Текст книги "Hollywood Dirt"
Автор книги: Alessandra Torre
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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 26 страниц)
CHAPTER 105
Cole was done for. He’d kept thinking, after sex, that it’d fade. That he’d come to his senses and find his footing. Realize that she was a normal girl and that they’d had one night of fun and now filming should be smoother, his life in Quincy less antagonistic. But he was still crazy in the middle of the night, when he fought sleep just so that he could enjoy holding her just a little bit longer. And he was definitely still crazy when he woke up, a morning chub out of control, and craved her. Smelling food, finding her in his shirt, in his kitchen, a spatula in hand, had made it even worse. He’d been attracted to women before, had loved fucking Nadia, but had never had someone crawl under his skin like this. He looked at this woman and saw her bouncing his child on her hip, saw her running through the field on his Montana ranch, saw her sitting in a velvet seat at the Academy Awards, her hand light on his arm, her mouth warm against his ear. And all of those images scared the hell out of him.
Now, sex in the kitchen completed, breakfast eaten, dishes washed, he watched her. She stood in the living room, her hands on adorable hips, frustration in her stance when he rounded the couch and faced her. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t carry all of this stuff home.” She gestured to her haul from last night, a pile that included a popcorn machine (she’d never had one), iPad (he’d insisted on it), and minion pajamas, among four bags of other things. She had been planning to wear the pajamas to bed, thank God she hadn’t.
“I can drop you off.” He didn’t want to drop her off. He wanted to drive over to her house, pick up all of her cheap shit, and move it in. He wanted to sit down and work out their shooting schedule, their next fifty years, find out every dream she’d ever had and then make them realities. He wanted to fly Brad DeLuca up here and personally hug the man for putting him in Quincy early, for putting him on her doorstep, for saving the rest of his life.
“The reporters,” she reminded him, chewing on a thumbnail as she reached down and shifted through the closest bag.
“Fuck the reporters.”
“Ha.” She pulled out a pack of gum, Bubblicious, and ripped it open, holding it up before shaking one out. “Want one?”
“No.” He watched her unwrap it and pop the pink cube in her mouth. A children’s gum. She chewed children’s gum. Her jaw worked, and she glanced up at him, popping a bubble before speaking. “What?”
“Can we talk about this?” A stupid question. He should have kept his mouth shut. Taken her home. Let everything play out properly. Or not play out properly. And in that risk laid his worry.
“About us?” She popped her gum again, and he fought the urge to kiss it out of her mouth.
“Yes.”
“Are you freaked out by what I said last night?” She tossed down the gum and turned to fully face him, her arms crossing in front of her chest. Not defiantly, her arms were tight, as if she was giving herself a hug, her hands under her armpits. Nervous Summer. A new side. Nadia would never have responded in this manner. She would have played games, been cool, skirted direct conversation while he chased her down with questions and insinuations. Their fights were exhausting, which is probably why they both avoided them—him working out his anger on their gym’s punching bag, her on, apparently, other men.
“No.” It was the truth. Her weak declarations that could be analyzed a hundred different ways depending on how long a man wanted to stay awake… those didn’t freak him out. Not when they were so pale compared to his feelings, live and vivid in a thousand different hues. He looked down, at the pile of shopping bags, and wished he’d picked a different location for this. It’d be too serious if he invited her to sit down, yet standing here, in this dim room, the fan above them off balance and ticking, wasn’t exactly how he imagined this going. Not that he had thought this through. If he had, he’d have duct taped his mouth shut. Bringing this up now could only lead to disaster.
“So talk.” Her shoulders had loosened a little, and her chewing quieted.
He took a deep breath and jumped off the cliff. “I meant what I said last night. A man would be crazy to cheat on you. A man would be crazy to want something else, when he could have you. I’ve had you—the real you—for these last eighteen hours, and I don’t want anything else. I don’t think I’ll ever want anything else.” He stepped closer and looked down at her. “Tell me we aren’t great together.”
She looked away, into a far corner of the room, then back up at him. “We aren’t, Cole. This…” she gestured between the two of them, her hand a floppy wave of heartbreak, “… this doesn’t even compare to what I had with Scott.” She lifted one of her shoulders in a tiny shrug of indifference. “I’m sorry.”
“But… you told me you loved me. I thought…” He stepped away from her and pressed his palms to his eyes, everything in his life spiraling down in one hellacious drain of WTF.
“You thought I was a terrible actress.” There was a smile in her response, and he looked up, confused. She blew a giant bubble and popped it.
“So you were acting? With me?” His mind started shuttering through their night, and she rolled her eyes, stepping forward and wrapping her arms around his neck, her mouth sugary when she pressed it to his lips.
