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“It’s really nice to meet you.”
And then he was gone.
I collapsed into the chair he’d sat in and dropped my head into my hands, unable to process the amount of time and words I’d just shared with Ryan McDonnell, the movie star. This was not my life.
I just wished I could keep my mind from embellishing everything that had just happened.
He had definitely not been giving me a look in the pantry, right? He was Juliet’s boyfriend. And in my experience, when you had champagne, you didn’t go looking for moonshine.
Chapter Five
Ryan
Iwoke to sun streaming through the tall windows of my room, and I stretched in bed and lounged longer than I probably should have, enjoying the lazy lack of anything I absolutely had to do.
Sleep had come pretty easily, despite the unfamiliar location and bed. I was tired, for one thing, and that helped. The stranger thing, though, was that I felt oddly settled here. At home. And that was something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Maybe ever.
I suspected some part of that had to do with Tess, but I couldn’t have explained exactly why.
When she’d gotten me dinner, there had been something so natural about spending time with her, talking with her in the cozy old kitchen with its warm light and hidden spaces. This house—more than that, even—this place… it spoke to something inside me in a way I couldn’t understand in any terms that made sense. But I knew I liked it here. A part of me already felt sad that soon I’d be going back to the plastic people and shiny spaces that made up my regular life.
Sure, there were great people and real things in Hollywood. But so much of my world was made up of people focused on things that just seemed somehow impermanent and flimsy to me. My own quest for stardom … what would it get me? Financial security, I hoped. And security for my dad. But beyond that? Look at what Juliet was going through, all in an effort to keep her reputation clean in the eyes of the world, all to stay on top in the minds of people who didn’t even know her.
In another life, I’d have considered making a place like Maryland home. Maybe I had lived here in some previous life, hiding priests in tiny holes and growing tobacco like Tess said. But I’d chosen my home and my life for now. And the financial promise of the path I was currently walking made it pointless to think about things like this. Hell, maybe I’d known Tess in some past life, too. How else could I explain the way I felt around her, the closeness I sensed was already between us?
Or maybe I was just longing for the kind of life I couldn’t have. At least not now. It didn’t stop me from thinking about it though, about what it would be like to live here with a girl like Tess in this quiet beautiful place, maybe open a little restaurant someday.
After lounging in bed a while, I thought I could hear Juliet talking with her sister in low voices somewhere outside my door. I glanced out to see them both heading for the stairs and couldn’t resist the urge to let my eyes trail down Tess’s back as she disappeared from sight. Juliet was beautiful, but her sister was in a completely different class.
The hot-as-balls class, if you wanted to know the truth. The class that made my blood pound a He-man rhythm through my veins and my nether regions come up with ideas that were altogether inappropriate, given that I was supposed to be dating her sister.
Where Juliet was an indisputable beauty, her appeal was very obvious, almost in your face. Her sister, on the other hand … something about her made you want to look longer.
From the long angles of her nose and chin to the round pout of that small mouth. She wasn’t tall, and she wasn’t short—she was perfect, as far as I could tell. She moved away from me, having no idea I was tracking her every move. Her body was curvy and generous, and everything about the way her hips moved as she walked made me want to drop my hands to her waist and feel the motion for myself—maybe pull it into me.
If I was honest, Tess’s body made me think of dirty, dirty things… but I forced my mind away from them and chastised the parts of me that insisted on obsessing about what it might be like to feel her close and tight and hot around me as my hands filled themselves with her perfect breasts.
Even though she was physically perfect, that wasn’t the thing that made Tess so strangely compelling, and I realized it wasn’t any one thing—it was everything I’d learned and seen so far. I realized I barely knew her, but something fundamental inside me had responded the second I first saw her, and now I seemed to be nursing a serious fixation. It was a little unsettling, actually, because I was a guy who spent long days around Hollywood starlets, and I’d never been more taken with anyone than I was with this girl I’d found practically in the middle of nowhere.
I wanted to know her. To have the privilege of learning her.
There was the small issue of having to pretend to be smitten with her sister, however. But, I told myself there was no reason I couldn’t learn a little more about Tess Manchester on a purely platonic level while fulfilling my duties to her sister. And this little ruse wouldn’t last forever.
It wasn’t long before Juliet came up to get me for lunch—I’d been catching up on email and general news in the room. Something about being so far from a big city made me feel oddly out of touch, despite the fact that we’d left Los Angeles just the night before. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant feeling, actually.
“Come meet Gran,” she said, leaning against the doorframe.
“Anything I need to know?” I tensed a bit at the thought of telling our lie to an elderly family matriarch. I wanted to make a good impression.
While lying, of course.
Juliet tilted her head to one side and then wrinkled her nose before speaking. “She’s quirky.”
“Quirky how?”
“You’ll see.”
Juliet wasn’t lying. Gran, who I’d expected to be a frail old woman with maybe a cane or a shawl over her shoulders, was decked out in a designer sweat suit, looking a lot more Beyoncé than Grandma Moses. She was bent over the counter by the sink, giving a silver cocktail shaker a workout, when Juliet called out to get her attention.
