“No.” Getting up, she moved over to the window and stared outside. “Things didn’t go at all well with Sebastien.”
“I was afraid of that. Did he finally decide to start tearing into you, too?”
She glanced back at him with a faint smile. “Not like he does with everybody else.” She wasn’t about to tell her manager that she and Sebastien probably would have had sex on the counter in his kitchen if Dash hadn’t interrupted them with his call.
When he didn’t answer right away, she went back to staring out over LA. JD had most of the top floor for his agency and his office had been tucked into the southwest corner, facing out over the sprawl that was Los Angeles, California. On a clear day, Marin could stand at those windows and see forever.
More often than not, she saw smog.
Today, it was rain. An unseasonably chilly front had moved through, and the change in Los Angeles’s normally mild weather had people rushing for their designer coats.
But Marin had driven here in just a light sweater, the cool temperatures making her think of chilly fall days back in the Smoky Mountains before her parents had decided to move to LA when she was still a child.
She still went back to Tennessee on a regular basis and she kept a home there in addition to a cabin she’d bought in the Rockies and her town house in New York. She liked feeling at home when she traveled. So naturally, she just bought homes in the places where she was at most often. Hotels sucked.
“You look tired, Marin.”
She made a face at her manager over her shoulder. “I am tired. I didn’t spend the night in one place for more than three weeks while we were finishing everything for the opening of Whiskey Row and as soon as that was done, I was back to filming. Won’t be too long before I’ll be called back for the postproduction work, and then it will be time to gear up for the prerelease madness.” She shrugged and went back to staring out into the rain. It had been raining for nearly an hour and it made her wish she was at home with a book and a cup of coffee, not dealing with business. “But I’ll have plenty of time to rest as soon as I’m done here.”
“Your vacation.” JD nodded as he got up from behind his desk. He refreshed his coffee and poured her a cup without asking, bringing it to her after he’d doctored it with cream.
She accepted and took a sip. It didn’t hit with quite the same zing as always. Her stomach had been acting up on her the past couple days. Just another thing to lay at Sebastien’s feet.
If only he wasn’t a jerk. If only he wasn’t still in love with Monica.
Her eyes started to burn, but she refused to linger on any of that. She’d cry him out of her system while she was taking some time off.
Putting the coffee down, she sighed. “Look, maybe in a few more months, you can try again. Right now, Sebastien is just too . . .”
“Angry?” JD offered when she couldn’t find the right word.
“Well . . .” She remembered the frenzied passion between them and how it had turned so quickly to anger. But was anger really at the root of it all? She didn’t know. “I’m not sure if he knows how he feels right now.”
“Maybe he doesn’t,” JD said, moving to join her at the window. “But sitting at home and refusing to come back to his life isn’t helping, either.”
“I know.” Without lifting her head, she shifted her gaze to the endless wall of rain. “But I think it’s getting better. He’s heading out to see his folks—or at least thinking about it. That’s more than he’s been willing to do in a while.”
JD nodded, but his expression remained grim. “This isn’t just about the movie, you know that, right?”
“Of course I do.” She caught his hand and squeezed. JD had been with her since she’d started out and he was just as much a friend as anything else. He cared about his clients. In a world where actors and actresses came and went more often than fashion trends, he stood by his people. He believed in them or he didn’t work with them—and JD clearly believed in Sebastien. “We want to make everything better for him, but we just can’t. That’s up to Sebastien.”
JD didn’t have any response for her.
After a moment, she leaned over and kissed his cheek. He was a few inches shorter than her and usually one or the other made a wisecrack, but today, neither of them had the heart. “I have to get going. I need to finish up some last minute things before I head out of town.”
“You be careful out there,” JD said, his gaze still on the rainy skies of Los Angeles. “I’ll . . . I’ll call Zach. Maybe he can get through to Seb.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” But it was a lie—Zach wasn’t going to get through to Sebastien, and they both knew it.
***
Sebastien caught sight of that familiar head of blonde hair, the skeins of it flattened to her head by the downpour. She’d accepted her keys and dashed around to the driver’s door before the valet could so much as open the umbrella he’d brought out to shield her from the rain.