Protecting Rayne

by Emily Bishop

  “Fine,” Felicity huffed. “But I don’t see why. This town is perfect. I told you that when I suggested it, Jay.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I said.

  “Stop spitting at each other, and start walking.” Luke led us down the long sidewalk that separated the road from the trees. We’d come from our hotel, the Moondance Motel, another potential setting for a scene in Pride’s Death.

  “So, what’s the list?” Felicity asked.

  Luke lifted his clipboard—he preferred pen and paper to touchscreen—and ran the tip of his pen down the scene list. “We need a bar, a restaurant, a grocery store, library, forest, motel. I’m interested in the potential for a lake.”

  “We didn’t write anything for a lake,” I replied.

  “Yeah, but wouldn’t the forest chase scene be more interesting if the protagonist ended up in the lake? Hiding below the surface of the water while a flashlight strobes overhead, seeking her out?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe.”

  We continued in silence, past a few entrances to dirt roads, some of them labeled as private property, or outfitted with a wooden mailbox. One had what looked to be a Native American totem next to it.

  “Quaint,” Felicity said. “Isn’t it?”

  “It’s nice. I think it has potential,” Luke replied.

  I didn’t answer. We had more to see, and each passing tree reminded me of the ones outside Aurora’s trailer, and the surreal sense of having my life laid out before me. I’d lose money. Change was coming, and I’d had heartbreak recently. I glanced at Felicity askance.

  Is it heartbreak if the person you loved wasn’t real? The Felicity Swan I knew was a fake, and this woman next to me… the mask peeled back.

  “Here we are,” Luke said. We passed the first of the local stores, a little bakery and a barber next to it, all constructed in a log-cabin style, and moseyed on down the street. A bird swooped past, showing off its bright yellow undercarriage, and disappeared past the roof of another shop.

  “Ugh, so much wildlife,” Felicity said then giggled. “I guess I’ll have to get used to it again. I can’t say I missed that part of this place. Or the lack of nail salons.”

  “When did you leave?” Luke asked.

  “When I was sixteen. I had good memories here, but this town was never big enough to hold me. Once I was discovered, it was too late to look back, you know?” Felicity fanned her face.

  Discovered. Felicity’s mother had been a toxic, overbearing iteration of the younger actress herself. She’d forced her into every local commercial in the state then dragged her across the country to transform her into the blockbuster star she was now. Felicity had spent her formative young adult years in Hollywood.

  Had she always been this selfish?

  “This is the General Store,” Luke said, and placed a mark next to one of the scenes on the list. “Let’s check it out.”

  We filed into the shop, the bell tinkling above the door, and Felicity laid a hand on my arm. “Hold on a sec,” she whispered. “Before we go any further, we need to talk.”

  “This isn’t the time,” I said. “We’ve got nothing to talk about. You have your place, I have mine. We weren’t married, so we have no assets to split—”

  “Oh, for god’s sake,” Felicity whispered. “We don’t have to talk about the breakup. I want to know where you were last night. You worried me.”

  “Felicity, it’s none of your business where I was. It never will be again. Get that.” Once again, I removed her grip from my arm. “Back to work.” If there was one thing I could do, it was remain professional.

  Nothing mattered more to me than business, than work. It was the reason Felicity was still the lead in this damn movie. She was the best in the business, even if I begrudged her for it.

  “Whatever.” She swept past me, channeling Coco Chanel in scent and attitude, and halted in front of the counter. “Ring, ring, is anyone home?” she called out. “I’m looking for some service here.”

  A man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a buck-toothed smile popped up from behind the counter. “Say! You’re Felicity Swan!”

  Felicity jumped and looked down her nose at the clerk. “I need a pack of Marlboro Menthols. Now.”

  Bucktooth Joe scrambled to obey her orders.

  Smoking. I wasn’t a stiff, but it was one of Felicity’s more annoying habits. She worked out with a personal trainer and lit up after each session. The irony never occurred to her.

  “Here,” Luke said and beckoned me from between the shelves. “What do you think of this?”

