by Grant, Pippa
“Have to live on grass and pinto beans when I’m traveling. I’m eating all the shi—stuff I can cram in my belly while I’m here. Whoa, Tucker, dude, you just beat Luigi. Give it up, little man.”
I fist-bump him.
He grins with his big crooked front teeth, and shit.
Kid’s adorable.
“You like pepperoni?”
“I like anchovies.”
I wrinkle my brow. “You like—oh. Oh. Anchovies. Yeah, that pizza joint up in Shipwreck.” He has good taste. The cool little pirate-themed town out in the Blue Ridge Mountains makes some kick-ass pie in their pizza shop. I glance back at my sister, but she’s not carrying in pizza.
Nope.
She’s bringing in her neighbor.
Who’s not wearing shoes, or carrying her cat like the last time I saw her, but what she lacks in foot apparel and added fur, she’s making up for in a steely determination in her gaze. “We need to talk.”
“Sure.” I leap to my feet, because she basically holds my future in her hands. I wasn’t exaggerating about the people who’d have to find new jobs if RYDE and all my subsidiary lines go out of business because of this. Plus she could tell me to waddle down the street bawking like a chicken, and I’d probably do it. “Come on into my office.”
Wyatt chokes on a laugh.
Ellie rolls her eyes heavenward with an amused smile.
Or maybe exasperated, but I’m going with amused.
“You have an office, Uncle Beck?” Tucker asks.
“Of course,” I tell him. “It’s where all my serious work gets done.”
Sarah’s holding herself stiffly and studying all of us like we’re nutjobs. Which is probably mildly accurate. But she lets me lead her around the kitchen to the short hallway to my game room.
What?
I do my best thinking here.
There’s something totally Zen about chilling out with some old school Pac-Man or a foosball game.
I shut the door and prop myself on the pool table. “What’s up?”
“Is that Donkey Kong? Like the real original Donkey—no, wait. Stop. Never mind. Not why I’m here.”
“You like Donkey Kong?”
“Yes. I freaking—stop it. Stop distracting me, or I won’t get this out.” She pushes her brown wavy hair back from her forehead and blows out a short, heavy breath. “I’ll do it.”
“You’ll…?”
“Pretend that I’m falling in love with you. But only under my conditions, and you have to do all the hard work. And I want it in writing, naturally. And this isn’t about money. It’s about controlling the story and helping the giraffes. Understand?”
I should be relieved. This is exactly what I want.
Except I’m suddenly not sure she can pull it off. And getting caught in the lie would be worse than doing nothing at this point. “Where’d you go?”
Her nose wrinkles. “To Mackenzie’s house. Which I’m sure your security told you.”
“After the Hagrid thing.”
She freezes. And not just a little. She’s an ice princess locked in a glacier, complete with the message of I will bring about apocalypse by snowball if you EVER reference the Hagrid incident to me again shooting out her pores.
Probably I should’ve made sure she didn’t have her taser on her.
I shift against the pool table and wish I hadn’t played Wyatt last, because the dude puts everything away where it’s supposed to be. Every time.
So no pool sticks to defend myself or random balls to throw to distract her.
“They’re going to ask,” I point out. Sympathetically. With my hands over the family jewels, because I’m not always the sexy, charmingly lovable idiot I play on the runway and on shoots. Sometimes I have self-preservation skills. “You need an easy comeback to a hard question, I’m your guy. But I can’t help if you don’t let me.”
I wait while she fights her own breath, those dark chocolate eyes boring into me like her senior prom was my fault.
After this many years in the business, the gossip rags are all easy to ignore. I’m always going broke or being abducted by aliens or partying at geriatric strip clubs and having a love child with Bigfoot’s baby. You get used to it.
You accept it’s part of the package.
But Sarah didn’t ask for famous parents. Or to grow up under the microscope. I doubt she would’ve changed her name and moved all the way across the country if the Hagrid thing at her senior prom hadn’t happened. And until I fucked up and dragged her back into the spotlight, she’d found her way out of the gossip rags and the general constancy of being torn down for being unique in the Hollywood world that values the appearance of perfection above all else.
“Control the story,” I remind her. “You control the story, you take away their power.”
She blinks and looks away, then marches to my Donkey Kong game.
I follow and hit the button to start a game.
Honey. That’s the sweet smell she’s carrying with her.
Honey.
The game starts, and she exhales a shuddery breath while she takes Donkey Kong up the first level.
“Morocco,” she says quietly. “I went to Morocco after…after high school.”
“Marrakech?” I ask.
“Everywhere. Rabat, Fez, Casablanca, Marrakech. I took a bus over the mountains to the Sahara. I camped. I rode camels. I read. I perfected my French. I met the most amazing people and I ate pastries every day.”
Fuck, now my mouth’s watering again. I’ve been to Morocco a few times, but always on shoots where I had to look like a fucking million bucks. No pastries or cookies for me. The crew would go to a bakery and come back with a plain black coffee for me and piles of candy crack and cookies and honey-coated goodies that I couldn’t touch, because fuck if I’m gonna let them airbrush me. “Are they as good as they look?”