“God, you are dense,” she whispered against his mouth. “Yes, we are great together. Yes, I don’t want anyone else either. Yes, you big stupid man who can’t say the words that every woman wants to hear, I love you too.” She leaned back to say more, but he didn’t let her go. He crushed her into his arms and somewhere, in the course of their kiss, he got her gum and swallowed it and then threw her over his shoulder and carried her upstairs.
CHAPTER 106
When we pulled into the Holden’s driveway, the gate was open, the string of stranger’s cars now in a neat line in front of my house. At our approach heads moved in the cars, doors opened, rigs were grabbed, and feet stepped quickly out, flashbulbs popping in the brightest sun that God could provide.
“Are you sure we don’t need to call Casey?” I asked nervously, Cole’s hand tightening on mine.
“First rule of Hollywood, babe. The gods don’t ask permission. Own your shit and don’t forget to smile.” He put the truck into park and leaned over, waiting for a kiss, his smile widening when I leaned over, and our skin was lit when the paps went crazy.
I giggled, and he smiled, taking one more kiss before he grabbed the handle. “Let’s go raise some hell.” I grabbed my handle and cracked the door, a stranger before me wearing a Lakers hat, his black shirt a poor choice in this heat, a camera in his hand one that probably cost more than my truck. I smiled politely and he lifted his camera in response. We met at the front of the truck, Cole’s hand reaching out for me. When I grabbed it, he pulled me all the way in, his arms supporting me as he dipped me low, my shriek in response captured by every camera present. He smiled down at me, and I scowled. Then he kissed me long enough that I blushed.
“Enough,” I murmured. “I think they got it.”
Cole pulled me up with a smirk. “Not yet.” He kept his hand on my lower back, and we stepped toward the house, the curtain moving in the front window, and I wondered what on Earth Mama was thinking of this. On the front steps, Cole turned, hugging me to his side and facing the group, seven or eight bodies scattered across the lawn without any concern over my planting. I glared at the closest one, and he moved away from my butterfly garden, his hands raising in apology.
“I’m assuming, since you’ve squatted yourself on this personal property, that you know this beautiful woman beside me. But what you don’t know is that she is mine. You fuck with her, you fuck with my team and—more importantly—you fuck with me. If I ever convince her to marry me, you all are invited to our wedding. We’ll be serving crème brulee, be sure to eat up.” I smacked his stomach hard enough to make him wince, and he pulled me against him, his head dropping for another kiss. “Just a joke, babe. Except for the marriage part. Too early?” He pulled off, his eyes on mine, a cautious smile on his features.
“Too early,” I said sternly. “Especially since, Mr. Masten, you’re still a married man.”
“Ouch.” He winced. “And you know better than to call me that.”
“Mr. Masten?” I said playfully and wheeled out of his arms, reaching for the door handle, his hand too slow when it tried to catch me.
“Damn woman.” He hooked a finger in the back tie of my sundress, pulling me back before I could twist the knob. “Have I told you that I love you?”
I didn’t respond to him, I just smiled, and then the door opened and Momma was there, and her smile was stretched bigger than I’d ever seen it.
CHAPTER 107
TWO DAYS LATER
The bang on the trailer’s front door was so hard that the walls shook. I rolled over and poked, with one lazy finger, Cole’s side. He groaned. “I can’t move, woman. You’ve destroyed me.”
I laughed, my own muscles too weak to move, much less to stand, dress, and get to the door. “I thought we had two hours before the next shoot,” I whispered to him. It couldn’t have been two hours; there was no way. It’d been… I looked for the clock, but it was in the trailer’s main room and that was a good eight feet away. I laid my head against Cole’s chest instead. The person at the door pounded again, a series of raps that showed no patience or timidity whatsoever.
“Just pretend we aren’t here,” Cole stage-whispered, his hand tightening around me when I started to get up.
Our view on the bed afforded a door’s width glimpse into the living room of the trailer. Enough of a glimpse that, when the front door was kicked in, we saw the edge of it swing, the man stomping up the steps appearing in our doorway a second later. I gripped the sheet to my chest and tried to place the man… Cole’s attorney. DeRico or something like that. Here. With Cole’s trailer door now lying on its side, cockeyed on the floor.
“Shit,” Cole grumbled and pulled the sheet higher on me, his legs swinging off the bed, and he grabbed a pillow, covering himself as he glowered at the man. “What the fuck, DeLuca. Your phone doesn’t work?”
“Don’t bitch at me about communication. Not when you two go and play that stunt on national television without calling me first. Nadia is pissed. Beyond pissed. I had to listen to that bitch personally; she left me an eight-minute voicemail explaining her detailed plans for your castration.”
