by Louise Bay
“I think you’ll like this almost as much.” I pulled out my dressing table drawer and brought out the cuff I’d been working on over the last week that I’d carefully wrapped in acid-free paper. I’d barely been in the shop at all, wanting to make this before Matt left. “I figured I could maybe put a commission tab on my website and use this as an example.” I placed the piece on my dressing table and unwrapped it.
“Wow, Lana. This is beautiful.”
I rolled my lips again and watched him take in the gold bracelet that matched the more intricate collar in the Bastet collection. It was smaller, but also less expensive to make.
“You don’t think you could just sell it? It’s the sort of thing I’d expect to see at the Oscars.”
“In Worthington, Maine? I’m not sure Hollywood types come around here very often.” I poked him in his rock-hard stomach just above his towel. “There’s always the odd exception, I suppose.”
“Regardless, I’m proud of you. You’re so talented, Lana,” he said, rubbing himself down and climbing into his briefs.
“Thanks.” I looked away. Truth be told, I was pretty proud of myself. Five years had passed and I’d sometimes thought I’d never make any jewelry again. I’d seen it as something I’d left behind in New York. It represented my old life and old dreams. “And did you keep your end of our bargain? Did you speak to Brian about the book?”
He rubbed his towel over his head, making his damp hair point every which way. “I’ve put a couple of calls in to him. Left him a message.”
“You make him a ton of money, but he doesn’t call you back?”
“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.
Mr. Butcher smiled but dropped the subject. “I’m glad to see your property business is booming. What about the jewelry? How’s that going?”
I stopped what I was doing. “Actually, if you have a few minutes, I’d love to get your opinion on a piece I’ve been working on.” I’d been so happy with how the gold cuff had turned out that I was desperate to show it off.
“Of course. I’d be honored. You know what a talent I think you have.”
“And you know I adore your taste and value your eye, Mr. Butcher.”
“It’s in my blood, darling. What can I say?”
From Paris to Poodles, good tailoring to a sunny Maine day, everything Mr. Butcher felt passionate about was in his blood.
“If you’ll excuse me while I just go and wash my hands?” I held up my palms, then turned and headed in back. “Take a seat and I’ll be right out.”
I threw the cloth by the side of the basin and washed my hands before drying them carefully. I hadn’t shown anyone other than Matt the cuff, and I was pretty sure I could have sawed off the end of a baked bean can and Matt would have told me how talented I was.
Mr. Butcher, on the other hand, wouldn’t hold back with his criticism.
I pulled the wooden box from the filing cabinet where I’d been keeping it and headed back out. Mr. Butcher was standing in front of the glass display case that doubled as a counter.
“So, what have you got?” he asked.
I really hoped he’d like it. It was the first piece I’d made since leaving New York, and I hated to think I’d lost any of the skills I’d learned.
I pulled out a black-velvet mat and placed it on the glass, then opened the box containing the cuff.
He gasped. “My dear, it’s magnificent. Did you make this yourself?”
I beamed at him. “Yeah, it’s my first piece since college. Gold-plated platinum.”
“Good grief, Lana. With this sort of talent, you should be in Saks, Barneys and Harrods.”
I shifted from one foot to the other. “I wasn’t planning on selling it in the shop.” Excitement and uneasiness churned in my stomach.
“Well of course not. Do you have other pieces?” He held the cuff up to the light. “It truly is remarkable. Very luxurious—it doesn’t have that homemade feel to it.”
“I think that’s down to the materials.” So many jewelry designers skimped on quality because of costs, but I’d wanted to do this right. “You really like it?”
“I really do.” He placed the bracelet back on the velvet and turned to me. “I’m quite serious when I say that you are very talented. I could make a few calls, or—”
“Thank you. For now, I’m just going to add a section on my website and say I take commissions. I don’t want to get ahead of myself.” It was enough to know that I could make beautiful pieces, and that people I trusted liked them. I’d left my dream of adorning the rich and famous in New York. I had a different life now.
He clasped his hands together. “But, darling, you need to share these with the world, not hide them away.”
I wasn’t hiding, was I? I’d achieved so much in the five years since college. My dreams had just changed.
Mr. Butcher was wrong. “I’m not hiding anything. I just know what I’m capable of handling right now.”
Matt probably agreed with Mr. Butcher. He didn’t understand my desire to stay in Maine.
As much as I enjoyed spending time with Matt, I wasn’t sure I saw him in my future. Maybe because I knew deep down that however much he protected me, if we were going to survive as a couple, the whole world would know who I was—I would never be okay with that kind of exposure and scrutiny.