  I walked down the aisle and halted beside him then turned and surveyed the view from his position. A great shot of the front of the store, between the products and shelves, a low-hanging light near the front, and sunlight through slightly dusty windows, a little claustrophobic.

  “It’s a good aesthetic,” I said. “We could grime up the windows more.”

  “Right? I like this for the scene with the—”

  The bell above the door tinkled, and a familiar figure swept into view. Curvy, short, sexy as fuck. Lavender scent drifted to my nose, and I gripped the nearest shelf, clenched my jaw to keep arousal at bay.

  Aurora. Here, in this store. And Felicity at the front.

  Christ, if this wasn’t a recipe for crap in a handbasket, what was?

  The gypsy girl walked down the center aisle toward us, focused on the products.

  “These aren’t menthol,” Felicity said, out of view. “I asked for menthol.”

  “Sorry, Miss Swan. Right away, right away.”

  Aurora stiffened at the end of the aisle. She half-turned toward the front of the store then took a step back, shaking her head. She darted toward our end of the aisle instead, a basket slung over her forearm. She glanced over her shoulder, didn’t see me, and muttered under her breath.

  “Whoa there,” I said and put out my hands.

  She crashed right into me and bounced back. Recognition dawned, and her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed—fish out of water.

  “Aurora.” It came out breathy.

  Luke shifted next to me.

  “Are you OK?” I asked. It was the first thing that popped to mind. She hadn’t seemed all right this morning.

  “F-fine. What are you doing here?”

  “Scouting,” I replied. “I take it you’re shopping.”

  “Just bread. And sugar.” Aurora’s bottom lip quivered.

  Fuck me, I’d kiss her again. I’d walk her back to her RV and lay her down on that bed. Run my fingers through her hair then eat her pussy until she screamed my name and forgot whatever it was that’d scared her this morning.

  “Bread and sugar,” I managed. “Not bacon and eggs?”

  “No,” she whispered. “I don’t like them that much.”

  Free, and feisty, and apparently, allergic to me. Great. I’d managed to cultivate an obsession for a woman who wasn’t interested in me. Refreshing though it was, it didn’t help the growing… situation downstairs.

  “You don’t like bacon and eggs?” I replied. “Everyone likes bacon and eggs.”

  “They’re overrated,” she said, loudly. “Sometimes, you want one type of eggs, only to find out that they’re the eggs someone else has already had and—”

  The eggs someone had already had? Someone like Felicity? No wonder she’d freaked out this morning and made me leave. Did she think we were still an item?

  Luke’s head swiveled as if he were at fucking Wimbledon. Tick-tock went the proverbial tennis ball.

  “What if someone else had the eggs but doesn’t deserve them anymore?” I asked.

  “How could that be possible?” Aurora hugged the loaf of bread to her chest, and her beaded bracelets rattled.

  “What if they ate more than one type of eggs?”

  Luke clapped his hands. “I hate to interrupt this, uh, egg discussion but what the fuck are you two talking about?”

  “Shopping,” I said.

&nbs
p; “Nothing,” Aurora put in, at the exact same moment. “Nothing important.”

  The click of Felicity’s heels brought more than irritation this time. A sinking in my gut. “What’s this?” She halted behind Aurora. “Have we picked up a stray?”

  Aurora’s eyes went as round as fried eggs. She scuttled back a step and nudged the shelf. A bag of sugar teetered on the ledge.

  I caught it then handed it to her. “Your sugar.”

  She took it from me with pincer fingers, avoiding all physical contact, still with those fried-egg eyes. “Thanks,” she said, juggling the loaf and sugar in her arms. “I was just leaving.” That was directed at Felicity.

  “Wait a second. I know you.” Felicity touched her shoulder, a two-finger pat. “You’re Aurora—uh—Aurora Nell, right?”

  “Aurora Bell.”

  “Bell, what a quaint name. Cute.” Felicity’s simper sickened me.

  “Ease off,” I said.

