She laughed. “Something like that.”
“You said you didn’t miss it, but I’m getting the feeling you do. At least on some level.”
She stared out at the black sea. Did she miss Hollywood? That was the place she really considered home. Not Kentucky.
Never Kentucky.
“I miss the people,” she finally said. God’s honest truth. She missed her director, and the producer. She missed the caterer, the wardrobe people…her agent. He’d been like a father to her. In fact, she’d often pretended he was her father, which was better than the truth—that she’d been conceived during a one-night stand at a party and Tamilyn had never named the guy.
Olivia had found her real family on set. The wardrobe lady had been the grandma she’d never had, since her mother had been estranged from her own family for decades. The set director had been like an uncle. The other kids on the set were her siblings. It’d been a dysfunctional family, but still a family, and she missed the close camaraderie. “I miss the people a lot.”
“You were close.”
They’d been lucky. Their cast had been a large, young, boisterous, happy one. After spending the first seven years of her life poorer than dirt, life on that set had been a dream come true. Food tables, constantly filled. Games, toys, books, whatever she’d wanted. “Extremely,” she said, knowing damn well that he thought they were talking about her real family. But these people had been her family, for all intents and purposes.
Until, of course, she’d hit puberty and the show had been canceled. Her identity had, poof, vanished, and the people she’d cared about had all moved on, leaving her alone, confused, and more than a little frightened at the easy abandonment.
As an adult, she’d come to realize it hadn’t been anything personal. It’d simply been the way of the industry. The way of the world, in fact.
Didn’t make it hurt any less.
“How about you?” she asked. “You’re close to your family.”
He laughed and rubbed his jaw. He had at least a day’s worth of growth there, and the scraping sound it made against his palm activated the butterfly colony living in her belly.
“My dad’s gone now,” he said, “but both he and my mom grew up here, and they never left. Raised all four of us here, and yeah, we’re close. Though I think nosy’s a better word. We’re all up in each other’s business a lot.”
“And you all stuck in Lucky Harbor?” she marveled, unable to fathom that. He’d said his sisters were crazy, but she could tell by the softness in his gaze that he was just joking, that he had the real deal in his family.
“All of us,” he said. “I left for a while after graduation. Worked on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for five years before coming back here.”
“Wow,” she breathed. “Five years. What did you do?”
“I was the chief positioning operator and navigator for the ship and in charge of the equipment and safety for all the guys. Eighty-five, to be exact.”
“I’m trying to imagine living with eighty-five guys on a rig for that long.”“Three were women, actually.”
“Not the best of odds,” she said, fascinated by him, by his family, by everything.
He shrugged, but something in his gaze caught her interest. “You beat the odds,” she said, guessing. She laughed when he grimaced. “You did,” she said. “Eighty-two to three, and you caught one of them.”
He grimaced again and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Only because as a supervisor, I stuck out from the general population,” he said. “Authority tends to look good to some women.”
She studied him. Heart-stopping blue eyes. Silky brown hair that tended to fall over his forehead when he was wet from head to toe, and also when he was riding Ferris wheels.
He looked pretty damn good to her, and she wasn’t into authority figures. “You don’t think you’re hot?” she asked.
He actually squirmed, and she laughed again.
He met her gaze, his own rueful. “You know I love your laugh, but this is starting to remind me of when you were pointing and laughing at my naked ass on the boat last week.”
“I never pointed and laughed at your naked ass. I never saw your naked ass. I saw…other parts.” Oh boy, had she. “And I wasn’t laughing at…it.”
He arched a brow. “It?”
Now she squirmed. “You’ve got a better term?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “It’s called a co—”
She put her hand over his mouth. “We were talking about the rigs,” she said firmly, doing her damnedest not to blush—as if she had any control over that. “You had a girlfriend out there.”
He nodded, a little reluctantly she thought. She had no business wondering, being so curious about him, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She dropped her hand from his mouth. “You and One-of-Three go out for a long time?” she asked.
“Three years.”
“Three years…in the past tense?” she asked.
“You fishing?”
Hell yes. She just didn’t know why.
“Past tense,” he said, letting her off the hook. “I don’t still see Susan.”
There was something in his expression. No, scratch that. There was absolutely nothing in his expression at all. He was carefully…blank. “Real life wasn’t as romantic on the mainland as it had been on the rig?” she asked, trying to joke.