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  He allowed himself to feel a small moment of pride as he contemplated the achievement on the very simplest of scales—he, personally, had written over ninety pages of screenplay. Spelled the words correctly. Even got the grammar and punctuation right, give or take a few colloquial exceptions. The man—boy, really—he’d been fourteen years ago would have been astonished. But that boy hadn’t known that he had dyslexia. That boy had whipped himself daily for being an ignorant half-wit who couldn’t understand even the basics of stuff that other kids seemed to take in as easily as air. He’d been on a road to self-destruction, spiraling out of control, furious at himself for being kicked out of school, looking for some way to ease the pain…

  Realizing that he was standing in his almost-empty office dwelling on his misspent youth, Dylan gave his head a brief, impatient shake. All that stuff was history, water under the bridge. Long gone, done and dusted. Unimportant in the world of here and now.

  Stacking the screenplay on top of the carton of personal effects to take out to his car, Dylan spent the next few minutes checking his desk drawers for anything he’d forgotten. Apart from stray paper clips and Post-it notes, he was home free.

  His heart felt lighter as he grabbed the box. The Boardroom team were holding a goodbye dinner for him tonight at his favorite Mexican restaurant in Hollywood, and he’d say his final goodbyes then. For now, he was content—happy, even—to be moving on from this stage in his life.

  He’d made it to the office door and was balancing the carton on his knee to flick the light off when his phone rang. Frowning, he contemplated not answering it, but his conscience wouldn’t let him walk away without picking up. Sighing, he dumped the box on his visitor’s chair and scooped up the phone.

  “Anderson, here,” he said.

  “Dylan, it’s Ruby. You got a sec?” his agent asked rhetorically. Rhetorically because, no matter what his response, she always kept talking. She could talk under wet cement, his agent. One of the reasons he paid her a small fortune every year.

  “I know you’re keen to put your feet up for a while and give that enormous brain of yours a break, but I’ve just had a very interesting call,” Ruby said. Dylan smiled to himself, recognizing the enormous brain reference as Ruby’s way of softening him up.

  “Forget it,” he said firmly. “No. Negative. Non. Not interested. I officially do not exist for the next two months. Then you can start fielding job offers for me again.”

  “Dylan, baby, you haven’t even heard what the offer is!” Ruby wailed.

  Dylan rested his hip against his desk. Ruby was only getting warmed up, he could tell.

  “You’re going to have the screenplay on your desk tomorrow morning. That should keep you busy enough.”

  “So you don’t even want to know who’s desperate for a story editor on short notice? Not even a tiny inkling of curiosity?” Ruby asked.

  “Nope. Not interested,” Dylan said smugly. He had the next two months of his life planned down to the second—three concepts to develop further for network pitches, and several more screenplays in various stages of plotting. Only when he’d laid the groundwork for the next step in his career would he start looking at in-house jobs again.

  “Fine. I’ll ask around the traps, see if anyone else good is available.”

  Off the hook, Dylan felt free to be helpful. “Try Olly Jones. I know he was keen to stop freelancing and go back in-house.”

  “Yeah, I know. They signed him to Crime Scene last week.”

  “Hey, that’s great,” Dylan said, pleased for his friend and making a mental note to give Olly a call. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a full weekend to himself or caught up with his friends.

  “You got your big goodbye bash tonight?” Ruby asked.

  “Yep. Gotta go home and stock up on the tissue,” Dylan said.

  “Yeah, right, because you’re so sentimental,” Ruby scoffed.

  “I’m an emotional guy,” Dylan defended.

  Ruby made a rude noise. “Anyway, I’ll call you once I’ve read the script,” she said.

  “Sure. See you.”

  Before he could put the phone down, Ruby spoke up again, her tone exasperated. “You’re really going to let me hang up without even asking which show it was? You could really do that?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you call yourself a writer! Where’s your natural-born curiosity and nosiness?”

  “It’s not going to work, Ruby,” he said good-naturedly. “I’ve got too much to work on to even consider it.”