  My ex raised an eyebrow, cool as fucking ice.

  “That’s my cue,” Aurora said and side-stepped—a vain attempt to escape. Once Felicity set her sights on something, she didn’t stop until she’d laid her fame-mongering fingers on it.

  “You went to high school here, didn’t you?”

  Aurora froze mid-stride. She shifted her grip on the bread and sugar.

  “Moondance High,” Felicity continued. “I remember you. You were there for two years before I left.”

  “Right. Felicity,” Aurora said and nodded. She didn’t extend a hand to shake on the greeting, and I didn’t blame her. Felicity was up to something.

  “I left when I was sixteen, remember?” Felicity pressed the flat of her palm to her chest. “I left at the same time you did.” She looked over at me. “You see, Aurora here dropped out of high school, as I remember it. Why was that again?”

  Aurora didn’t reply. She looked as if she’d been slapped.

  “Didn’t it have something to do with your mother?” Felicity asked, the picture of innocence.

  “That’s enough,” I said, evenly. “You’re making her uncomfortable.”

  “I am? Oh, gosh, I didn’t mean to, sweetheart. I wondered what could possibly be more important than your education? I mean, when I left, I studied from home. Did you?” Felicity was a train on a collision course.

  I stepped between the women.

  Aurora shook her head. “As I said, I’m leaving. I hope you all have an awesome day.” She shuttled past me and out of the store.

  I turned my head toward my ex. “What the hell was that?”

  “What?” Felicity tore the plastic off her pack of menthols. “Just another one of Moondance’s colorful locals.”

  “Don’t give me that shit. You embarrassed her, and you damn well did it on purpose.”

  “I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea about her, hon. She’s bad news, and always has been. She dropped out of school the year I left Moondance. I know how much education means to you.”

  “What?” She was way off base. I believed education was important, but it didn’t govern raw intelligence or the potential future or worth of another human being.

  “You’re an intellectual. Look, I know it can be tempting to get involved with a pretty little slut like that,” Felicity continued, “but it’s not worth it. Think of your reputation.”

  “Did you smoke something this morning?”

  “Not yet.” Felicity winked and extracted a cigarette from her pack. “But I’m not an idiot, darling. I saw how you reacted to her. You like her. Is that where you were last night? With the gypsy whore in the trailer park? Très chic.”

  I towered over her, and she wilted. “If you talk to her or anyone else like that again, Felicity, I’ll remove you from the film. Understand?”

  Felicity jerked back. “What?”

  “We’re not here to make enemies,” I replied. “If we do end up shooting in this town, we’ll need permission from several locals and Aurora might be one of them.” A lie. We wouldn’t need to shoot in an RV park. “Maintain professionalism or go back to the hotel and pack your bags.”

  Luke nodded. “Couldn’t agree more.”

  It was Felicity’s turn to look as if she’d been whacked upside the head.

  I strode past her. Aurora, here, and victimized by my ex. I’d work this out before she got the wrong idea and ran with it.

  Chapter 6

  Aurora

  I had an uncanny knack for attracting karmic retribution, that much was clear.

  Sleep with a celebrity? Check. Discover he’d once been engaged to a Moondance high popular kid and bully? Check. Consequently run into both of the aforementioned parties on an innocent shopping trip? Check.

  Triple threat. Or was it a strike out?

  I hurtled out of the store’s glass front door and into the sunlight. The warmth on the back of my neck didn’t bring any comfort. Seeing her, here, had only confirmed that I’d made an epic mistake.

  She’d brought up Mom, for god’s sake. What gave her the right to bring it up? What gave her the right to act like she knew anything about my life? We’d exchanged all of three words in high school, and that’d been seven years ago.

  What a freak. Those had been the words, spoken from Felicity, and laughed at by my boyfriend at the time. Shit, I hadn’t even picked up a bag on the way out of the store. I hadn’t paid.

  “Add stealing to the list of bad decisions today,” I muttered and turned right to walk back to the RV park—it was just around the corner, at least. My safe haven.

