the pair of them stand up and start shaking hands with various people around the table.
“Thank you, boys,” red suit says, giving Jeff a wicked little grin. “I think we got everything that we came for. I look forward to this. Certainly. I’m sure you’ll be in touch?”
Jeff looks gleeful. “Now that the preliminary is signed, we’ll work on the full contract. Chris generally rules over these things with an iron fist, so we’ll probably have to go another couple of rounds before we lock down the details. But the deal’s done. Finito.”
“We’re very happy to hear that.” She crosses the room to shake my hand briskly, pulling Hallie behind her. “Mr. Jensen. A pleasure.”
Hallie’s arms are firmly glued to her sides.
“Mrs. Ellison.”
“Mr. Jensen.”
I reach for her hand and she hesitates for a moment before offering it to me.
My fingers brush against hers, and the shock runs through me.
Lightning. Still. After all of these years.
I glance at her face to see whether she feels it, but she’s already out the door.
Jesus goddamn motherfucking Christ.
Chapter 3
HALLIE
I’m still shaking my hand free from the feel of him as I step into the brisk air. The tingle is traveling up my skin, filling my entire body with little currents of electricity. Eva calls out a final goodbye and some last-minute instructions as we part ways on the sidewalk outside of the building, but I don’t hear any of it. She’s probably already sent an e-mail with copious notes and endless rows of figures that I’ll never look at. She’ll take pity on me and take care of the details, as she always does. I’m sure of that, if nothing else.
My hotel is only a few blocks from FFG’s offices, but it’s an eternity before I reach my room. Even the elevator ride was interminable. There was a family, man and wife and a pair of perfectly matched little boys with enormous Statue of Liberty hats who were chattering away as I got on. I saw the look in the woman’s face as they shied away from me, probably scared that my twitching was a sign of some deadly disease. Or an impending zombie apocalypse. I’m scaring total strangers now. Awesome.
I mindlessly pace back and forth across the carpet. I’ve been trying desperately for a year to put the broken pieces of myself into something that resembled the person I had been, and one look at Chris Jensen was all it took for me to fall completely apart. What’s worse, I must have known that he would be there. Subconsciously, maybe I even wanted him to be.
I managed to stare at him for long enough to satisfy my sick curiosity. Of course, it wasn’t like I could escape Chris Jensen’s face entirely. In the five years since I had last seen him, he had become a bona fide movie star, his every move documented by the paparazzi. There was even a weekly column in one of the movie magazines solely dedicated to the trials and tribulations of whatever two-week relationship he was having with an up-and-coming starlet or supermodel or actress. I usually comforted myself with the delusional notion that the magazine pictures I surreptitiously looked at in the check-out aisle had been Photoshopped. It was practically my patriotic duty to examine him in the flesh, to make sure that the publishers weren’t perpetrating some sort of photo alteration scam.
If I had to guess, not a single one of those pictures had been Photoshopped. It should be a capital crime to be that handsome.
But if I was really being honest with myself (something I have tried desperately to avoid for a number of years now), the reasons that I stared far too long were much more personal. I wanted to find some trace of our old connection. Part of me had even hoped that he would start singing that line about pina coladas from the Jimmy Buffett song I loved, the one that always made me laugh when I was angry with him.
It had hurt unbearably to look at him. His face had honed into sharper planes and some of the youthful innocence had hardened into masculine strength, but he looked basically the same as the day that I met him, standing on that balcony and asking me for a light. Hah. I had wanted to find a social recluse, someone to help me escape from the loneliness of crowds. But Chris Jensen, in all of his glory, had appeared instead.
That memory begins playing