As Bryce followed her out of the office and down the hall, she heard him murmur something like, “No doubt he could give me what I need.”
She could hardly blame Bryce for indulging in his fantasy. Right now her own brain was flooded with images of Sam, his skin glimmering with sweat, the muscles of his massive arms and shoulders standing out in stark relief, as he pushed his body to the brink. Carla felt a spurt of warmth, low in her belly, and quickly shoved the images away.
She went through the main building and through the restaurant. Still no sign of Sam.
As they stepped out onto the pool deck, Carla heard peals of all too familiar laughter and felt her lips involuntarily curl into a sneer.
“The mating call of the useless and famous,” Carla muttered so only Bryce could hear.
“Looks like they've caught one,” Bryce said.
The Waters Twins were the latest entrants on L.A.'s celebutante scene. Twenty-two-yearold Kayla and Karena were the daughters of a big time movie producer and an Academy Award-winning actress. They'd parlayed their position as Hollywood royalty into an incredibly successful reality television franchise. What had started with a camera crew following them and their silly, vapid antics through their silly, vapid lives had spawned a slew of spinoffs featuring everyone from their hairdressers to their dog groomers.
When their rep had made the reservation at Holley Cay on their behalf, claiming that they wanted to visit the resort specifically because they wanted to have a break from the constant scrutiny of the paparazzi, Carla had inwardly cringed. She'd caught an episode of their show once and had turned it off, disgusted, after five minutes.
Still, a high profile client was a high profile client, and for the next fifteen minutes at least there were few people more visible than the Waters twins. “Besides,” Bryce, who was practically trembling like a Chihuahua at the thought of meeting the twins, had assured her, “you know how a lot of these people are totally different once they're away from the cameras. Watch, they're probably totally sweet and down to earth and just playing up the dippy spoiled girl thing for the show.”
To Carla's dismay and Bryce's disappointment, what you saw on TV was very much what they got. In fact, it didn't take long for Carla to decide that the show's editors must have had their hands full editing the shows so that the girls didn't come off as completely hateful. In this case, their beauty really was only skin deep.
Just one day into their stay Carla declared them by far the most difficult guests in Holley Cay's history. And having survived the wedding of an actress Carla would forever refer to as “hurricane Jane,” that was saying something.
“Looks like the call worked on someone,” Bryce said.
Carla's skin crawled as she saw them, stretched out on padded teak lounge chairs next to the pool, dressed in bikinis that covered less surface area than the sunglasses perched on their noses. But their virtual lack of clothing wasn't what made the little hairs on the back of her neck stiffen and her teeth grind in her mouth.
It was the man who was smiling affably at them as they giggled and flipped their hair and arched their backs just in case he didn't notice that four breasts were about to break free of their moorings.
Sam.
She could see his teeth flashing in the sun, hear his deep, rumbling chuckle all the way across the pool as he laughed at something one of the twins said.
Her feet were moving before she even realized it, her heels a sharp staccato on the concrete slabs lining the pool deck.
The roar in her head was so loud she barely heard Bryce say as he hurried behind her, “Remember, 'Impeccable service to all guests.'” The reminder of item number four on Holley Cay's list of core values brought her back from the edge―barely.
But it was enough to slow her gait from a stomp to a saunter. As she got closer, she could see one of the twins―Kayla, Carla recognized, because she'd cut her straight blond hair into a pixie cut―had hijacked Sam's walkie talkie. That explained the giggle and lack of response.
“Ladies, I really need that back,” Sam said, reaching for the walkie talkie. As he did so, Kayla pulled it to her chest so it nestled between her breasts.
“Come and get it,” she said with a flirty smile that made Carla's jaw clench so hard she was afraid her molars would snap.
Sam returned Kayla’s smile with the same teasing smile that had haunted Carla’s dreams last night. “Honey, if you're angling for me to feel you up, we're going to have to do that when I'm off the clock.”
“When will that be?” Karena purred as she ran her fingers down Sam's muscled forearm. “You have a key right? You can just come to our villa―”
“You should surprise us,” the other twin, the one with the walkie talkie squealed. “You could pretend to break in―”