On a Night Like This Read Online Free PDF

Geller dinner party, the last place on earth he wanted to be.
    Brady answered the door, clapped him on the back as if thrilled to see him. The bastard had never liked him. He was a big, once-handsome man, now ruddy from too many martinis and burly from business lunches and three-star dinners. “Just in time for the main course, Luke,” Brady said. “Come join the gang.”
    “No,” Luke said, holding ground despite the man’s insistent pressure on his arm. “I just need to talk to Dana. For a minute. I’m not staying.”
    “We’re in the middle of dinner. A few other couples here, nothing fancy. You’ll join us, talk to Dana later. It’s been—what?—months. We’re dying to hear what you’ve been up to. My friends would love to meet you.”
    Of course,
Luke thought.
Show me off.
For years Brady had shown no interest in him or his writing—until Luke had won an Academy Award. Suddenly he mattered in the world Brady inhabited.
    “No, Brady. Just get Dana,” Luke insisted.
    “Who’s there, dear?” Dana’s voice called out.
    “Luke,” Brady said, and Dana appeared in the hallway. “You were right. He’s back in town. Tell him to join us.”
    “No,” Dana said. “He doesn’t have to do that. Go ahead, Brady. Let me talk to him.”
    Brady shrugged, clapped Luke’s shoulder, pecked Dana’s cheek, moved on down the hall. Luke could hear uproarious laughter spilling out of the dining room.
We would be there,
he thought.
Emily and I. Would we be enjoying ourselves?
Luke couldn’t remember.
    “I can’t help you,” Dana said quietly. “I told you that.”
    He looked at her. She was tall and elegant, hair swept up into some sort of chignon, a rope of pearls gracing her long neck. She was a dark version of blond Emily, and the resemblance pulled at Luke’s heart.
    “I just want to talk to her,” Luke said.
    “She’s gone away. You won’t find her.”
    “My God,” Luke said. He saw her hand move down across the swell of her belly. “Look at that.” He reached his hand out—wanting to touch her—and he saw her step away. He dropped his hand.
    “She wouldn’t leave you when you’re pregnant,” he said. “She’d stay close.”
    Dana shook her head.
    “How many months?”
    “Four,” she said. “Please go, Luke. I have nothing to offer you.”
    “Your husband offered dinner.”
    “My husband’s an idiot. You know that.” She finally smiled.
    “You look good,” Luke said.
    “You look like shit.”
    He ran his hand across his beard—it was easy not to shave in the mountains.
    “I like it,” he told her. “Makes me look like someone else. I look in the mirror and I’m always surprised. Who the hell is that? And damn if I can’t figure out the answer.”
    “Are you going back to your cabin?”
    “Not till I find her.”
    “Let her go.”
    “I tried,” he said. “It didn’t work.”
    He turned and headed down the tall steps leading toward the street. He could hear the shrill laugh of someone in the dining room and the echo followed him all the way to the car.
    Sweetpea wouldn’t leave the house on Potrero Hill. Luke was too tired to fight with her—“One night, that’s all,” he warned the dog, and then settled in on the big bed.
    When he woke once in the middle of the night, he reached out for Emily—something he never did in the single bed at his cabin—and then he pulled himself out of bed, stumbled into the bathroom to find a sleeping pill, or two, and lay awake, for hours, listening to his snoring pup, waiting for unconsciousness.
    He thought about falling in love with Emily, an almost effortless, cool slide into life with her. She did the graphics for his film publicity,
Pescadero
—an ice blue sea, a strip of flat white beach, a girl lying alone in the sand, curled on her side. When he met her, he told her the poster was perfect, and when she smiled at him, so obviously pleased and surprised and just a little shy, he asked her to dinner on the spot. Within