by Cate Cameron
“No problem,” Charlotte said quickly, and a little lasciviously. She grinned at Ashley. “Right?”
Josh frowned at her, and Ashley knew why. He didn’t like being an ornament. But that was too damn bad. It was one thing for Josh to judge Ashley’s behavior and find it wanting. Quite another for him to presume to judge Ashley’s friend.
People on vacation, messing around with the locals—it was a time-honored tradition. Fun for everyone involved. Everyone except Josh “Puritan” Sullivan, apparently. For the first time in too long, Ashley didn’t feel embarrassed being around Josh; she felt annoyed. Yeah, she’d made a fool of herself, repeatedly, but that didn’t mean he had to be such a princess about it all. It wasn’t like she’d forced herself on him or something. “Fine,” she said with a cool smile, one she didn’t really try to warm up. “It shouldn’t affect our day at all if you work on the roof. Will you need anything from us?”
Josh raised an eyebrow at the absurdity of the suggestion. Arrogant bastard. “We’ll be fine,” he said. Then, almost reluctantly, he stepped a little sideways and drew their attention to the other man. “This is Kevin. If I’m not around and you need something, you can talk to him.”
Now it was Ashley’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “I can’t imagine that we’ll need to do that.”
“Actually,” Charlotte said quickly, “we were talking about carrying that metal table down to the dock.” She smiled at the men. “It’s an awkward shape, hard for two people to get a grip on it, but too heavy for one person to carry it alone. At least, too heavy for one of us. . . .”
“I could have a look,” Kevin volunteered quickly.
And that was all it took. Charlotte abandoned Ashley with a merry eyebrow waggle, and Kevin followed behind her like a happy puppy, leaving Ashley alone with Josh. It was exactly what she’d wanted only a few days earlier, but she’d given up on trying to apologize to him; he didn’t want to hear it, and she was tired of trying to make it happen.
So she just sank back into her chair. It had felt good to stand up to the man, and she didn’t think she wanted to back down just because Charlotte had decided to consort with the enemy. “Can you get started on the roof without him?” she asked pointedly.
“Of course. I wouldn’t want to ruin your solitude. Oh, wait . . . you changed your mind about that, I guess.”
She felt guilty for half a second, almost long enough to start explaining how Charlotte had just shown up, without an invitation. Then she remembered that it was none of this clown’s business. “So. The roof.” He was dismissed.
And he didn’t like it, she realized. He didn’t like being the one who was judged and found wanting. Well, that was too damn bad. She refused to even look at him, just picked up the script she and Charlotte had been talking about and started reading. She was dimly aware of him turning away from her and walking toward the bunkie, but she kept her attention locked on the script.
It was a modernized Western and she’d started rereading somewhere near the start, a scene where the two sisters had realized that their husbands had almost certainly been killed in a cave-in at the mine. They were clinging to one another, one sister crying while the other was trying to be strong. There was hardly any dialogue, but with a director like Lauren Hall, the scene would be powerful. Ashley could see it in her mind, the way it would look on the big screen, and in her imagination she was playing the crying sister, the one who would get stronger later in the movie, and it was Charlotte trying to comfort her. In her mind, it felt powerful, and right. They could do it.
Of course, they wouldn’t be allowed to. Ashley wouldn’t be given the chance to prove that she was capable of being anything but glamorous and empty. But just because she wouldn’t be given the part, it didn’t mean she shouldn’t try for it. She loved acting because it gave her a chance to live so many different lives, to be so many different people. And with the good roles, the ones that really meant something, she could pull something out of the character and keep it as part of herself moving forward. She looked down at the script in her hands. What would either one of the sisters have done, confronted with a man like Josh Sullivan?
Well, they wouldn’t have made idiots of themselves in the first place. But if they had, they sure as hell wouldn’t apologize for it. They wouldn’t back down or go crawling to him with an apology. Yeah, even if Ashley didn’t have a chance of getting the role, that didn’t mean she couldn’t lift a little bit from the characters and keep it for herself.
