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After Ryan left the room, I lay awake and took stock. My body hummed with memories of his touch, and my muscles were soft and languid, the result of the very best orgasm I’d ever had. And while my body purred as I lay in my bed alone, my brain whizzed and jerked, trying to find some way that all of this would be okay.
But it wouldn’t.
Because I was an idiot. I’d let myself become completely absorbed in the dream of Ryan McDonnell. In the few days I’d actually known him, I’d gotten much too close, and I knew when he left I was going to be broken. I’d entertained a fantasy, let it wind itself around my heart, and now it was going to be very hard to release.
How could the boring standstill world of my everyday life ever compare to the dream of having a movie star sweep me off my feet?
But that was what this was. Just a dream. Even if Ryan was not really with Juliet, there was no chance he was going to be with me. I knew myself too well for that.
I was Tess Manchester, largely invisible to men.
On the plus side, that gave me a lot of time to pursue activities, and had allowed me to build a successful business and construct my life pretty much the way I wanted it.
The down side was … well, it was pretty obvious as I looked around my room. My life often felt empty.
When the sky outside began to lighten in infinitesimal amounts, I slipped out of bed, feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all. I couldn’t remember every single one of the dark minutes that had ticked by, but it felt like I’d been awake to mark each one’s slow passage. And I stood beside my bed now with a weight in my chest and fog in my mind. And more than one hundred guests coming tonight for Granny’s party, not to mention the press for Juliet’s article.
Perfect.
I slogged downstairs in my pajamas, looking for coffee, and nearly had a heart attack when I bumped into Juliet in the living room.
“Oh, Tess!” she said, looking every bit as surprised to see me at o’dark-thirty as I felt to see her.
“Hi,” I said. I wondered why she was wandering around the house this early in her pajamas, but then realized I was doing the same thing. Maybe she couldn’t sleep either. “Getting coffee,” I told her, my best effort at conversation still making me sound like fuzzy and dense at this hour.
“Good, yes,” she said, following me to the kitchen. Her quick answer and the glance behind her made me think my sister was hiding something. For a split second, my suspicion rose again and I peered around in the darkness for Ryan—could they really be together as Gran had insinuated? Was she sneaking around down here with him? But that didn’t make a lot of sense, and it was far too early for me to worry much about it.
While the coffee brewed, we sat across from each other at the small round table in the kitchen, each of us lost in our own thoughts. Once the pot was done, and we each had a mug between our hands, Juliet looked up at me. “You doing okay?”
Shame crept over me, a wet rag that smothered other feelings and pushed my shoulders down into a slump. “Jules, I’m sorry about what I said last night.” I said the words, mostly because I loved my sister and wanted to mend things between us, less because I was actually sorry.
“No, you were right.” She sipped her coffee, put the mug back down and traced the rim with her finger. “I know it isn’t easy being my sister, Tess. I know I make it hard.”
“It’s not always you … it’s just all the things that come with you now,” I said, wishing things could go back to how they were when we were kids. Just sisters. Just life.
“Things like Ryan?”
I sighed. I had no idea how to sort through the feelings I had for Ryan.
“He’s a good guy, Tess. And we’re not together, so …”
“So now it’s okay with you?” I raised an eyebrow at her over my mug. It had been very not okay last night.
She shrugged. “You were right. It’s not about me, and it’s not up to me. I want you to be happy, and lord knows you need to meet someone. Your life has revolved around salt water and Granny and other peoples’ adventures for way too long. You’re verging on spinsterhood.”
“I’m twenty-five.”
“Well.”
I shook my head. Facts had never gotten in the way of a good story for Juliet.
We were both silent for a while, drinking our coffee as the sun lifted to the horizon and spread rays of pink and orange across the sky, every color reflected in the surface of the water at the edge of the lawn. Juliet watched me, and finally put her mug down.
“You should give him a chance,” she said.
Even if geography wasn’t a problem, we were worlds apart. How could a man like Ryan ever really be happy with a simple woman like me? He might be charmed by Maryland now, be having fun entertaining the fantasy of leaving his glamorous life, but he’d never really do that. And I’d be a fool to think he could.
“It would never work out.” How could it? We lived on opposite coasts and our lives couldn’t be more opposite. “There’s no way I’d ever move to California,” I said. “And last I checked, they aren’t making any big movies out here. We don’t even get to see half the movies down here—I had to drive up to DC to see that one you did that won Sundance.”