“I think my ass can still attest to how good they were. And the mint tea basically changed my life.”
“You had it with sugar?”
“You didn’t?”
“That’s it. I’m going back.” The next time I have a few weeks between shoots, anyway. Getting back in shape is always a pain in the ass.
I hear Tucker shriek the magic word—pizza!—and my stomach tries to climb out of my body to get to all the cheesy, doughy deliciousness, that I’m eating because stress burns extra calories.
And also because the mini-shoot I was supposed to do at a shelter in New York was canceled this week, which means I do have a couple weeks to be a little more flexible with my diet.
Sarah pauses between levels to glance at my abdomen. “You should see a doctor about that noise.”
“Nah. Just a bakery. And a hamburger joint. And this guy I know who makes a strawberry malt that’ll—oh, shit. Sorry.” I wipe the drool and grin at her.
And her are you for real? eye wrinkle turns into a smile.
A wide, uninhibited, you’re a big dork smile that makes her dark eyes sing and shows off those pearly whites and pops out a dimple in her left cheek. “You might want to rethink some of your life choices.”
I don’t know a single fucking man in the world who couldn’t smile back at that gorgeous shining face. “Eh. Has its perks.”
Her smile fades as quickly as it came, and swear on my first modeling contract, the room gets dark and chilly.
“I saw a therapist for a while when I came back for college,” she tells the game. “We talked about not letting one moment in high school ruin my life forever, but it still makes me almost throw up to think about letting reporters shred my life choices all over again. Especially because it wasn’t the first time. I was seven the first time I made a tabloid, and my parents made so few missteps, I was the easy target in our little family. I like my life now. It’s quiet and I have a job I love and nobody cares who my parents are or where I grew up, and I built a following all on my own of people who care about the world the same way I do.”
“You’ll get it
back,” I promise her.
“No, I won’t. My boss already texted me to ask if I want to take tomorrow off so I don’t bring the circus to work. And the office gossip is asking what you smell like, and my team lead texted to find out what my favorite donuts are for our Monday morning status meeting. They forgot my name on the May office birthday cake, but now they want to know what my favorite donuts are.”
“Maybe—”
“No, they don’t feel guilty for forgetting my birthday, because I didn’t tell them, because then they’d ask if any of my family got me anything, and I don’t want to talk about my parents sending me the Harry Potter Hogwarts Castle Lego set this year because they remembered how much I begged for the sets in high school. And my mom will probably say it’s because her psychic told her to, because Madame Susan knew I needed a warning that prom would come back to bite me in the ass.”
“Your mom’s psychic is Madame Susan?”
She turns after demolishing the third level to pin me with those fascinating eyes again. “That’s what you picked up on?”
“No, I heard it all. That’s just the least uncomfortable part. I’m loogry. Sorry.”
“Loogry?”
“Yeah. I don’t get mad when I’m hungry. No hanger here. I get loopy.”
“Would you like to take a break to go eat?”
She’s adorable when she’s all logical. “Nah. I’ve been through worse.”
Her lips part again, her brow furrowing, and she’s shaking her head as she turns back to the game. “This is never going to work.”
“Why not? I like you. You tolerate me. That’s exactly the sort of chemistry all these people will eat up, wondering if we’re for real, because this whole show’s gonna go down with you ultimately releasing a statement that we’re better off as the accidental friends we became after I was a public ass, but that you prefer a quiet life trying to save the bees and giraffes and educate people on solar eclipses not actually being the work of witches. Your parents will go on Ellen and talk about how proud they are of you and your engineering work, tell the world I’m a good guy doing good things, plug Persephone again, and in two months, none of your coworkers will care anymore who your parents are.”
But I have a very strong suspicion I’ll care.
And that’s my burden. Not hers.
She’s quiet while she runs Kong up the fourth level, and I think she’s concentrating on the game, but I’m wrong.
Not unusual.
“I always wondered if I was adopted. My mom can’t balance her own checkbook. My dad came home once bragging he’d gotten a role as an engineer, but he was a train driver, not a math-and-science engineer.”
“Heh. Ultimate dad joke. That’s funny. Desert Heist, right? Fun movie.”
She slides an unamused grimace my way. “It was not a dad joke.”
“You sure?”
She pauses, and a light stain of uneven color dances over her cheeks. “Well…no. I guess not. But they still didn’t get it when I asked for science kits and Legos and memberships to the science center and birthday parties at planetariums. Mom would always ask if I didn’t want a pedicure party instead, and Dad would offer to build me an art hut off the pool house.”
I snag a stool and sit, scooting close to her. My childhood was the exact opposite—parents running their own environmental engineering firm, little sister with straight A’s, and then me, the goofball who had big dreams but not enough brains to pull them off—but I never questioned if I fit in.
Had to be hard growing up in Hollywood, in the limelight, and not fitting the mold. “Your mom said they hopped a red-eye as soon as they saw the video last night. They were worried about you.”
