“Relax. I’m not here for you, Flower,” he said. “I’m here on business. With the studio. Dad wanted me to check in and be here to make sure things wrapped on time.”
I balked. “Why do you need to be here for that? They have a million ADs and other people doing the same thing. And y-you’re not supposed to be here. It’s in Will’s contract.”
“Well, well, look at you, Miss Hollywood. You really know the lingo now, don’t you?”
Again, I didn’t reply. I knew by now that arguing with Theo usually only brought out the worst in him. Cowardice combined with aggression was a very dangerous thing.
“Don’t you worry,” he said, stepping toward me. “Contracts were made to be broken. Dad knows that as well as anyone. Including your boyfriend.” He reached out and traced a finger down my jaw lightly, and like a scared rabbit, all I could do was stand there and take it.
“I said don’t fucking touch me, Amy.” The sharp sound of Will’s voice echoed from around the corner, and both Theo and I jerked toward the sound.
“Looks like we’ll have to get reacquainted later,” he said, stepping backward toward base camp. “Later, Flower.”
Before I could reply, Theo was jogging in the direction I had come from, away from the six feet, three inches of wrath that he likely knew would be directed at him if he were caught even speaking to me at all.
I turned to find Will rounding the opposite side of the soundstage, tossing the claws of Britain’s Top Model herself off his robe-covered shoulder.
I cringed. The robes could only mean one thing—that the scene I’d chosen not to hear was the one and only love scene in the movie. I’d known it was coming; it had been on the call sheet for weeks. It was mild, considering the movie was supposed to be PG-13, but even so, both of them were mostly naked and simulating foreplay in front of an audience of fifty. It wasn’t full sex, as Will had said, but it was close enough.
“Darling, really, you never used to be such a drama queen.”
“Well, you never used to ignore the word no. The scene was over, Amy. And if I wanted your hands anywhere near my anything, I’d come knocking at your door at two a.m. like every other VD-infected prick in this city.”
Will thundered toward the trailer, and it was only upon catching sight of me that his expression shifted slightly.
“Thank God you’re here,” he said as he reached me, taking me with both hands, clasping one around my head, the other around my back.
He smelled of baby oil and the chalky scent of body makeup. Underneath the robe, his body was slick, and his hair had been combed with something greasy. On film he’d undoubtedly look fantastic, but in front of me, it was kind of gross.
“I need a fucking shower,” he muttered as Amelia shuffled up behind us. “Hey, are you all right? Lil, you’re shaking.”
But before I could say anything, we were interrupted again.
“You used to be a lot more bloody fun,” Amelia snapped before catching sight of me. Her angry snarl morphed almost immediately into a haughty glare, and she stood behind Will with her hip jutted out with one delicate hand perched on it. She also wore body makeup and a full face of faux-sweat. Their makeup made it look like they had been getting busy for real, not faking it in front of fifty people.
I nuzzled into Will’s side and encircled my arms around his waist. It was petty, but I enjoyed the fact that while this bitch was only allowed to touch him in front of a camera, I had free reign—any time I wanted.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he’s pretty fun. We have ‘fun’ all the time. Some people might say we have ‘fun’ like rabbits, don’t you think, babe?”
Will glanced down with a raised brow. He knew exactly what I was doing, and to my surprise, he didn’t seem to care. As Amelia watched, he took one of my hands that was holding onto his belt, kissed my knuckles, and then slipped it inside his robe so I could play my hand freely up and down his finely shaped abs and pectoral muscles. If I was going to play this game, he seemed to be saying, he was going to play it with me.
“Hippity fuckin’ hop,” he said.
I grinned, and he grinned right back.
“You ready for lunch, Lil?” he asked. “Or do you want to have some more ‘fun’ first?”
Amelia’s mouth twisted. “You bloody bastard,” she spat, then hurried by us in the direction of her own trailer, parked near the others.
Will chuckled, then kissed the top of my head. “Thanks for that. Maybe it’ll get her off my damn case for the next two weeks.”
