. A horse. A couch. A shrink taking notes.
He almost laughed.
But no, not funny. He knew how some horses were treated.
So he sighed again and texted OK. A charity for animals. There were worse ways to spend an evening. Sitting in his penthouse, replaying the day’s events would surely be one of them.
Kindness to horses was a much better alternative.
By the time the event was over, he’d have forgotten all about Cheyenne McKenna.
The plane gave a delicate bounce.
“Sorry, folks,” the captain said. “Just a little turbulence.”
Indeed, Luca thought. Just a little turbulence.
Then he re-opened his email inbox and got to work.
* * *
Cheyenne McKenna was on one hell of a tough bike ride.
What made it even tougher was that on her stationery bike, it was a ride to nowhere.
Just like her life.
Sweat dripped from her face, soaked her tank top and shorts. Her hair, piled in a knot on top of her head, was a soggy mass. Her thighs burned; her calves felt as if the muscles were tying themselves into knots.
Eye of the Tiger blasted through her earphones.
Had blasted through them.
She’d hit the stop button on her iPod twenty minutes ago so she could devote her attention to the flat screen TV hanging on the wall ahead of her, while Dr. Will imparted his daily dose of wisdom to the masses.
Cheyenne watched Dr. Will for the same reason she suspected most people did: so they could look at the idiots who came on the program and instantly feel better about themselves.
Right now, an otherwise-normal looking woman was sobbing over some mistake she’d made a decade ago.
Dr. Will let her rant for a while. Then he handed her a box of tissues, looked into the camera and said, in hushed tones, that they’d be back after the break and while they were gone, he wanted her to put things in perspective.
“You made a mistake,” he said, “and yes, you embarrassed yourself. But it’s time to put that behind you and move on.”
The screen faded to a deodorant commercial, but before it did, the camera took one last shot of the woman’s face. She was still sobbing, but now she was looking at the doctor as if his advice might save her.
Cheyenne snorted.
How good could his advice be if he didn’t know enough to shave off his foolish-looking mustache and beard? Surely, a couple of million viewers must have told him that by now.
He’d look a hundred percent better.
All men looked better clean-shaven.
She’d never been into guys with mustaches. Or beards. She’d never been into any kind of facial hair.
So how come she could still remember that faint dark stubble on Luca Bellini’s jaw, the sexy look of it but, mostly, the feel of it against her skin as he’d kissed her breasts?
She pedaled faster.
Actually, she’d been pretty sure he’d shaved just that morning, that he was simply the kind of man who came by that I-just-tumbled-out-of-bed look naturally.
Lots of the guys she’d worked with over the years cultivated that look, the sexy male model thing: five o’clock shadow, smoldering eyes, long muscled bodies, husky voices…
And there he was again, front and center in her head. Luca Bellini, gorgeous and naked in that bed.
“Idiot,” Cheyenne said briskly.
She left Dr. Will and the sobbing woman to each other, switched on her iPod, turned up the sound and pedaled even harder until, finally, the only thought in her head was that it would be a miracle if she could survive five more minutes on the bike, but she always thought that and she always survived it.
You didn’t get to the top of the modeling world by being a wuss.
Not that she was at the top anymore.
Prinnng!
The timer went off.
Gasping, she killed the iPod and yanked the headset buds from her ears. Dr. Will was casting his grave look at a different woman who was weeping over a different mistake, but his advice was the same.
“I know,” he said. “You made a mistake, you embarrassed yourself, but—”
“But,” Cheyenne said, her voice mingling with his, “it’s time to put that behind you and move on.”
It didn’t take a degree to do this counseling stuff. She’d figured that out years ago. All you needed was a sorrowful expression, a deep voice, and a solid line of bullshit.
Enough, she decided, and she grabbed the remote, aimed it at the TV and blasted Dr. Will into infinity. Or eternity. Or wherever it was TV pitchmen went when a remote sent them scattering because Dr. Will, doctor title or no, was a pitchman.
And she was soaked to the skin.
Cheyenne plucked a towel from a small bench, blotted her face and arms, dumped the towel on the bench again and marched through her Soho condo to the kitchen. There were half a dozen small bottles of water in the fridge; she took one, unscrewed the top and guzzled down the contents.
You made a mistake, you embarrassed yourself, putting it behind you and moving on was not just an option, it was the only thing to do.
The problem was that every now and then, what you’d done tagged along with you like an annoying clown, sticking its thumbs in its ears, waggling its fingers and going la la la 24/7.