She looked up from the script, over to where Josh Sullivan was setting a ladder against the side of the bunkie. She knew who she was, and who she’d been. She knew the mistakes she’d made, and she knew that sometimes she’d been flaky. But she knew who she could be, too. And she needed to stop letting people try to keep her from turning into that person, just because they expected her to be someone else.
* * *
JOSH tried to keep his mind on the job. By the time Kevin returned from his errand at the lake, Josh had cleared the damaged shingles and squared off the hole in the plywood. As soon as Josh saw the younger man’s expression he knew he was in trouble, but he tried to ignore his intuition. He also tried to ignore the extra movie star, who was standing beside Kevin and peering with apparent interest at the tools in the bed of the truck. “I’ll call down measurements,” Josh said. “You write ’em down and cut the plywood.”
Kevin looked startled, as if he’d forgotten that he was supposed to be working that day. “Yeah, okay,” he said quickly, with a furtive glance in his companion’s direction. Then he added, “Josh, have you met Charlotte before? Charlotte, this is my cousin Josh.”
Josh nodded wordlessly in her direction, then said, “Thirty-two inches.”
Kevin took a moment to understand, then scrambled to find a pencil and record Josh’s measurement. “They need to learn to ride,” he announced as he searched through the toolbox.
Josh wasn’t going to acknowledge what he’d just heard. “Seventeen and three-quarters,” he replied. “That’s the first piece. Then a smaller one . . . nineteen and a half by . . . sixteen even.”
“Shit,” Kevin muttered. Then he straightened, with a pencil finally in his hand. “Could I get those again?”
“Thirty-two by seventeen and three-quarters,” Charlotte said calmly. “And nineteen and a half by sixteen even.” She smiled beatifically up at Josh. “So, Kevin said you keep horses. I said I wouldn’t want to impose, but he said there isn’t really a boarding stable in the area. No one who offers lessons on rented horses.”
“It’s the country,” Josh said. He knew he was coming across as churlish but he absolutely didn’t care. “If people want a horse, they keep it at home.”
“So that makes it kind of hard for us to find somewhere to ride and someone to teach us,” Charlotte said, as if she were glad they were in such perfect agreement. “We’ve both ridden before, but English. We need a few Western lessons for a couple of parts we’re interested in.”
“Wait. Both of you?” Somehow Josh had missed that before. He swiveled to look at Kevin. “You’re a terrible rider. You can’t teach them to ride.”
“I’m not terrible,” Kevin said with a don’t-embarrass-me-glare for Josh and a nervous grin for Charlotte. “But, yeah, I wasn’t thinking I’d be the one doing the teaching. . . .”
“Sorry,” Josh said to Charlotte. He wasn’t interested in talking to his idiot cousin. “It’s a busy time of year. And I don’t teach riding. I just keep a few horses for messing around on.”
“You taught Emma,” Kevin interjected quickly. “And her little friend, what was her name?”
“They were kids. And Emma’s family. And I did that in the winter. It’s not the same thing at all.” But Kevin was staring at Josh, his face carefully angled so Charlotte couldn’t see his pleading expression.
And it made Josh even more reluctant to be part of this stupid ide
a. Because Kevin’s expression didn’t say she’s-hot-and-I-want-in-her-pants. It said I-really-like-her-and-I-want-to-spend-more-time-with-her. And Josh knew that he was looking at an expression just like his would have been when he’d first started hanging out with the summer people. Josh had managed to get out before his heart got more than a little bruised, but Kevin? Kevin was an idiot, and he charged into these things with no caution whatsoever. Kevin was going to get fucked up.
And still, somehow, Josh found himself giving in. Not because he was a romantic. Aunt Carol was just plain wrong about that. No, he wasn’t a softy, wasn’t hoping things turned out better for Kevin than they had for him, and he sure as hell wasn’t secretly intrigued by having an excuse to spend more time with the other beautiful movie star visiting their fair community. No, it was none of that. He was just tired of protecting Kevin and wanted the kid to grow up a little. Yeah, that was all.