  “Fine. It’s just I know you like the show, I thought you’d be tickled to work on it,” Ruby said. He could almost see her shrugging her big shoulder pads.

  “Ruby…”

  “Fine. Don’t work on America’s number-one daytime soap. See if I care.”

  He was about to end the call, but he hesitated for a beat, his interest well and truly caught.

  “You mean, Ocean Boulevard?”

  “The one and same,” Ruby said smugly. “Apparently, their story ed’s written himself off for six months or so in a car accident.”

  “Yeah?” Dylan said, his mind ticking over at about a million miles a minute. Sadie Post worked on Ocean Boulevard, had done for the past four years. He’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to know that in the small industry they worked in.

  He couldn’t even think her name without feeling a burning resentment. A series of images flashed across his mind’s eye—Sadie staring at him with burning intensity as she humiliated him in class by peppering him with questions she knew he couldn’t answer; the impatient disgust on his guidance counselor’s face as he kicked him out of school; his father’s contemptuous acceptance that flipping burgers was all his ignorant son was good for.

  “Dylan. You still there? Hello?” Ruby said.

  “Keep talking,” he said after a long moment.

  Maybe he wasn’t as busy as he’d thought.

  TEN DAYS LATER Sadie drove into her assigned parking spot at the Ocean Boulevard production offices in Santa Monica and pressed the button to bring the roof down on her Audi TT convertible. She checked her appearance. Her hair looked windblown, but it matched the tan she’d gained on her honeymoon-for-one in the Caribbean and she figured it was the least of her problems. It was amazing how things like convertible-hair suddenly gained perspective when you had a real crisis to deal with. Nothing like being stood up at the altar to give a girl a reality check.

  Grabbing her satchel, she swung her legs out of her low-slung car and pushed herself to her feet. She couldn’t wait to get into work. She imagined her desk, overloaded with scripts and story lines for her to read, and felt pathetically grateful. Ocean Boulevard was her sanctuary, her solace. She knew it would take all her energy and focus, and then some. Its comforting embrace would get her through the next few months. She was banking on it.

  Not that she was a basket case. Far from it. She was good, solid.

  Okay, she wasn’t about to kick up her heels and dance a jig, but she wasn’t a sniveling wreck, either. After ten days of self-pity in the Caribbean, she’d picked herself up and dusted herself off. Life went on, and so would she. It was that simple.

  Recovering was a little easier given that she still hadn’t heard from Greg. She told herself she liked it that way. If she never spoke to him again, she could pretend the whole six months she’d thought she was in love with him had been a hallucination.

  Striding toward the building, she switched her focus firmly to work. She hadn’t had a chance to download any of the story lines that had been written while she was away, but she could spend the day catching up before the team pitched her their ideas for the week’s episodes on Tuesday morning.

  She mentally reviewed the show’s story strands from a week and a half ago as she breezed past the receptionist and into the open-plan office. Set in Santa Monica, Ocean Boulevard centered around a group of people living in a Spanish mission-style apartment block on the street of the same
name. The show ran an hour a day, five days a week, so there was always plenty of work to keep her busy.

  A couple of heads came up as they spotted her, but she waved and flashed a bright, confident smile. Nothing to see here, her expression said. No tragedy to pick over. Please, move on.

  Her office looked exactly the same as when she’d left it, except for a vase full of fresh tiger lilies on her desk return. Claudia being thoughtful, she guessed.

  Slinging her satchel on top of her filing cabinet, she hit the power button on her computer and waited for it to boot up. She was typing in her password when Claudia appeared in her office doorway.

  “I knew you’d be in early, you workaholic,” Claudia said. Her tiny frame was encased from head to toe in black, her signature color.

  “Holiday’s over,” Sadie said, clicking through to her e-mail program.

  “Hmm. I don’t suppose the gutless wonder has made contact yet?” Claudia asked, referring to Greg.

  “Nope, thank God,” Sadie said. “I have nothing to say to him.”