“I worry about them too,” she tells me. “Mom went a few years without getting a role, and I thought she was going to fall apart. She had one director tell her she needed a facelift. Another told her she needed to lose ten pounds. One flat-out told her she was too old to ever work again. And meanwhile, Dad’s actually declining roles left and right because old is distinguished on men but he wants to slow down. But I can’t tell her to say fuck it and walk away, because it’s what she loves. It’s who she is. I don’t understand why, but I guess it would be like someone telling me I was too old to care about clean energy or that I had too many gray hairs to talk about endangered species.”
“Limelight sucks sometimes.” I lean in and point at the screen, because Donkey Kong’s about to get a barrel to the head.
“I see it,” she mutters. “You know what’s really stupid?”
“Soy milk?”
She barks out a surprised laugh. “Are you for real?”
“I spent six years touring the world with four of my best friends. Gets boring. Somebody had to entertain us all, and that someone was me.”
“And now I understand why you’re famous for your pictures instead of for your interviews.”
“I’m going into personal coaching whenever I finally retire from modeling. More people should be surfing this wavelength.”
She laughs again, a short, I can’t believe I’m laughing at this guy laugh, and my day is made.
“So. Tell me what’s stupid in your world.”
She bites her lip while she leans into the game, battling past the last obstacle before going on to level five.
She has nice lips.
Full.
They’re easy to overlook without makeup or gloss, but they’re perfect.
It’s like she’s hiding in plain sight.
“When I was sixteen, I asked my parents if they’d help me set up a blog about pollution. I wanted to be famous for saving the world.”
“That’s not stupid.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I thought I’d use their public platform to launch one of my own, when it turns out, I’m not built for life in the spotlight.”
I don’t answer, because I don’t agree. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in fifteen years in public life, it’s that you never know what you’re capable of until you try, and there’s no shame in using the path you’ve got to get there.
I never meant to go into modeling and fashion, but it found me, and I apparently have an eye for it—or something—so I keep hiring the right people to help make me look good, and here I am.
She pauses the game and turns to look at me. “I’m only doing this for the giraffes.”
“Why giraffes?”
“Because they really put their necks out there.”
Now I’m choking on a surprised laugh. “Dad joke supreme, right there.”
She pops another smile, and my dick sits up and takes notice. I tell it to pipe down, because dating in the spotlight is hard enough without adding real attraction to the mix.
Plus, I’m a relatively bad judge of who wants me for me, and who wants to take advantage of me.
I want to trust her—she’s pretty upfront about what she wants, but she’s also a daughter of Hollywood. She knows how these games work.
“Seriously,” I push. “Why giraffes?”
Those big brown eyes watch me warily, and I think she’s going to blow me off when she says softly, “They’re awkward and weird and still beautiful just the way they are. It’s inspiring.”
I’m not overly familiar with that tight heat cramping my lungs, but I think it might be my heart cracking a little at the implication that she only sees herself as awkward and weird.
Yeah.
I think I have it bad, whether I like it or not.
She shakes her head. “Anyway. I want a contract.”
“With a non-disclosure,” I agree, letting it go. Because much as she’s growing on me, I’m not the guy she needs to point out that she’s beautiful in her own way too.
I come with everything she’s worked so hard to get away from, and if there’s one other thing I’ve learned the last fifteen years, it’s that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
“The NDA was understood,” she says.
“We’ll h
ave to go out in public a few times, and my team’s already working on finding any public charity event that’ll sell me a ticket for some good publicity. If it happens in the next two weeks, they’ll want you to go. If they can’t find anything, knowing Charlie, she’ll create something.”
She slides me an unreadable look. “Nice. Blame your team.”
“Blame? Nah, I’m giving them credit. It’s a great idea.”
“It’s a terrible idea.”
I cup her cheeks in my hands, because she’s there, and her skin is so soft and smooth, and if we’re going to pull this off, we are going to have to touch.
Her eyes go wide and connect with mine, and I really hope she’s not packing that taser right now, because I can’t protect the jewels from this angle.
“Trust me?” I say quietly.
“You’re the reason we’re in this mess.”
I’m grinning again, because there aren’t many people in the world outside my family, my lifelong friends, and my assistant who will flat-out call me on my bullshit, and I like that Sarah’s not afraid to.
“This is far from the worst mess I’ve ever had to get out of.”
One full eyebrow lifts.
“Ask Levi sometime about the elephant in Delhi.”
“You know elephants are endangered too?”
“Yeah, that’s why we saved its life. Cost a shit-ton to cover it up and get the elephant a new home, but he’s a pretty happy guy in an animal sanctuary now.”
Her eyes flare wide. “You saved an elephant?”
I could pull out pictures, but that feels like overkill. “Point is, we’ve got this. Okay? And if your life isn’t back to normal in six months, I’ll hop on Twitter and start a war with Chrissy Teigen just to distract everyone. Cross my heart.”
“You saved an elephant.”
Shit. She’s looking at me like I’m some kind of hero. I drop my hands and stand, moving the bar stool back against the wall. I put it in here yesterday so Tucker could reach the controls. “Just the one time. And I almost got the whole band tossed in an Indian jail for it. Like the time I got caught pissing behind a bar in Berlin. But in my defense, I couldn’t even walk in the men’s room without getting asked for my autograph. I just wanted to take a leak in private.”