Cole shrugged. “Want to give Summer some respect and get the fuck out of this room?”
The man glanced at me, then nodded. “I’m sorry.” He made eye contact with the apology, and I shrugged my forgiveness. He turned his back to me and hovered at the door, looking to Cole.
“I’m coming,” Cole barked. “Give me a minute.”
DeLuca closed the bedroom’s door, and Cole was on the bed and above me in a second. “Sorry babe.” He kissed my neck and hopped off the bed, grabbing a pair of jeans off the floor and pulling them on.
“Will everything be okay? With Nadia?” We had conveniently forgotten her in this whirlwind of change, Cole solidly on the Obsessed with Me bus, oblivious to any of the side effects that seemed to plague Don and Casey’s view of our new union.
He shrugged into a shirt. “We already came to an agreement. We’re good. She’s just pissed. It’s normal.” He squeezed my foot, the closest thing to him, and winked at me. “I’ll be back.”
CHAPTER 108
The chair, a leather straight back that sat by the door, was in serious danger of joining Cole’s door on its trip to the set dumpster. DeLuca leaned on the back of it with both hands, his knuckles white, his face dark.
Cole sat down on the couch, his hand waving at DeLuca to proceed. “Okay, give it to me.”
“Nadia is contesting the mediation document, saying that your good faith actions in the mediation were false, and that you were in love with Summer the entire time.”
Cole tilted his head, trying to connect the dots. “But… she’s in love with the director prick. Has been the whole time. Why the fuck does it matter who I’ve been doing what with?”
DeLuca let out a long, exasperated sigh. “Because you knew she was doing the director prick. It was a shared understanding. See, from Nadia’s side, she was under the impression, when agreeing to our terms, that there was a chance that you two could rekindle things.”
“What the fuck?” he exploded. “She was the one who filed for divorce. And rekindle things?” He laughed and felt almost delirious, this a situation happening to someone else. “Getting back with Nadia hasn’t been part of the equation since before I even left LA.” He looked to the bedroom door and wanted Summer out there. Hated her shut away like she wasn’t part of this. He looked back at DeLuca, exasperated. “You’re the one who told me, if I loved Summer, that it was okay.”
“Is that what this is? It wasn’t that damn long ago that I asked you and you didn’t know.”
“I love her.” Cole nodded tightly and met the attorney’s eyes. “Without a doubt.”
“Right now, you have two options. Stay with Summer and split The Fortune Bottle with Nadia, or push this fling aside, we’ll repair things with Nadia and the press, and the movie will be yours. All yours.”
There wasn’t a moment of hesitation in Cole’s response. “Fuck no. Give her half if that’s what it will take.”
“You sure about that?” DeLuca let go of the chair and stepped closer, his head tilting as he examined Cole’s face. “You’re willing to walk away from half of this? Over her?” He nodded toward the closed bedroom door.
“You told me once that you had your soulmate. Would you have given half of a movie away for a lifetime with her?”
Brad’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not permanently walking away from her in my scenario. All I’m asking is for you to put this relationship on hold. Give it six months, then you can reunite, try it again.”
“Would you risk your relationship with your wife?” Cole repeated, and it wasn’t a question at all. It was a point, and Brad stared at him for a long moment before nodding in understanding.
“She must be special,” he said quietly.
“She is.” Cole grinned. “Now get the fuck out of here so that I can get back to her.”
“No second thoughts?” DeLuca said. “It’s half of your baby.”
“No.” Cole shook his head. “It’s a movie. That’s it.” A statement he would never have made a few months ago. Back when his entire life was The Fortune Bottle, and he was ready to tear apart his soul if it meant keeping it from Nadia. But now, with just a flicker of risk to his new relationship, it had lost all of its value. He wanted to be done with Nadia, done with the press, done with everything but the feisty blonde behind that bedroom door. Maybe it’d been the months in this town, a place where pretense and competition didn’t exist. Maybe it was the way that, through Summer, he had taken the first hard look at himself and wanted to change.
“Wow.” DeLuca clapped him on the back, walking past the broken door and out, the summer heat pushing through the opening.
“Anything you need from me?” Cole called.
“Oh, no. Please.” DeLuca waved his hand. “Less is more, Cole. Less is more.” He moved into the crowd, and Cole stood in the doorway and caught Justin’s eye.
“We’re on it,” Justin called, and Cole saw two engineers jogging over, tool bags in hand. Cole waved his thanks, nodded to the men, and stepped back, into the bedroom, closing the door behind him.
