Backstage with Her Ex

by Louisa George

  So why weren’t they laughing?

  After taking another gulp of coffee he dipped his gaze and seemed lost in thought. Or a struggle. Or something. But when he looked back to her his eyes were softer, his smile almost tender. ‘Maybe I could come back again. Some time.’

  ‘Sure. In another ten years?’ Damn. The words just blurted out. It wasn’t as if she’d waited for him to come back; she’d got on with her life despite him leaving. Hell.

  The sound of a heavy-duty motorbike engine revving and growling down in the street made them both jump.

  ‘Honestly, some people, it’s way too early for that.’ She turned towards the noise, which set her nerves on edge. Unease shuddered down her spine as she watched Nathan storm to the window, the chill in the room taking a further nosedive.

  But the growl didn’t stop, accompanied now by a darker, more sinister one from Nathan’s throat that sent her heart racing and a sickening drop in her stomach. He peered through a chink in the closed curtains, a shaft of bright early sunshine illuminating his straight back and hands fisting at his sides. ‘What the—? Scumbags.’

  * * *

  His voice was too loud and too angry as he dropped the curtain but Nate couldn’t contain his anger, not even for Sasha. Not even after the best night of his life. Her smell coated his skin, his hair. The taste of her lingered in his mouth. And his body ached to take her straight back to bed for a rerun. But that wasn’t going to happen—she’d made that clear. And she was right.

  He didn’t do this—staying over. Wanting more.

  So he didn’t know whether his inflated reaction was caused by the guys outside, or the fact he’d been thrown off kilter by the mixed-up feelings swirling round his chest. Factor in a mess of photographers and his mood was shot. ‘They must have followed us last night when I thought we’d given them the slip.’

  ‘Who? What is it? What’s happening?’ Instead of coming to the window she shunted further into the sofa cushions, eyes wide and spooked.

  And that was the moment he determined she couldn’t be part of his life long-term. Jasmine, Cara, the plastic sisterhood—they all adored publicity and fed off it like piranhas. Sasha wasn’t like them. She was a regular—no, a stellar—high-school teacher who wanted to stay being just that.

  She didn’t crave fame for her own end. And he’d dragged her into a chaos of his own making. He should have kept away. Should have gone back to his hotel alone last night, instead of giving in to temptation.

  But she’d been so sweet to put her inexperience in his hands, then so incredibly hot, it wasn’t something he’d ever regret. Perfect. Bloody perfect. He just needed to get his head round it, but that didn’t seem to be happening.

  ‘Cameras, paps...lowlife.’ He forced his voice to soften. ‘They either followed us, or had a tip-off and spent the night trawling the Internet to find things out about you.’

  ‘Pull the curtains closed, then. I don’t want them here. How can we get rid of them?’

  ‘Without making a scene? Very little. But they’ll know now what you do as a job. What your credit rating is. What kind of junk...er car you drive.’

  ‘If you’re trying to make me feel better, it’s not working.’ An indignant smile broke through the frown. ‘I happen to love that car. I bought it when I was twenty-two, the down-payment was from my first pay packet.’

  ‘Boy, you teachers must have really low wages.’

  Perfectly shaped eyebrows peaked. ‘Yeah. Ha. Ha. It’s reliable—mostly. And it’s pink, easy to spot in a car park. Bonus.’

  ‘It’s a wreck and clearly way too distinctive to be a getaway car. Let me buy you another one? Whatever you want, it’s the least I can do.’

  Sitting up, she frowned. ‘What? You sleep with me and then want to pay me out with a car? What is this? Guilt money or...worse? I don’t want anything from you. That’s not what this is about.’

  ‘Hey. Stop right there.’ Whatever else happened here he needed to erase that hurt simmering in her eyes. No way did he want that to be the last image he had of her. ‘Most people do want something from me. I just can’t get used to the fact that you don’t.’ But he wouldn’t put up with that kind of accusation.

