“He normally doesn’t return my calls if he thinks I’m going to make the wrong decision about a script or something. Some kind of passive-aggressive power play.” He scraped his fingers through his hair.
“You don’t think he liked your idea?”
Matt shrugged. “Probably not. I told you—I’m just a pretty face to him. Nothing but a pussy draw.” He pulled on a t-shirt, his abs dipping and clenching.
I grimaced at his words. “But it’s not Brian’s decision, right? You could talk to the studios yourself?”
“Yeah, I might do that when I’m back home.”
For some reason, his description of going home sliced through me like a knife. “Sounds like a good plan. You’ll need something to keep you busy.”
“Until you come out and visit,” he said. “You are still coming, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” I said. We hadn’t made any definite plans and I wasn’t convinced it would actually happen. Matt Easton would forget all about me as soon as he got back to LA.
His phone buzzed and I turned back to my dressing table to find my mascara.
“Hi, Sinclair,” he said.
I lay the back of my hand on my cheek, trying to cool my face. Every time Sinclair called, I couldn’t help but remember how he’d seen me naked in bed with Matt. Apparently Hollywood boundaries were different from the rest of the world’s.
“Yeah, Lana has her laptop. Lana, can I check something out on here?”
“Help yourself,” I replied, twisting open my mascara.
He winked, then turned back to his conversation. “Are you serious? What does it say?”
“Shit,” he said under his breath as he began to tap at the keyboard. “They have pictures?”
I glanced across at the screen, but he’d turned it away from me so I couldn’t see whatever it was that he was getting riled up about.
“MT fucking Z. Unbelievable. They must have had someone on a boat.” He looked up out my bedroom window. “There’s no way they could have got that shot otherwise.”
My blood ran cold as Matt’s voice merged into the screaming in my head. Pictures? Taken here?
I gripped the edge of the table in front of me as my head began to spin. “Matt?”
I hadn’t even finished saying his name when I felt him beside me. “It’s okay. You can just about make out it’s me, but they can’t tell it’s you.”
“Show me,” I blurted out.
“I’m telling you, it’s not that bad.”
“Show me,” I demanded. “I need to see for myself.”
He grabbed the laptop and set it in front of me on the dressing table, bottles and makeup flying everywhere. “It looks like they were taken last week. But they were so shitty, they had to wait for a slow news day.”
I peered closely at the grainy pictures of us on Matt’s deck. How many were there? I grabbed the mouse and clicked through. One. Two. Three. Four. Four pictures. I went back to the first one of us having lunch on his deck. That must have been on his last day off. Most of our time we spent at my place, but I remembered last week we’d taken our food to his cottage because I’d run out of ice. “It was Tuesday.”
“Yeah, but look, baby, they can’t see you.”
In the first two shots, it was only just possible to make out Matt’s identity. If it hadn’t been for his height and strong jaw, it would have been easy to mistake him for someone else. In the first one, I was hidden behind the clematis trellis. In the second one, I stood behind him. I wasn’t in the rest of them.
“They just know I was with someone. That’s all.”
Thank God. I wasn’t going to be dragged through the tabloids. Still, this posed a problem for Matt. “Is Sinclair mad?”
“Sinclair’s always mad,” he said, tossing his phone to the bed. “But I’m on my deck, eating lunch. There’s not much he can say. Don’t sweat it.”
“But your franchise. I thought you wanted to portray an image of dependable and trustworthy . . .”
He closed his eyes and shrugged. “It’s not like we’re kissing or anything.”
“I’m so sorry.” I put my arms around his waist, and let my head rest against his stomach.
He pushed his hands through my hair. “It’s my fault, not yours.”
“No,” I said, tilting my head to look at him. “This is the guy who hired a boat in order to invade your privacy’s fault.”
He smiled, but it was dull and without life. I couldn’t decide whether it was the invasion of privacy or the thought that he might have created problems for his career that worried him. Guilt churned in my stomach. Matt and I had snowballed into something that I’d never intended. Suddenly, I was putting his future at risk. All for a relationship that was never going to go anywhere. Matt might be used to his fame and attention, but I knew I never would be. There was no time when I was going to be okay with people taking my picture and publishing it across America. And that’s what it would mean to be with him. These grainy photos were a warning of what would happen if things continued between us, if things grew deeper.
Tomorrow, Matt would leave and I’d wave him off and remember a beautiful summer. But that’s all we could ever be. The way he held me close, kissed my head? It made me think he understood that, too.
There was no way a Hollywood superstar and a girl from Worthington, Maine, were meant to be together.
Seventeen
Lana
Keep busy. That was my mantra. Right now, that meant polishing the front windows of the shop.
I pulled out the linen cloths and grabbed the vinegar from under the cash register. I had to get used to Matt being back in LA. It wasn’t like he was traveling for work or on vacation—we lived on opposite sides of the country. Which wasn’t even the biggest obstacle in our relationship. His fame, my not wanting to be out in public with him, him having every woman under sixty-five having a desire to jump him—none of it sang out happily ever after. I should have been stronger and ended whatever there was between us, but he was so hard to resist. Especially when I didn’t want to. Instead I let myself hope that his draw would wane over the next few days.
We’d spoken twice since he’d left yesterday. Once when he landed and another just before I went to bed last night. Apparently, Matt was almost as good at phone sex as he was at the real thing. Almost. I blushed as I came face-to-face with Mr. Butcher.
“Good morning, Lana.” He poked his head around the open door. “It’s going to be a beautiful day. Better get those windows done quickly. You can’t do them in the sun.”
“Oh, now that’s an old wives’ tale,” I replied.
“It’s true,” he insisted. “The heat from the sun warms the window and dries it too fast, which makes streaks.”
“Well I gotta work faster then.”
“I heard your neighbor moved out. Are you very disappointed?” he asked, lingering by the door.
I tried to keep my face still and my smile constant. “We have another renter in on Wednesday, so it’s all good as far as I’m concerned.” I was pretty sure that if anyone in Worthington had caught wind of a romance between Matt and me, I’d have heard about it, but something in the way he asked made me think maybe he suspected.