“Fine. You groom and saddle, you do some chores around the place, and you bring me a case of beer. And you understand that I’ll be drinking the beer as we go. And we do this, like, once. Maybe twice. Just the really basic stuff.”
“Absolutely,” Kevin said in the voice of someone who’d just been offered the chance of a lifetime. “That works, right, Charlotte?”
Josh wasn’t sure he liked the way Charlotte was looking at him. There was something about her expression, something that suggested she was seeing more than he really wanted her to. But all she said was, “Sure. That sounds great. And we can bring the beer, if you want.”
“No,” Josh said quickly. “If you bring it, I’d have to offer you one, and then maybe you’d take it, and then you’d be drinking around my horses, and letting rookies ride them is bad enough. I don’t want to make them deal with rookies who’ve been drinking.”
“Complicated,” Charlotte said, and Josh definitely got the impression she was talking about more than his ban on drinking and riding. “But, okay. Your barn, your rules.”
Well, he liked the sound of that, at least. So he gave her a nod, then turned back in Kevin’s direction. “You measuring down there?”
“Oh,” he said. His smile was more of a grimace. “Could you just give me those numbers one more—”
“Thirty-two by seventeen and three-quarters, and nineteen and a half by sixteen even.” Charlotte smiled, then said to Josh, “Kevin said maybe we could have a lesson tonight, after it’s cooled down a little but before it gets dark. Maybe around seven?”
Damn. This was really happening. Josh wondered what state the house was in, and then resolved to just keep them outside. He’d clean the front bathroom. That was it. Make sure the hallway that led to it was in good shape. No more. “Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “Okay. Kevin told you how to get there?”
“He didn’t. He wasn’t quite that presumptuous! Maybe you could come up to the house when you’re done working? We could give you a down payment on the drinks, and you could give us directions?”
But there was no way he was going to sit around on the deck of one of these fancy cottages and drink with the movie stars. Those days were gone, and he was glad of it. Besides, she’d already demonstrated that she had a good memory. “Take the highway north out of town, turn left at the abandoned church, then right at the top of the hill, and I’m the third driveway on the right.”
She blinked as if taking a moment to store the information in her memory banks, then nodded. “Okay. No down payment. We’ll see you around seven.” She turned and headed for the house, and they both watched her go.
“There is no way you can handle a woman like that,” Josh said to his cousin. It wasn’t a warning, just a calm statement of fact.
Kevin shook his head. “I’ll do it or die trying.” Then he looked down at the sheet of plywood he’d hauled out of the back of the pickup. “Could I just get those measurements one more time?”
Eight
“SO, WHAT’S THE story?” Charlotte asked as she and Ashley headed out on the highway. They both had jeans on, but Charlotte was wearing a fitted, low-cut blouse while Ashley had opted for a long-sleeve work shirt in an unflattering army green that she’d found at the town’s small department store that afternoon. It was a shirt that clearly said I-have-no-interest-in-you-sexually-or-otherwise, and it was the best purchase Ashley had made in months.
“The story? What story?” She knew it wouldn’t work, but she decided to play dumb anyway. It seemed appropriate to mount some level of defense. “I just decided that I wanted the part. Well, no, I always knew I wanted the part. I just decided that I owed it to myself to try for the part. I’m not going to do the bastards’ dirty work for them. If they want to reject me, they can at least go to the trouble of doing it themselves instead of brainwashing me into doing it for them.” That’s what the sisters in the script would have done.
“Okay, that is all excellent, and I love it that you’re going to try. But I think you know that’s not what I’m talking about,” Charlotte said.
“You played a psychiatrist for two episodes of a TV series. You are not actually a therapist.”
“Ah, but isn’t it interesting that your mind automatically went to ‘therapy’ just because I asked you a simple question. Yes, very interesting, I think. Don’t you?”
Ashley refused to look over and see Charlotte’s triumphant grin. Instead, she focused on navigating down the town’s main street as if she was working her way through the worst of L.A.’s rush hour traffic.