  Claudia raised a disbelieving eyebrow, but let the subject go.

  “We need to have a quick work powwow,” she said, switching to producer mode. Propping a hip against Sadie’s bookcase, she tucked her hands into her trouser pockets. “Don’t freak, but Joss had a car accident while you were away. Broke his pelvis in three places.”

  Sadie gasped. “Oh, my God. Is he okay? Was anyone else hurt?”

  “No. The idiot was test driving a Porsche on Toyopa Drive in the Palisades. A dog ran across the road and he smacked into a tree.” Claudia shook her head as though she still couldn’t quite believe it. Joss was notoriously accident prone. He could find a way to hurt himself in a rubber room.

  “Wow. But he’s going to be okay?” Sadie asked.

  “Six months before he’ll be out of rehab, but he’s fully covered by insurance, so apart from the joys of physiotherapy et cetera, all is good. Except, of course, we kind of need him.”

  Sadie’s eyes widened. For a moment she’d been so worried about Joss’s health that she’d forgotten about the show.

  “God, yes. We have to find a new story editor,” she said, her brain hitting a brick wall at the very thought. Story editors—good ones—were like hen’s teeth, difficult to find. Usually it took months to woo someone away from another show, or to headhunt a promising up-and-comer. The story editor was the focal point of the story team, the person who said yes or no to plot lines and drove a show forward. As script producer, the story editor and his or her team were Sadie’s direct reports. It would be her responsibility to find someone to stoke Ocean Boulevard’s furnace with new and innovative ideas now that Joss had taken himself out of the game. Automatically, she reached for her address book, but Claudia waved a hand.

  “Relax. I sorted it out while you were gone. We got lucky,” she said.

  “Yeah?” Sadie asked doubtfully.

  “You’re going to love him. Five years experience in London working on various shows, including their top-rated police procedural, and he’s coming off three years with Box-Office Cable on The Boardroom. I still can’t believe we got him, but he was between contracts and he loves the show.”

  Sadie frowned. European experience, credits on The Board-room—BOC’s gritty depiction of high-stakes corporate life. It was all starting to ring a bell in the back of her mind. A very large, very noisy, alarm bell.

  “I’m not sure if…” she said, but Claudia spoke over her.

  “Look, here he is now. You guys can chat a little before everyone gets here.”

  Sadie felt the blood drain from her face and her stomach drop to the floor as she saw the tall, dark-haired man approaching over Claudia’s shoulder.

  He still had to-die-for good looks. His eyelashes were still too long and dark. And his gray eyes were still cocky and overly confident.

  She stared at him, all her nightmares rolled into six-foot-two-inches of strong, supple male.

  Dylan Anderson. Her teen nemesis. And her new direct report.

  2

  AS SOON AS Dylan saw Sadie Post, all his expectations about working on Ocean Boulevard went out the window.

  After initial talks with Claudia, he’d been genuinely intrigued about the idea of working on a soap. The demands of the show—five one-hour episodes per week—meant that an enormous amount of material had to be produced by the writing team. It would be a challenge, and an opportunity to push the envelope. Just talking to Claudia had given him ideas. But he’d be fooling himself if he pretended that was why he’d walked away from his own plans so easily—learning from Claudia that Sadie would not be a part of the hiring process had been the clincher. The thought of her returning from vacation in the Caribbean to find him ensconced as her new story editor had been irresistible.

  Despite all his achievements and how far he’d come, the memory of his humiliation in American Lit at her hands remained a sore spot in his psyche. It wasn’t the most mature or rational or noble motivation for taking a contract with Ocean Boulevard, but he figured a guy was allowed a moment of weakness every now and then.

  Then he walked in her office door and all his expectations hit an unexpected slippery patch and went skidding out of control.

  When he’d pictured this moment in his mind, Sadie had been as forgettable as she’d been throughout their school years—same blah blond hair pulled back into a tidy ponytail, same raillike body in baggy clothes.

