"Are all small towns the same?" she asked.
I was going to formulate a smartass response, but I merely grunted, since we were already pulling into the parking space. And then River was practically scrambling over the top of me to get a look at the menu. “Excuse you,” I said, as she dug her hand into my thigh.
“Didn’t complain when I was this close to you before,” she said.
True. And I could see down her shirt, so that was a bonus. I felt the familiar stirring between my legs, and she looked down, then up at me. I shrugged. “Don’t put your hand down there if you don’t want it to get hard.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but we were interrupted by the car hop at the window. While the girl was taking our orders, I found myself actually wondering what River had been about to say.
We ate in silence for a while, until River spoke. "So," she said. "You grew up in West Bend?"
"Yup." I popped a French fry into my mouth, and didn't elaborate.
She let the silence linger for a minute before breaking it. "Anyone ever tell you you're amazing at small talk?"
I shot her a look.
"Thought so," she said, her voice light. "Well, there's this thing called conversation, where one person asks a question and the other one answers, but says some more stuff in response."
I shrugged. "I'm not much for talking about where I grew up." I got the hell out of West Bend as soon as I could, and I'd only gone back once. I wasn't exactly looking forward to going back now.
Especially considering the fact that now I had to think about what the hell I was going to do with a movie star in tow.
I sure as fuck couldn’t take her to my house. A girl like that would run screaming when she saw where the hell I came from. Hand to mouth living was probably the best way to describe my family's situation growing up - we had four walls and a piece of dirt, but not much more than that. My father—the asshole, as my brothers and I called him-brought in our meager income mining on our land, until that went to shit when I was in high school.
I wasn’t about to bring a girl like her home with me to see my family’s clapboard house, that was for damn sure, even if the asshole wasn't there anymore.
“Well, we’ve got how much longer until we get to West Bend?” she asked.
“About an hour or so,” I said.
“Then you’ve got about an hour or so of a captive audience here,” she said. “Considering you had your tongue down my throat before, I’d say we’re pretty well acquainted enough for small talk.” She winked at me, and it made me laugh.
“All right,” I said. “What do you want to know?”
“Who said I wanted to know anything about you?” she asked. “I’m a fucking movie star, and you don’t want to ask me anything?”
The same damn words out of someone else’s mouth and they would have sounded stuck up and bitchy and just plain tacky. But there was this...lightness about everything she said, this playfulness about her.
I laughed. "You are full of yourself, aren't you?"
“Just direct,” she said. “I don’t see any point in beating around the bush about it. There’s obviously something worrying you about going home, and you’re clearly man enough to tell me if you don’t want to discuss it.”
“I don’t want to discuss it,” I said.
“See how easy that was?”
"Okay, princess," I said. "Where'd you grow up? Hollywood? You think you're going to be able to hack it in rural America?"
She looked down for a minute, and I hoped she weren't going to start fucking crying again. But she didn't, just took a bite of a French fry. "Golden Willow, Georgia," she said. "I know small towns. I think I'll manage just fine."
"Huh." I hadn't expected that.
"Surprised?" she asked, her smile more of a smirk.
"Didn't expect you were a country girl," I said.
"Not all of us movie stars grow up rich, you know," she said. "I wasn't always a princess."
"You're not really what I expected from an actress."
"Glad I'm not disappointing," she said, munching on the end of a fry. "I'd hate to be a cliché."
I watched as she took a bite of her burger, and she turned toward me, her hazel eyes bright, hair messily sticking up on the ends. "You're definitely different, River Andrews," I said. "That's for damned sure."
CHAPTER EIGHT
ELIAS
“You’re sure this place is discreet?” River asked. “This is someone you’ve known for a while?”
“You sound like we’re visiting a whorehouse or something,” I said. “It’s a bed and breakfast.”
I deliberately failed to mention that I wasn't friends with the owners, and that people from West Bend may not exactly be particularly happy to see one of the Saint brothers show up, dragging with him a movie star demanding to stay incognito. That’s not the kind of problem you just dumped on people who thought you were the scum of the earth.
Not that I knew the people running the bed and breakfast anyway.