“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.