My jaw dropped and time seemed to slow down around me.
“She was the only one who seemed to be able to get me out of scrapes without getting too mad at me,” Guillaume continued. I could barely hear him over the rushing sound in my ears. I knew that my face had turned beet red, although of course no one in the audience knew that I was the person he was talking about. Guillaume went on: “Somehow, she always made it so I came out looking good.”
“Okay, she sounds perfect,” Katie said. “I need a publicist like that.” The audience laughed lightly, and she added, “So, what’s the problem?”
Guillaume cast his eyes down. “Well, the thing is, she liked this reporter named Gabriel, and I knew she did,” he said.
“Oh, no,” I muttered to myself, prompting a strange look from my Texan seatmate. I barely noticed. My face felt hot, and my palms were suddenly sweaty. Had Guillaume really just announced to the entire country that I had an inappropriate crush on a journalist? And this was supposed to make me feel better? I wanted to shrink into my seat and disappear.
“Oh, really?” Katie prompted, leaning forward with some interest.
“Yes,” Guillaume said, the sheepish expression across his face.
“Please stop talking,” I muttered under my breath. “Please stop talking.” But Guillaume apparently wasn’t listening to me. The only one who seemed to respond to my words was the Texan, who finally scooted an inch or two away from me and gave me a look as if he was afraid I was insane.
Onstage, Guillaume continued, undeterred by the please shut up mental messages I was furiously sending him. “See the thing is, I’ve been basically trying to screw with Gabe for the last thirty years,” he said.
Wait. What? Thirty years? What was he talking about?
“I’m a bit of a jerk,” Guillaume continued. “But the thing is, this time, it actually mattered. It wasn’t just harmless. I actually effed things up with Emma and Gabe.”
“Why is it you’ve been trying to screw things up with this Gabe for the last thirty years?” Katie prompted. Good question, Katie, I thought.
Guillaume shrugged, a mischievous expression playing across his perfect features. “Ah, it’s silly really,” he said. “It’s our stupid brotherly rivalry.”
I gasped. “Huh?” I said aloud. I couldn’t understand what Guillaume was talking about.
“See, he’s my half brother,” Guillaume continued onstage.
“What?” I breathed.
Beside me, the Texan was staring at me with alarm. “You crazy or something, lady?” he asked. He scooted even closer to his wife. I barely noticed.
“But he grew up in the United States with his mom,” Guillaume continued. “He’s a year and a half older than me. So when he’d come spend summers with our dad and me, all the girls went for him since he was bigger, stronger—and half American. Even all those summers he spent teaching me to speak better English, I was still just the boring French kid next door.”
Guillaume paused and grinned. “It’s why I had to join a band,” he quipped. “It’s the only way I was ever going to get laid with Gabe around every summer.”
The audience laughed at his joke, but all I could do was stare, my jaw hanging open. “They’re brothers?” I whispered to myself. How could it be? How had Gabe never mentioned any of this to me? But it certainly explained a lot—like how Gabe knew so much about Guillaume’s background, how he always seemed to know what Guillaume was doing, and how he was the only one who seemed to effortlessly see through my lies about Guillaume’s odd behavior.
I thought about it for a moment. Although I never would have put two and two together, it made so much sense. They did look alike. But while Guillaume wore his dark hair spiky and sexy, Gabe wore his combed and professional. Guillaume’s green eyes were framed by thick, dark eyelashes, Gabe’s were hidden behind his omnipresent wire-rimmed glasses, but they were more similar than I’d ever realized. Where Guillaume flaunted his body in curve-hugging rock-star wear, Gabe tended to be more professional and reserved, but I suspected that their builds were more similar under those clothes than I had considered. Even their accents when speaking English were identical, although Guillaume’s was thicker. Obviously, this could be explained by the fact that they shared a father and that much of Guillaume’s English had come from Gabe’s tutelage.
Katie was talking as I tuned back in, still riveted by the revelation. “So,” she was saying, “I hear from producers that this brother of yours is actually here backstage right now. Can we bring him out?”
I could feel my eyes widen as Gabe, looking even more handsome than I remembered, came striding reluctantly out from stage left, looking embarrassed. He was dressed casually in dark jeans and a gray T-shirt that actually showed off contours of his arms and chest I’d never noticed before under his stiff, button-down shirts. He had never looked better to me.