  He tipped her chin up so he could see her face properly. So she could see his. ‘I slept with you because you’re beautiful and hot, and I like you. And I’m glad I did.’ And of all the women he’d slept with, none had made him feel so stirred up that he didn’t know how to leave. Or how to stay.

  ‘Oh. Okay. Me too...I suppose.’ She managed a weak smile and looked up at him under thick black eyelashes.

  It took a huge amount of effort not to say something stupid or sentimental that would cause more damage in the long run. ‘And I want to buy you a car because I can afford to. That’s all. That car is so old it could be dangerous.’ He flicked his thumb to the window. ‘Like these idiots here are dangerous. They can ruin lives.’

  ‘Yes, I know all about that too. Thank you very much.’ She shook her head as if closing off that line of thought. She was good at that—bringing down the barriers about her private past or about any kind of emotional pain. ‘How can we get rid of them? Police?’

  ‘Unlikely. They’ve never been much help before. A lot of them think celebs are fair game, as far as I can see.’ But Sasha wasn’t.

  Anger swelled from nowhere and before he could contain it his fist landed on the coffee table with a thump.

  Her shoulders twitched and the spooky look on her face darkened. ‘Hey. Stop that. Go ruin your own stuff. Leave mine alone.’

  And he was making things worse, again, in his bid to protect her. Where did that come from?

  Feisty she might be, but there she sat in the tiniest lounge in living history, lush red hair corkscrewing around her shoulders, completely oblivious to the freak show she was now part of. Every part of her life would be scrutinised and picked apart. There was nothing for it but to shelter her from it all.

  But how?

  He should just take her lead and leave her to it.

  But...well, he couldn’t let the circling sharks have their feed on her, not when it was his fault they were here in the first place.

  Kneeling down at the sofa, he tugged her hand. ‘Come to the bedroom and start packing some clothes while I make a few calls. You need to get away for a few days until all this interest has died down. You’re not at school on Monday?’

  She tugged her hand back. ‘No. We have Spring Bank Holiday week...but I need to work, refine the choreography.’

  ‘Excellent. I’ll get onto it. You don’t need to be here. You can work on routines wherever you are.’

  ‘Please, it’s not necessary. I can look after myself.’

  The trill of her cellphone distracted her. ‘Hello? Yes, this is Sasha...What? No! No. Go away. Go to hell.’

  ‘What was that about?’ Just seeing the panic in her eyes made his gut clench.

  ‘It’s just some jerk wanting to know how many times we had sex last night. Did I want an exclusive?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Who cares about these things?’

  ‘You don’t know these people and the lengths they will go to. We need to lay low for a few days or there’ll be lots more calls like that. And if they don’t get a story they’ll delve into your past, or worse, make something up. Print lies.’

  Horrified, she held her head in her hands. ‘I couldn’t bear that. My sisters would cope—Cassie would probably love the attention—but Mum doesn’t deserve to have her past trawled through the papers, not all that stuff about my dad. It was bad enough at the time. She’s finally managed to put it all behind her.’

  His hands were on her shoulders now, closer than he should be, but he just couldn’t help himself. ‘So you need to pack.’

  ‘Wait...I know. I know. I just need some time. To think. To organ
ise...’

  ‘Sasha, the sooner we get out—’

  ‘I know. I’m just thinking...’

  If he’d had more time and less sense he’d have crushed those lips with his mouth, taken her to bed and kissed her back to some kind of better mood. But instead he picked her up, threw her over his shoulder ignoring her protestations and squeals, and carried her into the cupboard she had the audacity to call a bedroom.

  Dumping her on the unmade bed that was still warm from their bodies, he stood over her, refusing to take any more nonsense. Someone had to take control here, and it wasn’t going to be her. ‘Okay. Take ten seconds to think it over, write a list or a spreadsheet or whatever you need to do to get your head round it all. Ten. That’s all you have. Then I’m phoning my pilot.’

  Still shocked at the fireman’s lift, she stared at him as if trying to process the turn of events. Her shoulders slumped forward, her expression turning from confused to blatant flustered.

