Extreme Bachelor by Julia London

and fast around the unbelievable
coincidence that after all these years, Michael Raney would show
up here , on this
studio lot, of all the places in the universe.
    It was so unreal that she glanced at him
again out of the corner of her eye. His expression was full of
concern, and he put a hand on the small of her back the way he used
to do a hundred million years ago when they were together and he’d
lean over to tell her something.
    What made the whole scene outrageously bad
was that while she probably had a huge welt on her head where she’d
hit the floor, and was wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt and no
makeup, he looked so damn good. He still had that sexy thick,
collar-length black hair and penny-colored eyes. And he was nicely
tanned, too, with little lines fanning out from the corners of his
eyes. To top it all off, he had a dark stubble of beard.
    That stubble had always been her
undoing.
    Dammit, had he always been so gorgeous? His
lips that full? His jaw that square? This sexy? Her mind suddenly
flashed back to a night he’d gone down on her with that stubble . .
.
    She couldn’t look at him. She glanced at the
bottle of water Trudy had given her and pretended to read the label
so he wouldn’t know it was official—that seeing him again after all
these years had knocked her completely off her axis. She was
spinning off into the universe without a net.
    God, she was so
unprepared. So self-conscious. The weird thing was, Leah couldn’t
even count how many times during the years she thought she’d seen
him—the way some guy would get in his car would make her think it
was him, or she’d see the back of a man on the street ahead of her
and know it was him. Worse, there were times she’d fantasize about
seeing him again, but in her fantasies, she was gorgeous and skinny
and fabulously successful and— here was the important part—always
with another guy. That was really key to the casual encounter with
an ex— she had to at least appear to be way better off without him. At that moment,
she’d have given her life to appear to be better off without
him.
    After that awful night in
New York when he’d dumped her, she hadn’t seen him again. Actually,
no one saw him again. He just vanished. He’d gone off to Austria or
God knew where and her life had been completely shattered by one
simple phrase: I am leaving and I’m not
coming back .
    It had taken Leah a long time to get over
him, but she really thought she’d done it—she’d been so sure she’d
done it—yet judging by the fact that she was having to remind
herself to breathe just now, it was impossible, even after five
years, to see the man she had once considered the love of her life
and not sink into despair with a sick sort of longing.
    Seriously, if her heart didn’t stop
pounding, it was going to pop right out of her chest.
    But waitwaitwait just a damn minute, she
thought as the world began to take sharper focus. This was totally
unfair! How in the hell could Michael Asshole Raney show up here ? How was it
possible he could have made the leap from that successful career of
a hotshot financier and ended up in L.A. at all, much less on her
first feature film?
    She abruptly looked at him again to assure
herself that she wasn’t hallucinating and that he really was even
better-looking five years later. Nope, she wasn’t hallucinating. It
was Michael all right, and he still had that same sexy, quiet smile
that used to reduce her to complete mush. And yes, apparently it
was possible to be better-looking five years later.
    “I got this,” Michael said to Cooper,
without shifting his gaze from Leah’s face.
    “Okay. Just drink some water, Leah, and
you’ll be fine,” Cooper said. “I think I’ll go have a chat with
Beth.”
    Cooper walked away, leaving Leah alone with
Michael. She stared blindly at the court, taking big sips of water
to keep from talking. In the background, she was vaguely aware of
Jack talking loudly about teamwork and