Cheyenne opened the cabinet under the sink, tossed the empty bottle into the recyclable bin and slammed the door, hard. The mood she was in, the solidity of the thud was nice and reassuring.
As for moving on… A fine concept. But what did you do next? Wait for a little time to pass, right? Once it did, the mistake would be history.
A logical realization, but it didn’t make her feel any better.
How could it? she thought as she entered her bedroom, peeled off her clothes, dropped them in a soggy heap on the floor, and headed for the shower.
A mistake.
“Ha!” she said.
What a pathetic way to describe what had happened this morning—and was it really only this morning that she’d gone to bed with Luca Bellini?
“Give it a break, McKenna,” she said as she stepped inside the shower stall and turned on the overhead spray.
She hadn’t ‘gone to bed’ with him. She’d jumped his bones. Fucked his brains out. A man she didn’t know. Didn’t like. They’d spent, what, two hours together, arguing and snapping at each other and, wham, next thing they were in a motel room they might as well have rented by the hour.
“Dammit,” she whispered, and felt heat rush to her face.
How about by the minute? Because she’d gone at him like a bitch in heat. Fast. Greedy. No preliminaries and then the final touch. That note. God, that note.
Cheyenne turned on the side sprays, closed her eyes as the water beat against her aching muscles.
The only thing she hadn’t done was leave him a fifty-dollar bill for cab fare.
Was that what happened when you hadn’t had sex for a while? For more than a while?
“For months,” she said aloud. “Be honest, McKenna, at least with yourself. You haven’t been with a man for a long time.”
She hadn’t planned it that way. It was only that none of the guys she knew seemed terribly interesting. They rarely did. She knew what it looked like from the outside, a woman moving in a world of sexy-looking male models, but the truth was that it was a world of shiny egos and fragile dispositions, and being out with a man who couldn’t pass a mirror without looking at himself grew old pretty fast.
Besides, she’d always had a removed attitude about sex. She wasn’t shy about it—it was a normal human need, which, given everything that had happened in her life, sometimes still struck her as a surprise, but yes, when the time and the man were right, she didn’t hang back. And yes, she liked to take the lead. Nothing wrong with that, either.
But she didn’t have sex with strangers. And no matter how you looked at it, Luca Bellini was a stranger.
She sighed, tilted her head back and gave h
erself up to the soothing cascade of warm water.
At least she’d never have to see him again, so who cared what he thought? Who cared what any of them thought, from the photographers who had once asked only for her and now acted as if they were doing her a favor when they shot her, to the designers who had once fought have her on their catwalks and now had to be convinced to hire her, to her agent, dammit, her very own agent who’d told her, bluntly, that putting up with the temper flare-ups of a Naomi Campbell was one thing; tolerating the increasing control issues of a Cheyenne McKenna was quite another.
The first thing got publicity.
The second put you on everybody’s shit list.
Besides, she didn’t have control issues.
Just because she knew what lighting was best for her hair and skin, what makeup would show whatever she was modeling to its maximum advantage; just because she had a better eye for color than most photographers, a firmer grasp of how to accessorize than many designers…
Just because she’d had sex with a man she’d damn near raped…
“Oh for God’s sake, McKenna!”
Back to that.
And it was ridiculous, thinking that way.
A woman couldn’t rape a man. And even if it were possible, she had surely not raped the Italian. He’d been a more than willing participant in their steamy encounter. That finger-sucking thing in her truck, and then that kiss in the motel parking lot…
That kiss had sent a river of fire racing through her blood.
His erection, pressing into her belly.
His arms, hard around her.
He’d almost carried her to that motel room and once they were alone, when she’d unzipped his fly, he’d sprung into her hands, his flesh hot, swollen, eager.
“Stop it,” she whispered.
She was turning herself on, just remembering.
Why had the sex with Luca Bellini been so thrilling?
He was gorgeous, yes. He had a wonderful voice, that little accent thing. She’d liked that he was big and lean and hard-bodied, that he was taller than she was, even in those silly cowboy boots she’d worn—worn deliberately, because she’d expected to spend a couple of hours with Travis Wilde and she’d met Travis so she knew he’d tower over her and she didn’t like that, the feeling she got when she had to tilt her head back to look at a man’s face, that sense of giving a man some kind of power over her, and how come instead of not liking that she had to do that to look at Luca’s face she’d—she’d found it a turn-on?