  Man, it was downright dangerous when she flustered. Her pretty nose crinkled, her cheeks blazed and her eyes got a panicky mist that made him want to wrap her up in his arms. ‘Nate, I can’t just go somewhere on the cuff like this. I just can’t.’

  ‘Yes, you can.’ Her clothes were so neatly stacked he had no trouble finding what she might need. ‘I’ll fly you somewhere safe.’

  ‘Fly? I don’t need to go that far away. I can manage fine. I’ll drive.’

  He pointed to the street outside from where excited chatter permeated their privacy. ‘Sasha, they’ll chase you from one end of this country to another. If we fly out somewhere then we can muddy the flight details a little. Throw them off scent.’

  We? We? He was going to go back to LA and send her to a nice private spa in Switzerland or France—on her own.

  You. Not we. Goddamn.

  ‘Together?’

  Shoot. He exhaled good and hard. Spending more time with her was the far side of crazy, but it made a lot of sense. He could lockdown the house, monitor the papers, keep her safe. Rerun last night...

  ‘This is my fault, I should...look after you. Just for a few days...a week at most.’ It was a step closer to protecting her than letting her stay somewhere, spooked, on her own. ‘And I need to do it right this time.’

  ‘This time? This time? I don’t understand. You never needed to look after me before.’ Her eyes grew wider. ‘Hang on...this isn’t just about me and the paparazzi, is it?’

  He’d hoped that little slip had gone under the radar too. But no. Nothing went under the radar with Sasha. How was she so perceptive? Feigning nonchalance, he shrugged and struggled for words. Was fluster contagious? ‘No...look, I don’t know. Leave it alone.’

  ‘It’s about something else too. Someone else.’ She clicked her fingers as she thought, a wave of a frown on her forehead. ‘Of course...it’s about Marshall. Something about protecting him? Or failing to. Am I right?’

  Yeah? Then she’d just worked out something he hadn’t even known about himself. Maybe she was right, maybe everything came back to how he’d let his brother down. But somehow he doubted it—he’d got over that years ago. Hadn’t he?

  A sharp ache tore through his chest at the thought of Marshall’s smiling face. He buried the pain back. No time for that now. Or ever. ‘Hurry and pack. We haven’t got time to talk about this.’

  ‘Yes, we do.’ With a determined twinkle in her eye she sat on the edge of the bed and folded her arms. ‘I can wait, just like those guys outside. As long as it takes, Mr Hotshot. So you can either tell me what this is all about, or you can sit here with me for who knows how long? Because I’m not heading off on any jaunt without knowing the real reason you need to save me.’

  Oh, she was good. Holding him hostage when he was trying to protect her. But he never shared this.

  Never.

  * * *

  Sasha watched, stunned, as he stuffed her clothes into a holdall he’d grabbed from under her bed, doing everything he could to avoid eye contact. ‘Nathan. Talk.’

  He looked up and opened his mouth, apparently shocked into speaking. ‘Marshall had a hard time at school. It was my fault. I pushed for him to go there.’ He stopped stuffing. ‘Sorry? Why do you need to hear this. Now?’

  ‘Because I do. And you need to tell me, or we don’t go anywhere. Whatever the cost. It was challenging for him, sure, a lot of special-needs kids find mainstream school hard. But you did what you thought was best for him.’

  He laughed, but it was hollow and cold. ‘Like I knew? I believed he should go to a regular school instead of living with a label. I believed only I knew what was the right thing for him. So I forced the school to take him, in the only way I knew how.’

  After his father went to prison Nate had been a gangly teenager forced into taking control of a situation he just didn’t know how to deal with. But that had never deterred him.

  ‘I was the man of the house, but I didn’t know crap about being a man, other than shouting loudly and getting my own way with violence. So I just walked into the school office and insisted they take him, even accusing them of discriminating against him. They didn’t like that.’

  ‘I imagine they didn’t. But Marshall loved the school, right? It was definitely the best decision for him.’ She reached across the duvet and tried to pull him to sit opposite her. But he resisted.

