“Maybe, but—”
“No. No but. I worked my whole life so I could do what I want. Then I get here, and I gotta slice out weeks between pictures. There’s no life of leisure. It’s a lie. You make it, and you don’t get to do what you want. You get to work like a plow horse. You knew this. You weren’t surprised. Your dad, your mom, your second cousin on your mother’s side . . . you all knew. Well, I didn’t. I worked to get out and I get here and it’s more work. I can’t breathe, Mike. I can’t breathe, and now I have to be a daddy? What the . . . what the fuck?”
“What do you want me to tell you?” His fingers tented between his spread knees.
“Tell me I can have a life.”
“You can have a life. But not the one you planned.”
How many parents did a guy need? Did I hit a hive of them or something? I felt as if I was being swarmed by people telling me what to do.
“That’s what you came down the hill to tell me?”
“Give or take. And that you need to slow it down. This is big. It’s not method. You’re not prepping for a part. This is it. This is all you get.”
Fuck this. Fuck this till Tuesday. Fuck everything about this.
“No pressure, right?” I grumbled and started for the door. I was being a brat. I knew it, but I felt like a justified brat who had plenty to be bratty about.
“And the nanny?” Michael called out just as I got to the door. My heart froze like Blomer Lake in January. Solid ice. Ready to crack if it was touched.
“How did you know?”
“Everyone knows.” He looked at me as if I were a mint leaf short of a julep. Maybe I was. Maybe I was losing my fucking mind. I almost asked him why. I almost got angry because it sounded as if he was going to insult Cara.
But he was Michael Greydon. He didn’t insult people. It was beneath him.
“I want her and I’m keeping her, Mike. I just haven’t figured out how. And don’t try to talk me out of it.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. She has this way. I want to do right by her, and then I want . . .”
To make her scream my name.
To fuck her so hard she’s sore for days.
I couldn’t say it. I was raised better than that. Weird enough to be thinking that way. I’d gotten rid of the southern gentleman bullshit and learned to live and fuck and party the LA way. No rules. I loved that life. I earned it.
“She did this thing to me,” I said more to myself than Mike. “She makes me want to burn the house down. I don’t know what it is.”
I rubbed my eyes. I couldn’t get the sight of her just before I’d kissed her out of my head.
“Well, I guess we know what Josh saw in her,” Michael said.
“Josh who?” I must have sounded enraged, because my blood reacted. Fuck him. Whoever he was. Fuck him.
“Josh who?” If Michael’s look was a guide, I was stupid as well as crazy. “Trudeau. Who did you think?”
I laughed, shaking off the adrenaline.
“Right. Never mind.”
“What’s going on?”
“The other nanny. Not the one Josh had an affair with. Not Blakely. Cara. I want her and it shouldn’t be a problem. I can’t help being an asshole and just taking what I want because it’s there. I don’t care what they think of me. But I care what they think of her.”
He didn’t answer. He just leaned back on the couch.
“Can you stop looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re a doctor and I’m the patient.”
“Tell me about your mother,” he said with a distinct Freudian lilt.
Fine. If I was going to be an emotional ass I was going to be an emotional ass.
“So, you know the time at Strasberg? When we were doing the game with the golf ball?”
“No.”
“You douche. Yes, you do. There were six of us. Britt too. And we passed the ball between us. Every time we got it we had to tell a truth about the person we passed it to. Right? And I passed to you and I said you were a Hollywood prince who had it easy and you got mad, so you threw it back hard and said I was a golden boy because I had all the talent and didn’t have to work at it. I sent it back to you and said you were going to waste your life worrying about what everyone thought about you. Then you sent it back and said the truth about Brad Sinclair—he’s worried everyone will know that he cares what people think so he makes sure everyone thinks the worst. Remember that?”
“Trevor took the ball away after that, right?”
“Yeah. But you were right. I was too, because you were a fucking prince.”
“I still am.”
“Thank you for admitting it. And right now? Sitting here in Ken’s office, I want to be you. I want a reputation I can be proud of. I want to look at what I’ve built and say, ‘That’s mine,’ like it matters.”
“Having kids will do that to you.”
“Can you stop being a dick for a minute?”
“Fine. Let me get this straight. You want the nanny. But if you have the nanny, you’re going to have a shit reputation that you don’t really care about except you do, for the nanny’s sake. And you want to stop being the Hollywood party boy for your daughter. But if you start screwing her nanny, it’s going to screw with her?”
“Something like that.”
Michael stood up and fastened the top button of his jacket. Cary fucking Grant had nothing on the guy.
“I can tell you one thing.”
I stood up too.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t have small-town Arkansas problems anymore. You’re almost a Hollywood prince. But not quite.”
“Watch your back, buddy.”
“You gave me some advice once. You said to do what I wanted because it was what I wanted and not pretend it was something else. So, what do you want?”
The simplest question in the world. I wanted Cara’s body and her time. I wanted to be a good father and do good work. The parties and the clubs came in a distant tenth on the list. I’d done all that. There was nothing new about it.
What did I want?
“Everything,” I said. “All of it.”
CHAPTER 35
CARA
I didn’t know what to expect from Ray Heywood, but he couldn’t do anything worse than give me a hard time in front of everyone at Kate Martello’s.
I had a feeling it was going to work out all right. My Brad dream had come like clockwork, and I woke up not just turned on, but happy. He and I were a terrible match, but once I wasn’t Nicole’s nanny, I could at least prove to myself that these dreams and feelings were misguided. I was hungry for sex and affection. Not Brad Sinclair particularly.
Yes, once I wasn’t his daughter’s nanny, I could kiss him again, and it would be . . . sad.
I parked the car myself and crossed over to the back entrance of the restaurant.
Brad and I were going to have some kind of short-term fling that proved we were incompatible and then what? I’d fallen in love with Nicole.
Do not fall in love with the children.