“Knowing your limits is good, Lana.” Mr. Butcher tilted his head, and the look in his eye made me wonder if he knew about what had happened to me in New York. “But pushing them here and there is even more important. It’s as true in business as it is in love. When you believe in something, sometimes you have to jump and trust the net will appear.”
Why did I get the feeling that Mr. Butcher was trying to deliver a sermon? “It’s scary, jumping without knowing something will catch you. I prefer my feet on the ground.”
“Yes, it is. It requires faith in yourself and the people around you.” He sighed and turned toward the window and the view of the ocean. “I spoke to a journalist just yesterday who I found wandering down on the beach.”
I turned back to the counter and my stomach flipped as I started to put away the cuff. “You did?” Surely a journalist wasn’t looking for Matt? “From the Portland Press Herald?”
“No, it wasn’t anyone from Portland. Someone from out of town, looking for the gossip on Matt Easton.”
I froze, then fumbled with the box in my hand. “Really? What were they asking?”
“Just that he’d heard Matt was staying here. He said he was following up on some photographs.”
I couldn’t look at Mr. Butcher, but I was desperate to know what had been said. Did Mr. Butcher guess it was me in the photos?
“I told him that if we’d had someone as handsome as Matt Easton in town, then I’d be the first to crow about it.” I turned to Mr. Butcher to make sure I hadn’t misheard him. “Outrageous. To think he could turn up in Worthington and we’d just spill our secrets to some stranger.”
A smile twitched at the corners of my mouth.
“We look after our own. You know that.”
I exhaled, relieved. Even if Mr. Butcher did know something about Matt and me, he hadn’t said anything. “Well, Matt’s gone now. Hopefully the journalists are, too.”
“I hope Matt will be back. He was very handsome.”
“Who knows? Anything is possible,” I said.
“That’s the attitude. You need to be open to possibilities, that’s all I’m saying.”
“I thought we were talking about jewelry?”
“We’re talking about your happiness, Lana. Worthington will always be here, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world isn’t worth exploring. Just be open to everything this wonderful life has to offer you.”
I sighed. He was right. I needed to be brave, deal with things as they came up rather than avoiding things in case they hurt. But it was easier said than done.
“I was thinking that I might get some professional photographs taken of this piece for the website, so I can show what I can do,” I said as I packed up the bracelet. “Then, maybe you could send one to one of your contacts, if you don’t mind.”
Mr. Butcher’s eyes danced. “It would be a complete pleasure.”
“They might hate it, of course.”
“Or it might not be the right time,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s a risk. But it doesn’t hurt to try. To dip your toe in the water.”
“Thank you, Mr. Butcher.”
Instead of terrified, I felt excited about the prospect of someone with real power in the fashion industry seeing one of my designs. Sending a photograph to some stranger on email didn’t require me to leave Maine. And if it led to opportunities that were too overwhelming, I could always say no. I really had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Eighteen
Matt
I stared up at the ceiling of my bedroom, my hands behind my head. I’d never enjoyed sharing my bed, preferring to starfish on my mattress to my heart’s content. But this was the tenth day of waking up in Los Angeles on my own in bed, reaching over, hoping to find Lana’s warm body, only to pull away disappointed.
Three days, and she’d be here. I couldn’t help but grin as I pictured her in my bed, naked beside me. I snaked my hand down to grip my morning erection. I wouldn’t have to waste these when Lana got here.
My dick twitched in my fist and I closed my eyes, imagining Lana’s hand rather than my own. My eyes flew open as my cell buzzed. Hopefully that was her, ready to talk dirty to me.
I grabbed the phone. Brian. Just my fucking luck.
I released my cock and sat up against my headboard. “Hey.”
“Thank God you’re back in the right time zone. I have Sinclair on the line as well.”
“Hi, Sinclair. What can I help you with?”
“You’re always all business, Matt.”
“You know me. What’s up?”
“It’s about Audrey. We’ve been doing some media management since those photos in Maine, and we need to bring your breakup forward.”
“I don’t see why. The studio will want to wait until publicity for the film is finished.”
“Look, the press is on your tail after that photograph with the brunette,” Sinclair said.
“Why? Those pictures weren’t incriminating. And for future reference, her name is Lana.” Jesus, the way people were referred to in Hollywood as their most prominent body part was fucking ridiculous. “And she’s my girlfriend.” As I said the words, my throat constricted. Was she my girlfriend? I’d been happy to be casual about what we were to each other when I’d left Maine, but having been separated from her, I wanted to put a label on it. Did she feel the same?
“Whatever. I’m telling you—the press is looking for a cheating story. They’re going to start clocking the time you and Audrey spend together, or go looking for reasons why you’re apart. She could even be caught out with her fiancé. This could all end up a big mess.”
If Sinclair was right, the whole situation was a ticking time bomb. “Do Audrey’s people agree with this?”