  But the woman rising from her office chair to face him was an Amazonian goddess. Nearly six foot—had she always been so tall?—with long, flowing Pamela-Anderson-just-rolled-out-of-bed-hair. And her body was no longer skinny. In fact, it looked as though the curve fairy had paid her a very substantial visit since he’d last seen her. Perky breasts thrust up from a slim torso, their curves outlined by a tight black T-shirt. Dark denim jeans clung to legs that were long and lean and seemed to go on forever. Just the way he liked them.

  For a second he was so thrown he could only stare and blink. Then he got his game face back on. So, she’d turned into an okay-looking adult. Big deal. It didn’t change anything.

  He’d already decided how to play this—supercool, not a single allusion to school beyond the mandatory acknowledgment, nothing that would give her the satisfaction of knowing that he attached any significance or power to her memory whatsoever. This was about burying the past, not resurrecting it. Just because she looked like a bikini model from Swimsuit Illustrated didn’t call for a change of plans.

  “Sadie. Great to see you again,” he lied through his teeth.

  He even managed a smile—nothing too effusive or sucky, just bright enough to be professional. Extending his hand, he waited for her to shake it.

  There was a long, long pause before she extended her own hand. Her skin felt cool and silky as her palm slid against his, and his gaze was caught by her velvety-brown eyes. Warm chocolate spiced with caramel, he decided before he registered what he was thinking and gave himself a mental slap.

  Where the hell had that come from? She could have shriveled currants for eyes, or big Bambi numbers—it didn’t matter one iota to him.

  “You guys have met before?” Claudia asked, her gaze alert as she glanced back and forth between them, probably wondering why he hadn’t mentioned it in their interview.

  “Sadie and I went to school together,” he supplied innocuously.

  He was holding Sadie’s eyes as he said it and was thrown when something soft and vulnerable flashed behind them. Another expectation blown away. He’d imagined defensiveness when she saw him. Even indifference—after all, she probably had dozens of scalps on her belt from all the people she’d stomped on over the years. No doubt it was a real bitch for her to remember what she’d done to whom.

  But the hurt, tortured look that had raced briefly across her face threw him. Again.

  “That’s right. Dylan and I went to the same senior high,” Sadie clarified.

  “Really. Dylan didn’t mention it w
hen we talked,” Claudia said, her near-black eyes fixed on him questioningly.

  Dylan shrugged self-deprecatingly. “Didn’t see the point. It was a long time ago,” he said. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure Sadie would even remember me.”

  A muscle tensed in Sadie’s jaw, the first and only sign that she felt any discomfort at all. Dylan noted the moment with satisfaction.

  “Just goes to show, it’s a small world,” Claudia said, obviously accepting his explanation. “Kind of takes the wind out of my sails, though. I was pretty proud of finding you all on my own.”

  Sadie’s face was once again under control as she eyed him.

  “I thought you were contracted to The Boardroom,” she said.

  Betraying color instantly stole into her cheeks. She’d been keeping an eye on his career. Probably waiting for him to be run out of town or told to sit in the corner with a pointy dunce cap on his head.

  “I was packing up my office when Claudia’s offer came through,” he said. Settling his shoulder against the wall, he turned the conversational spotlight on her.

  “I hear you were on holiday in the Caribbean. Where’d you go?”

  “Um, St. Barts,” she said. Her eyes darted to Claudia, and he got the sense that a secret communication was passing between them. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Claudia shake her head minutely.

  What was going on?

  “I was there a few years back. Did you try the scuba?” he asked, probing a little more. What was the big secret about St. Barts?

  “No. I mainly hung out on the beach and read and caught up on sleep. You know,” she said dismissively.

  He narrowed his eyes assessingly. He’d assumed she’d gone on holidays with a friend or boyfriend, but it sounded as though she’d gone alone. Was that what the look between her and Claudia was about? He couldn’t quite believe that a woman as attractive as Sadie had to go on holiday alone. Even with his built-in prejudice against her, he could see that many men—okay, most men—would find her attractive.