She sat on the edge of the bed, her pantyhose back on, her hands busy on the clasps of her shoes. “Everything okay?”
He leaned against the wall. “My door might disagree, but everything’s great otherwise.”
She stood and zipped up the back of her skirt. “You sure? I want to know if I’m causing problems.”
He stepped forward and looked down at her. “I love telling you when you’re causing problems. But no, right now, sadly, you are behaving entirely too much.”
She grinned. “I’ll brainstorm tonight over ways to cause you more grief.”
“I’d appreciate that immensely.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys are in love, we get it,” Justin called loudly from the living room. “Are you dressed? Because I need to get Mr. Loverboy over to Don.”
“That’s you,” she whispered, her eyes mischievous, and his fingers itched to push her onto the bed, just for a moment, just long enough to make those hazel eyes roll back in pleasure.
Justin coughed from the living room, and she pushed Cole to the door. “He’s coming,” she called out, and he frowned down at her. “I’ll see you on set,” she promised and shut the door, his door, on his face.
Cole turned with a scowl, and Justin laughed. “Give Don ten minutes. Then you can come back to her.”
CHAPTER 109
The movie wrapped on a Tuesday. It felt weird, the short week. Like the last days of school where you just watched movies and signed yearbooks, we all kind of milled around like lost children, Don barking at everyone constantly, the few scenes filmed were short redos that he hadn’t been in love with the first time.
It was so much easier to film with Cole after that night. I didn’t realize how much I’d been pushing him off, how much I’d fought my heart. When I stopped that fight, the surge of affection was scary, the feeling heady, the risk exhilarating. Now I knew why they said you fell in love. I plummeted with no parachute, and hoped like hell he would catch me when I hit the bottom. Only, there hadn’t been a bottom. There was just him, his cocky grin grabbing me from the moment I woke up to the moment our bedroom light turned out. His hand sliding up my thigh in the midst of a production meeting, his sexual touch turning sweet as he found my hand and grabbed it. His chuckle, the one that used to light my anger—I was addicted to it. I understood his laughter now; I knew his smiles and his glares and everything between them.
A week earlier, we camped out on the edge of the Holdens’ plantation, down by the lake. Ate s’mores and drank wine, and he told me about his mom, and how much he loved mine. And then we talked about Life After the Movie and what would happen to her. Cole wanted to bring her to California. I told him that Mama would make up her own mind about where she wanted to be. I’d never been to California, but I couldn’t see her there. Not with everything Cole had described it to be. I wasn’t even sure I saw myself there.
He was the first person I ever told about my Departure From Quincy. I think it hurt him a little. Not in a feelings sense, but more like the idea physically pained him. I had spent a lot of nights thinking, in my bed at night, staring up at my ceiling. My Departure From Quincy plans had been quite glamorous. I’d give Mama a budget and let her pick her poison—there were new homes going up on the edge of town, and eighty thousand dollars would get her a brick three-bedroom, two-bath with everything she never had. Or, if she’d rather, she could take that money and find something else. Maybe an older house on some land, farther out, on one of our hundreds of dirt roads. And I’d trade in the truck and get an SUV, something with air conditioning and low mileage. And then I was going to go someplace cooler. Maybe North Carolina. Find a town big enough to disappear in. Buy a house, find a job, maybe go to college.
That’d been the gist of it all, my fantasies lining up into place in the dark of my room. Before Cole. I told him the plan and watched his throat as he swallowed. He turned his head away, and the moon lit the line of his profile. We had joked about marriage, in front of the reporters. Had been connected at the hip since that night at his house. But we hadn’t discussed the future. He’d tried, I’d evaded, and then, beside that fire, overlooking the lake, I stopped. I stopped running and turned and faced our future.
“What do you want? For us?” I asked the question and he turned, pulling me onto his lap so we faced each other.
“It’s not about what I want. I want you to be happy. So I need to know what you want.”
“I think I want to go back with you. To California.”
“It’s not a city you can get lost in, Summer. Not tied to me.” His voice was guarded, tinged in worry.
“That’s okay. I’m a big girl. I can tough it out.” I had smiled up at him and saw the turn in his eyes, knew—before he’d even reached for me—what was coming. When Cole Masten loves, it is scary. The man puts his entire heart out with the expectation that it will be crushed. Sometimes I worry at the way he looks at me, at the way I feel for him. It seems too precious, too rare—our combination of souls. If I ever lose this man, I will never recover. If he ever loses me, I fear for the man that he will become.
I could take on California for him. I knew that already, but decided it there, by that fire, his push of me back onto the blanket, his hands frantic as they pulled at my clothes.
Together, we could take on anything.