  Instead, he stared into a spot just past her shoulder. ‘At first he did, but gradually he grew quieter and less willing to join in things. The only place he seemed happy was the choir. Eventually he admitted he was being bullied.’

  ‘Oh, Nate. That’s awful. I had no idea.’

  Nate smoothed a palm over the back of his neck. ‘I thought he’d brush the whole thing off—he’d always known he was different and accepted it. But then one day I found him in tears holding a note from one of his classmates. It said he should never have been born, that he was dirty and no one liked him. Seemed he’d been bullied for a while.’

  ‘That’s terrible. You should have told someone—a teacher. The headmaster.’

  ‘I dealt with it. It didn’t need making public. I was the big brother—it was my job to sort it out.’ He shrugged nonchalantly, his voice steady and detached, as he slipped back behind the public mask he wore. ‘At least that was the plan. I was pretty sure no one would listen anyway. I was having a bad day already and this made it a whole lot worse. I saw red. Stormed out and hunted down the culprit, some no-hoper called Craig. He and I had a brief exchange of words and then—’

  ‘Then you hit him,’ she interrupted, the events of their last night together now clear. The way he’d turned up at her house, dishevelled, animated. She’d initially thought his rocky emotional state had been to do with an argument they’d had about her refusal to talk to him about her past. How she didn’t trust him enough. He’d been so passionate. Ardent.

  And that passion had stirred something so deep in her, as it did again now, they’d finally almost made love, so close.

  But then the authorities had hammered her door down in search of him. ‘Your knuckles, I remember, they were sore and swollen, but you never did give me the full story, clearly.’

  ‘Because you did exactly what everyone else did. You looked at me as if you’d been expecting it all along. That I was no different from my useless violent father.’

  Was that how he saw it? Pain settled under her ribcage. ‘No. I knew you were different from him. I knew everyone saw a different side from the one I saw.’

  ‘Sasha, the look in your eyes stayed with me for longer than I cared to remember.’

  Because the whole sordid scenario had revived the memories of the night her father had died. Police at the door, shouting. Things getting way out of control. She couldn’t witness that kind of aggression and violence again, no matter how justified. And not from someone she’d love
d. Or at least, believed she did.

  But he’d been acting out of pure love, trying to protect his brother. He’d chosen her as the only person he could turn to when he needed comfort. For love? Trust?

  So she could see now how her betrayal, along with the way the town turned their backs on him, had forced him to leave and then spend the next few years forging emotional detachment. The drinking, the endless string of women, the wild parties. And, by saving herself, she’d been partly to blame for that. No wonder the man screamed non-commitment—he probably believed everyone he ever loved would let him down. Walk away. Turn away.

  Small wonder then, the rage, the hot-headedness, the ill-contained anger that stirred something raw and new in her, that both attracted and troubled her.

  She wanted to pull him back down on the bed and make him understand that she’d had other reasons to walk away all those years ago. But with his tensed muscles and the mask of impartiality he’d slipped back on she didn’t think he’d allow it. ‘If you’d only explained, I’d have listened.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. You shut down. And I wasn’t making a lot of sense. I’d completely lost control. They had to drag me off Craig. I was an animal. Worse. The only reason they didn’t press charges was because I had the letter evidence that Craig had been bullying Marshall.’

  ‘But even so, you can’t blame yourself for what happened.’

  ‘Can’t I? I failed Marshall by putting him in that situation. I might as well have bullied him myself. I did the wrong thing to get him out of it. Craig ended up in Intensive Care and Marshall never really recovered. He died a couple of years later.’

  ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

  ‘Yes. Well, it was a long time ago.’ And with that he turned, swung the wardrobe door open with a crash and reached for more of her clothes.

  Conversation over. He’d reached his limit; that was clear.

  It almost broke her heart to see him so closed-off, particularly when it was partly her fault. But he was the kind of guy who would take responsibility square on his shoulders, and would never back down.