They rode in silence through the town, all three stoplights of it, and then Charlotte said, “He’s very handsome. Excellent body. And good hands. I like a man with good hands.”
“Who are you talking about, exactly?”
“Kevin, of course,” Charlotte said innocently. “Why, did you think I was talking about Josh?”
“I thought you were talking about Hugh Jackman, actually. Did I tell you I danced with him last year at that AIDS benefit? He’s pretty light on his feet.”
“I wonder if Josh can dance.”
Ashley wanted to bash her head against the steering wheel. Or maybe do that thing her character did in the last slasher flick, where she’d unbuckled the passenger’s seat belt and then rammed them into a tree. The airbag would save the driver, but Charlotte wouldn’t be asking any awkward questions for quite a while.
Well, okay, maybe that was a bit over the top. And Ashley might as well get the conversation out of the way before Charlotte said something totally embarrassing in front of Josh. “It’s not a big deal,” she sighed. “Just a . . . I don’t know. A series of misunderstandings, kind of. Most of which involve me acting like an entitled brat, a drunken floozy, or a petulant bitch.” And then, to honor the spirit she’d managed to find earlier in the day, she added, “And all of which involve Josh Sullivan acting like an uptight little princess with absolutely no sense of humor.”
“Sounds like a good time,” Charlotte said. “I’d love to hear some details.”
Yeah, Charlotte was all about details. She said it was because she was an actor and needed to store up ideas for future characterization, but Ashley was an actor, too, and she didn’t feel like it gave her an excuse for burrowing into every corner of other people’s personal lives. But now that she’d gotten started with her confession, she kind of wanted to keep going. Part of her obsession, she supposed. So she gave Charlotte a short-form version of her interactions with Josh. The stupidity in the bar with the bet, and Josh refusing to go home with Ashley because she was drunk. . . .
“Okay,” Charlotte said. “So far, this is, like, a totally romantic story. I mean, maybe he was a bit paternalistic, but you were drunk, so you needed to be taken care of. Right? I love this guy. He doesn’t sound like a little princess at all.”
“No,” Ashley admitted. “You’re right. He was a gentleman. In the real sense of the word. And then . . . that morning on the dock . . .”
“Sounds lo
vely,” Charlotte said carefully. “What happened?”
So Ashley had to explain how Josh had found out about the bet. Charlotte squirmed around in her seat. “If the roles were reversed, you’d have been mad, right? You’d have thought he was an asshole for dragging your body into his stupid game. Right?”
“Yeah. I would have. But I didn’t even take the bet. Or . . . I don’t know, maybe I kind of did? I wasn’t actually . . . I don’t know.” Shit, this all sounded even worse as Ashley explained it to Charlotte. She wasn’t sorry for the topic change when she was able to say, “Oooh, a church! It looks abandoned, right?”
“Looks condemned.”
“Okay. So we turn here. And now we’re looking for . . .”
“The top of a hill.”
“There are street signs up here. He could have given us street names!”
“Maybe he’s hoping we get lost.”
“Yeah,” Ashley said. She supposed she couldn’t blame him if he was.
They drove in silence until they reached the top of a hill. “Right, here?” Ashley asked.
“Hopefully.”
“There’s the first driveway,” Charlotte said absentmindedly. When Ashley had heard the word “driveway” in the directions Charlotte had recited, she’d thought of something suburban, or maybe the two- or three-acre lots like she was staying on by the water. But up here, she was in the forest. A real forest. The driveways were dirt paths leading into darkness that made her feel like she’d travelled through time, or at least a couple hours ahead to when the sun would be setting.
“Second driveway,” Charlotte said after they’d driven a while. Then, “So, that’s all? You met, he was sweet, you screwed it up with a stupid bet?”
So Ashley had to explain about the dinner-that-wasn’t.
Charlotte was mercifully silent for quite a while. The she said, “Jesus, we are getting deep into the back country, here. You don’t think he’s luring us out for some sort of Deliverance-style revenge, do you?”