Sizzling

He pushed her into a chair and then got her a glass of orange juice. She gulped half of it, then let the high-sugar liquid sit on her tongue for a few seconds before swallowing.

The results were nearly instantaneous. The trembling stopped, her body relaxed and she started to feel almost normal.

“Better,” she said, looking at him. “Thanks. Go away.”

“That’s nice,” he said sarcastically. “Who crapped on your day?”

“Honestly? You. There was a reporter waiting for me outside your grandmother’s front door this morning. She wanted me to confirm you were staying here, which I didn’t. Just to put a little sparkle in my schedule, she showed me some pictures she’d downloaded from the Internet. Guess who was the star?”

His expression tightened as he swore. “I thought they were gone.”

“You knew about them?” She couldn’t decide if that was good or bad.

“They were taken about six years ago,” he said grimly. “Without my knowledge. This woman I was with wanted proof to show her friends. One of them suggested she get a little more publicity, so she posted them online.”

He sounded embarrassed and mad and frustrated. Lori wanted to believe he wasn’t to blame, but it was difficult. “How have you been living your life?” she asked. “This sort of thing doesn’t happen to normal people. The pictures, the reporter. You need to get your act together.”

“I’m trying. But stuff like this makes it impossible. I even got a court order that the pictures be removed from the Web site. But they’re still showing up on other sites. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. You feel okay now?”

The change of topic caught her off guard. “Yes. I have to eat something.”

“To maintain a higher blood sugar?”

She nodded. “Chocolate would be best. Preferably from Seattle Chocolates.”

“You’re kidding. That can’t be good for you.”

“It’s not.” Like him. “But it’s my fantasy and I can have it if I want to.”

He shook his head and muttered something under his breath. “Okay. Let’s see what real food we’ve got.”

He opened the refrigerator again and began pulling out ingredients. Shredded cheese, some cooked chicken, salsa and large flour tortillas. Food she didn’t remember being in there before.

“Did you go to the grocery store?” she asked.

“I went online and they delivered. There wasn’t anything in this kitchen.”

At least the Internet was good for something, she thought. “Gloria’s meals are delivered fully cooked. I bring in my own stuff.”

He shrugged and dug around for a large frying pan. “Now we have real food.”

“What are you doing?”

“Making you a quesadilla.”

She wasn’t sure which shocked her more—that he knew how, or that he was making one for her. “You can cook?”

“I have a few specialties. I’m very multitalented.”

“I brought my lunch.”

He glanced at her. “No, that’s not it. Let me think. Oh, yeah. How about ‘Reid, thanks so much for making me food and saving me from death.’”

She smiled reluctantly. “You have a well-developed sense of the dramatic.”

“I’m used to being adored.”

She was sure of that. Although some of his fans had turned against him.

She wondered what it would be like to be so much in the public eye, then decided it couldn’t be a good thing. Complicating an already difficult situation was the fact that Reid had a real habit of making lousy choices when it came to women.

As he heated the pan and assembled the quesadilla, he asked, “How’s it going with Gloria?”

“Great. She’s making progress.”

“She’s a challenge,” he told her. “You can say it.”

“Not even under threat of torture.”

He raised his eyebrows. “So I was right. Admit it.”

“I won’t. I still believe her family helped make her the way she is. She’s alone and lonely.”

“She’s crabby, difficult and mean.”

“She’s not mean. Not to me.”

“You don’t know her well enough,” Reid said as he slid the folded tortilla onto the hot pan.

Lori set down her empty glass and tried to find something to look at other than the man at the stove. If she didn’t distract herself, she was afraid she’d start drooling.

It didn’t seem to matter that his character was suspect. Her body wasn’t interested in the three thousand other women he’d had sex with. It just wanted to be number three thousand and one. How sad was that?

She picked up the top sheet of paper from the stack Reid had been going through.

“What’s this?” she asked as she scanned a letter from a boy wanting an autograph.

“A bunch of crap sent over by my manager,” Reid grumbled. “I let his office handle all my fan mail, which might have been a mistake.”

Lori remembered the slams about Reid ignoring kids in need in the newspaper article.

He flipped the tortilla. “I didn’t want to bother,” he said grimly. “That’s my big crime. So I trusted others to take care of things and apparently they did a piss-poor job. Seth’s response to everything was to send a check.”

“Seth’s the business manager?”

He nodded. “I was invited to a hospital opening and didn’t know. They put me on the program and everything. That’s not good.”

“But if you didn’t know, it’s not your fault.” Wait! Was she defending him? She resisted the need to slap herself. Didn’t she consider him useless? Hello, naked pictures. That had to mean something.