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Or maybe not.
His muscled physique nicely filled out the faded black T-shirt he wore, reminding her of a night in high school she’d rather forget.
“Why the starving artist imitation?” she asked, brushing her own cheek instead of pointing to his beard. “You look like Leonardo DiCaprio in that movie, The Revenant.”
“I just got back from a month in Fiji.”
“What was the story down there?”
“None. I can write my column from anywhere in the world. For the last month, it was Fiji.”
“Nice work if you can get it,” she quipped. Jordan’s eyes were the same brooding brown they’d always been. Darn it.
“I’ve been lucky, same as you.”
“Well, I didn’t get to choose which countries I visited. I mostly worked hard once I got there, before moving on to the next location.”
His wry, almost patronizing smile revealed his true feelings. Okay, maybe she was overreading, but he probably agreed with the people who thought modeling was a breeze and life for a model was one long air-brushed idyll. The general belief seemed to be that someone with her level of modeling success couldn’t have any problems; therefore, they should just keep quiet, forgo their privacy, live the way the world thought they should live, and remember they were the lucky ones.
She was lucky, but life wasn’t always that simple. Someone smiling from an airbrushed photograph could be concealing a broken heart or other problems. Money and fame weren’t guarantees of happiness.
Curiously, she was disappointed to discover Jordan was the same as so many other people with gross misconceptions about her “ideal” life. But then, his childhood had been turbulent—the epic battles between his parents had been legendary in the neighborhood. Maybe he needed to believe there was a world where everything was as perfect as the way it looked on a magazine cover.
“How about dinner tonight?” Jordan suggested.
“Sorry, but I need to get on with my painting project.” Nicole kept her tone polite and impersonal, the way she always tried to sound with the press.
Still, she needed to remember that Jordan wasn’t one of the paparazzi-enemies of earlier years, the ones who’d invented a wild, party-girl history for her. Nor was he a friend. For the time being, he was simply a man writing about her and Moonlight Ventures. That it probably wouldn’t be the open-minded piece she and her partners had been promised was a concern, but there was no need to start out with knee-jerk reactions.
“How about tomorrow night?” he asked.
“I’ve got plans.”
“In that case I’ll try another time,” he told her smoothly and started up the path.
Refusing to watch him leave, Nicole continued her run. She hadn’t seen Jordan since high school and had thought little about him through the years. But if anyone had asked, she would have said he must have improved—after all, being a jackass wasn’t an incurable condition, was it? It appeared the jury was still out on that question.
One thing was for sure, he was as good-looking as ever, even with the beard. It was embarrassing to recall her brief crush on him when she was sixteen. The whole thing had started at a party when he’d kissed her on a moonlit patio. At first she’d been curious—as a senior he’d had quite a reputation with girls and she wanted to understand what all the fuss was about—then she’d realized how great his lips felt. Snuggling closer, she’d kissed him back wholeheartedly.
No one inside the house had known, probably because most of the kids had been drinking. Her folks had shown up soon after, terrified she was going to spoil the “clean teen” image that had helped make her so popular. Besides, her mother had declared angrily, alcohol was fattening.
For the next several weeks, while on location in Hawaii for a modeling gig, Nicole had lived that kiss over and over again in her imagination. The days had crawled by as she’d anxiously waited to see Jordan again. But when she got home, he’d treated her with the same scorn as always.
Her crush had abruptly ended with the realization that he’d probably been too drunk to know which girl he had kissed. Nicole hadn’t blamed him; she’d been the idiot with no better sense than to let a single kiss make her forget the way he had always behaved toward her.
