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Now, riding in the back of a town car with Hollywood’s darling and preparing to pretend we were intimately involved at some family shindig had me thinking I’d just accepted a fairly challenging role.
There was a reporter fromHollywood Entertainermagazine coming down to attend the event and document Juliet’s ‘real life roots’ or something, and a new love interest was the one piece her team believed was missing. I’d been in the right place at the right time—or maybe the totally wrong place at the wrong time—and they’d asked me to play the part. So here I was, with the moonlit shadows of hulking trees and barns flying by on either side of me and … “Was that a horse and buggy?” I asked, sitting up straighter. It was dark out, but the moon was full, and as we sped by the horse and carriage, I thought maybe my tired mind had imagined it.
“Oh yeah, this is Amish country,” Juliet said, sliding her phone to her shoulder for a moment to answer me.
“Amish country,” I repeated, feeling farther from home than I had since I’d been on location in the Solomon Islands for my last epic failure.
“Hey Ryan,” she said, finally putting down her phone and leaning back to look at me. “Thanks for this. I mean it.” She smiled, but her eyes stayed sad, distant. “The divorce was such a complete disaster … I mean, I guess no divorce is a good thing, but everyone just seems to know everything about mine …” her voice faltered, and I felt the same sympathy I’d felt the night when she’d asked me to meet her at her house to propose the idea. Juliet was a good person. I could help her out.
“It’s okay,” I said, dropping a hand to take hers on the seat between us. She actually flinched at my touch, which didn’t do a hell of a lot for my ego.
After a second she relaxed, leaving her hand where it was. “Sorry,” she said. “Just a little tense.”
We’d put on a pretty good show in the airport at LAX, and again at Dulles, but Juliet was stiff and rigid. I wasn’t sure how convincing our act was going to be, but it was my job to make it work. And I liked Juliet. She was a superstar, but beneath the trappings of fame and glamor, I thought she was a good person. And she’d been treated like shit.
If Juliet—and about a million tabloid reports—was to be believed, her marriage had ended in a pretty spectacular disaster. The husband-banging-the-personal-chef-on-the-kitchen-counter kind. Toss in a little bit of stealing millions from your famous wife, and you’ve got a picture of what supposedly happened there.
I wanted to do what I could to help show her fans that she’d come through it all without a scratch, even if that clearly wasn’t true. Her ex was a leech and a cretin, and he’d siphoned off half her money before she’d walked in on him on the kitchen island. He’d gone straight to the media to play the victim, and they’d caught a few candids of Juliet clearly distraught, leading to a frenzy of tabloid coverage alleging everything from a nervous breakdown to a long-hidden drug habit.
Her shiny new “relationship” with me was a big first step to showing the world she was fine, even though I doubted it was true. When she gazed absently out the window, Juliet’s shoulders slumped and the lines around her eyes showed evidence of long sleepless nights.
I found myself wanting to help, even though I didn’t have a personal stake in Juliet’s life. I didn’t like to see people hurting, and if I could help in some way? I would.
“We’re almost there,” she said, nodding at the passing fields and barns, as if she’d spotted some landmark that to me looked just like everything else we’d seen.
“You ready?” I asked her, our eyes meeting and some kind of understanding passing between us.
My heart went out to her—she looked so sad. Part of me wished I felt something else, that I was interested in her, that my body responded to her obvious sex appeal the way the rest of the red-blooded male population of the United States—and the rest of the world, for that matter—seemed to. But Juliet Manchester, though gorgeous, didn’t do it for me.
There was something too shiny, too perfect about her. And I wasn’t looking anyway. I’d dated Hollywood starlets, and even regular women I’d met along the journey to becoming Ryan McDonnell. But nothing had ever felt real. I’d always had the sense that each relationship was built for the purpose of one or both people getting something out of it. Every relationship I’d had felt just like this one—forced, a business transaction. This was just the first time the cards were on the table at the outset.
No, if I were looking, it wouldn’t be in Hollywood. Some day I’d have enough financial security to leave all that and figure out who the hell I actually was. I’d find someone real and live in a place where people didn’t base their estimation of your worth on what your last film grossed or what your address was. For now, that’s the life I’d chosen—and it paid well enough most of the time to help me set up a better future. But this weekend, I had a role to play.
“The security team arrived a little while ago,” Juliet said. “My sister didn’t sound very happy about them scouting the property and poking around the house.”
I shrugged. “Necessary evil, I guess.” Juliet was a star of the caliber that attracted stalkers and other crazies, so I understood a little bit why we had two burly men in a car behind us and two ahead of us already poking around the house where we’d be staying.
With Juliet’s sister and grandmother, apparently. I wasn’t sure why we couldn’t just stay in a nice hotel nearby, but I was beginning to think it had to do with the totally isolated nature of this place.
Juliet nodded absently. “Once we get settled, it should be just family and stuff until the magazine crew comes out tomorrow. They’ll pop in for the party too.”
“And are we a couple where your family is concerned?” It would be easier if we didn’t have to pretend when the cameras weren’t around.
She wrinkled her nose and seemed to think about this. “The fewer people who know we’re pretending, the better, I guess.”
Great. The pressure just doubled—there’d be no chance to take a breath, let down my guard.
“Is that okay?” she asked, sounding sincerely sorry.
“It’s fine, Juliet. That’s what I agreed to, right? I save your image, you save my career.”
She smiled and laughed, but it was a practiced response. “We’ll see what we can manage on both counts.”
“So this is your sister’s house?” The car had turned between the tall brick posts of a wrought iron fence and was headed down a long gravel drive between two fields of what looked like corn. “Is your sister a farmer?” I angled my head at the crop, shadowed and eerie in the moonlight.
Juliet laughed. “No,” she said. “She runs a river adventure shop, actually, teaching people to kayak, stand-up paddleboard, do yoga on the river, that kind of thing. There’s a family that lives across the road here that farms the property. And the house is really my Grandmother’s, but my sister lives here and looks after her.”
“That’s nice of her.”