  When in doubt, get the hell out. My mother’s mantras had pretty much become my guide in life, and this situation was no different. The locals already whispered about me or stared, and a run-in with Felicity would only make things worse.

  I high-tailed it down the road toward the distant entrance to the park.

  “Aurora!” a man called out behind me. The voice sent a shiver down my spine, and not the gooseflesh, take-me-now kind. It was the ‘get me the hell outta here’ type. “Aurora, wait up!”

  I quickened my pace, but the pursuer jogged around me and blocked my path.

  James Goodman—the prodigal son of one of Moondance’s founder families—halted in front of me, wearing that shit-eating grin that had first drawn me to him when I’d been young, and dumb, and buoyed up at the prospect of someone accepting me, the fortune-teller freak girl.

  “There you are,” he said. “I hoped I’d run into you again.”

  We’d run in to each other almost every time I visited the general store or the local Moondance Bar and Grill. It’d occurred to me that the asshole might be stalking me.

  “I saw you two days ago, James,” I replied, evenly.

  “Yeah, two days apart is too long, don’t you think?”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t make a difference to me.”

  “Well, it makes a difference to me. Believe it or not, I can’t get you off my mind.” He sauntered forward a step. “You can’t tell me you haven’t missed me once, all these years.” His voice dropped low, a caress instead of a whisper. “You came back to Moondance, I’m here…” The implication was clear.

  The arrogance of this creep, god damn. How can one person be this delusional? Or maybe it’s because he can’t have me. James Goodman always got his way. It was part of his rich, white-boy M.O.

  “Pick up where we left off?” I asked. “Where we left off was you pretending I didn’t exist, secretly dating me behind your friends’ backs then mocking me in front of them.”

  James shifted his feet, and the grin shrank incrementally. A flicker of, what was that, rage? “I know,” he said and broke eye contact. “I was young and an idiot, Aurora. I shouldn’t have made you feel that way.”

  Mocking wasn’t even the word for it. “What was it you said to me, James? In front of all your buddies that day? I came up to you and slung my arm around your waist, and you pushed me back. I fell down, and everyone laughed. What was it you said?”

  “Aw,
come on, hon, you’re not still mad about that, are you? We were kids.”

  “Seven years ago,” I snapped, “not seventy. And I’m not dumb enough to make the same mistake twice.”

  “We weren’t a mistake.”

  God, he just didn’t give up. He couldn’t have me, and that had to eat at him. If I knew James at all, this was a grave insult to his manhood. “Fuck off, gypsy whore,” I said.

  He flinched.

  “That was what you said.” And because I’d spent the next year working in the Moondance Bar and Grill to collect enough money for a service on the RV, and for fuel to get the hell out of town.

  James cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back home. I have an appointment.” I side-stepped him.

  “You don’t.” James moved into my path again. “Look, Aurora, you can deny our attraction as much as you want, but the truth is, you know it’ll come back to bite you in the ass.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  His hazel eyes clouded. “No, of course not. I’m saying that what we had was special, and I wouldn’t want us to miss an opportunity to better our lives because of the past.”

  “Get out of my way.” I stepped and, once again, he matched me. “James!”

  “You were always too stubborn for your own good.”

  “And you were always a dick.”

  “Ha, see? That’s the banter I missed. We’re so good together, baby.” James was the lovechild of an Abercrombie and Fitch model and that college guy, Chad, whose dad has a cabin out by the lake, and who calls everyone “bruh.”

  “Don’t call me baby.”

  He caught my shoulder before I could move this time and put pressure on it, keeping me in place. “Aurora, please. I’m tired of you dodging me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. We speak for two seconds and you dart off before I can get –”

  “Just quit it, James.”

  “Hey!” another man yelled from the front of the general store.

  James snaked his arm back and raised an eyebrow. “What’s this?”

  I didn’t want to look. Oh, god, if I looked it would be him and my insides would curl into a ball all over again—shame and desire in equal parts. Ugh, I didn’t need this in my life. I had money to make, a house to buy.