive (The One 1)

“Clean-up?”

“From whatever mess you create pranking me.”

“That. Oh shit,” Rum swung his legs to the ground and scrubbed at his hair.

“You forgot.” He slapped the bar top. “Christ. I’m waiting to find out you had all my clothes given to charity, and you forgot.”

Rum laughed. “I couldn’t have organized a better prank if I paid a team of hustlers to come up with something.”

“You forgetting doesn’t count,” Haydn said, standing over Rum with his drink. He shouldn’t be annoyed not to be pranked, except he’d done all that wondering when the other shoe was going to drop for nothing.

Rum took hold of the glass. “But you finally falling in love in a weekend with a woman who lives halfway across the world and doesn’t want you.”

“No,” Haydn said, shaking his head. “No.” God, fucking, damn. He’d fallen in love with a woman who lived halfway across the world and wouldn’t want him and he didn’t know how to beg.

Rum took a sip and smacked his lips together. “Best prank ever.”

FIFTEEN

The worst decision Teela ever made wasn’t the one where instead of finding a new office space to rent, she took out a massive loan and bought the building her office was in. It wasn’t becoming a landlord as well as being able to renovate the way she wanted.

The worst decision wasn’t merging with a corporate training company to expand her offerings to clients, or hiring four new conference producers and her own video production team.

It was agreeing to pick up a chicken and avocado sandwich and spend the weekend with the Sexiest Man Alive.

While in meetings with bank managers and lawyers and job candidates and new clients, she thought about Haydn.

When she signed deeds and contracts and conference onboarding paperwork, she ran through memories of him.

She thought about him at the gym and working late, when she bought the bread-maker she’d probably never use, and painfully, when she lay in bed at night and couldn’t sleep. On those nights she used her vibrator and thought about him in very specific detail. Corded forearms and expressive hands, narrow hips and strong thighs, hauntingly pale eyes and lips made to kiss. She made herself come picturing him looking up at her from between her legs or down at her as he angled his thrusts to make her gasp.

She hadn’t heard a single word from him. Not that she’d expected to. There was no lack of clarity about that. He wasn’t looking over his shoulder at her. He was walking the red carpet with his dad as his date, at the Academy Awards and speaking at the United Nations about his refugee aid anti-piracy project.

Three months after that one-night stand weekend should’ve been long enough to have mourned and gotten past it. Even if that weekend was epically romantic.

Apparently not.

She’d had one date in all that time, only because it seemed like the right thing to do, to ground herself, come back to earth and get on with her life, because even if Haydn arrived at her door with another sandwich and professed undying love she, one, wouldn’t believe him and, two . . .

Yeah, what was two?

Didn’t matter. It was forever never happening. They had very different outlooks and futures. His was to casually bed-hop his way through life while making magic on screen and hers was to build her empire so one day she could lie in bed and not have to get up at 6 a.m. six days to go to the office.

Not that she had to. She wanted to. She was equal parts scared she’d taken on too much and excited about making it all work.

That’s the way she’d felt about her one date too. Steve was an old flame

from uni and they’d had a lot in common then and more now. He’d been a sweetheart who’d snuck out and filled her old clunker of a car with petrol when they were ambitious and poor students, and a generous lover who’d had more experience and helped her begin to understand what she liked in bed.

She’d been so delighted to hear from him she was hard pressed to recall why they’d drifted apart. Until she went on the date and remembered that as lovely as Steve was, older, wiser, sexier, the pilot light on whatever spark she’d had for him had long gone out and simply couldn’t be relit.

Fortunately, he felt the same, which was both a tragedy and a comedy. After a trial kiss that was perfectly pleasant and pleasantly bland, they’d agreed to keep it at friends and to do a better job of staying in touch.

She blamed Haydn for that. He’d elevated her sense of what attraction could feel like and ruined her for ordinary relationships. Just as well she was too busy for one.

“It’s ridiculous, “she told Evie over Vietnamese, late one night. “Haydn is an impossible standard to live up to. As soon as Steve hugged me hello I knew it wasn’t going to go any further than a good catch-up. The rest of the date was both of us desperately trying to be something more to each other than old friends who were once lovers.”

Evie sent a tweet and looked up. “I always liked Steve. But I’d hurt you if you tried to get serious about him again.”