Dirty Games (Tropical Temptation)

“Why not? I see peppers in there, and onion—”

“And carbs. Carbs my body needs for energy. You need to burn through your body’s stored energy reserves, which means we restrict calories and make every single one of them meaningful. Lean protein will account for most of yours. Fiber from green vegetables like spinach, kale, and broccoli will help you feel full. No processed food. No added sugars.” His gaze turned pointed. “No alcohol for the duration. I trust that’s not going to be a problem.”

None whatsoever. After this morning, she didn’t care if she never drank again. She gave his sofrito one last look, and then stared at her joyless chicken on its bed of roughage. “When I filled out the meal questionnaire, I indicated there were three things I couldn’t live without. Starbucks, chocolate, and ice cre—”

“No, no, and no.”

“None of it for six weeks?” Even she heard the whine in her voice.

“I penciled in two treats. One when you hit the halfway point—if you make it that long—and one when we’re done. Again, if—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She batted the disclaimer away with a wave of her hand. “Thank you for your vote of confidence.”

He ignored her interruption. “Otherwise, you eat what I say, when I say. And it’s going to look a lot like this.” He pointed to her lunch. “Understood?”

Fuuuuck. For an answer she sawed off a chunk of chicken, stabbed it onto her fork along with a leaf of kale, and shoved it in her mouth. Forcing herself to chew took more effort, but somehow she managed.

“Good.” His lips lifted in a grin, and he helped himself to more of his lunch.

Don’t complain. She took another bite of her chicken and chewed. He expected her to complain, and she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of…“God, does it have to be so…boring?”

“The purpose of this food is to nourish your body, not entertain you. Entertain yourself with books, activities, conversations—”

“Okay, then. Let’s talk.” Figuring she might as well know the extent of her losses for the next six weeks, she went with, “What other basic human rights have I surrendered to you, besides the ability to choose what I eat, and what I wear? Oh, and when I wake up.”

His lips quirked. “You can wake up any time you like, as long as it gets you to the gym at nine a.m. I own you from then until we’re done for the day, with the exception of two fifteen minute breaks—provided you earn them—and lunch.”

Days on the set started earlier, and frequently ran very late. She knew how to put in long hours, but spending so much time, one-on-one, with him gave her a slight rush of panic. “I need a definite end time. I didn’t put my entire life on hold when I boarded a plane for Paradise Bay.”

“Me, either. I still have a business to oversee, and I’ll be doing it long distance for six weeks. We’ll knock off each day around three p.m.—give or take—and you can run back to your villa and call your boyfriend, or—”

“I’m not involved with anyone,” she said through gritted teeth, just managing to hold back the you big jerk dancing on the tip of her tongue. “But I have lines to learn, scripts to read, calls to return. I realize you don’t find my job terribly worthwhile, but you’re not the only one with other obligations.”

Obligations, and a vacation he’d shuffled as a favor to his friend, which must have been painfully inconvenient. The question she’d been dying to ask since the day he’d agreed to train her resurfaced. “What massive debt do you owe Eddie, that he could guilt you into this?”

Luke nodded to indicate he’d heard her, then swallowed and took a drink of water. Then he said the name of an A-list actress.

“I don’t understand. What’s she got to do with anything?”

“When I first started out as a personal trainer, I worked for a very well-established guy who had a lot of industry clients. More than he could handle, actually, because they’re all insanely demanding. Anyway,” he continued when she would have interrupted to stick up for the fellow members of her craft, “I met Eddie through him, and ended up becoming his trainer. We got along. This was a decade ago, and we were both at similar stages in our respective careers. He brought her to one of our sessions. She was his boss’s client at the time, and up for a big role. He thought she might benefit from working out regularly, but she was resistant so he used me as bait.”

She nearly choked on a mouthful of water. “Bait? She’s a human being, not a mantle fish.”

He shook his head. “It says more about me than it does her. I was young, eager to make a name for myself in a competitive field, and easily caught up in what seemed, at the time, like a very accomplished person’s life. There I was, a redneck kid from Crooked Creek, Texas, who’d ridden a football scholarship to Southern California, and then transitioned that into an exercise science degree when I blew out my ankle halfway through my second year. She was beautiful, successful, and sexy as hell, and suddenly I was moving in her sphere. After a few one-on-one sessions, I was in her bed. Six months later, she asked me to take her on full-time—drop my other clients so I could travel with her, accompany her on set, and focus exclusively on her. She needed me.”

A hot emotion she didn’t care to identify burned through her blood. He’d taken pains to tell her they weren’t going to mix business with pleasure, but he obviously did it sometimes. For the right woman. “Did you?”

“Rookie move.” His quick laugh held very little amusement. “I was such a fucking amateur. She’d never looked better, and was a walking advertisement for my services, so my client list was growing by leaps and bounds. But yes, like the dumb-ass twenty-two-year-old I was, I agreed to her request. Eddie warned me not to, but I didn’t listen.”

The quick storm of heat subsided a little. “What happened?”

“Predictable story. I made her my priority, but she didn’t do the same. Any plans I attempted always took a backseat to her career. I ranked behind her agent, her manager, and her publicist, and every one of us knew it. She had a lot of demands on her, but God forbid I suggest I needed more to

be happy than to simply hang out in her life. Saying that amounted to a betrayal in her eyes.”

“Wow. Basically, ‘Be here for me, on my terms, or you’re a bad person’? You must have been incredibly hurt.”

“I was fucking miserable,” he said with such blunt honesty, her heart actually twisted for him. “I couldn’t give her what she wanted and still respect myself. It took a few cycles of teary arguments and hurled accusations, but eventually I thought we reached a mutual decision to call it quits. I walked away feeling like we’d treated each other decently, other than the fact that she hadn’t actually paid me in months, but whatever. I could get work. Except I couldn’t. I contacted all those people who’d begged me to take them on and got nothing but silence.”