I glanced back toward the soundstage with alarm. “Has she been coming onto you a lot?”
Will stiffened, but didn’t loosen his hold on me, even though I wanted to take my hand away. His entire body was covered in that combination of oil and makeup.
“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” he replied.
That didn’t make me feel better. Not at all.
“God, she’s a bitch now,” he said as we turned back to his trailer. “She’s so much damn worse than she ever was. Power hungry. Manipulative. She’s basically a cartoon.”
“She wasn’t like that before?” It was hard to imagine.
He gave me a crooked smile. “Fame does funny things to people, Lil.”
And for a moment, my jealousies disappeared as I realized how often those kinds of changes must have happened in his life. His mother, for instance, who had seen her son first and foremost as a meal ticket. Agents. Managers. How many people in his life had changed or forsaken him for what they thought he could offer? How many people had tricked him, made him believe they cared when really all they wanted was an extra dollar or shout-out from a celebrity?
Theo’s appearance could wait another day, I figured. I didn’t want to be one of those people who put my own needs on Will’s shoulders and made him carry the world on them.
“Guess what?” he said as we entered his trailer.
I shut the door behind me. In the silence, Will’s shoulders loosened visibly.
“I have the rest of the afternoon off,” he said with a grin. “So before I leave for the desert, I’m taking you out for a surprise.”
I sank down into the couch, Amelia and Theo vanished. “Surprise? For me? What are we doing?” We literally never went anywhere, so the fact that Will wanted to go somewhere besides the walled-in sanctuaries of the rental or his trailer was a complete shock.
He grabbed a towel from one of the shelves.
“First, I need to shower and get all this shit off me,” he said. “And then, baby, I’m taking you sailing.”
22
“Well? What do you think?”
I stood on the edge of a marina in Redondo Beach, pulling my hair into a ponytail over my shoulder while I examined the long, white boat bobbing in front of me.
Hakeem and Garrett lingered a solid fifty feet away, chatting at the marina’s entrance and making sure no one disturbed us. After leaving the studio under the cover of another SUV, we’d managed to elude the photographers that always seemed to hover at the entrance. I didn’t know where we were going, but I appreciated the way Will’s entire body seemed to relax the second the looming buildings of Beauregard dropped out of sight.
“It’s…wow.” I squatted down to run a hand over the shiny white edge of the boat, then looked up at Will. “Is it yours?”
I didn’t know why, but the idea scared me. Was Will the kind of person who would buy a twenty-foot sailboat on a whim? Was he…was he planning to stay in Los Angeles after shooting wrapped in two weeks and hadn’t told me?
I still didn’t know, did I?
“No, no, no,” Will scoffed. “It belongs to Corbyn. He said we could borrow it for the afternoon.” He hopped on board and started untying the rope that kept one end of the boat anchored to the dock, then stopped with sudden worry. “You don’t get seasick, do you? I figured since you grew up on a lake…”
I shook my head as I stood back up. “No, I don’t. But…”
Will began co
iling the rope in one corner of the boat. “What, babe?”
“Well, I don’t know how to sail. Don’t you, um, need some help maneuvering this thing?” I looked doubtfully up and down the boat, which, though very beautiful, also seemed pretty massive.
Will grinned, his smile refracting the bright late summer sunlight. “Lil, you know I basically grew up on one of these things, right?”
“Yeah, but wasn’t the last time you were on a boat when you…”
“Crashed one in Maine and faked my own death?” His grin expanded, cheeky. Almost delighted. Out here on the water, Will’s face glowed with a boyish light I had never seen before. He started pulling on a few other things.
“Come aboard,” he said, holding a hand out to me.
Cautiously, I stepped onto the boat, steadying myself against the light rocking.
“Take a seat over there,” Will said, pointing to the bench seats situated around a small table in front of the steering wheel, or whatever it was called.
I did as I was told while he moved around, doing whatever needed to be done to get us going. I watched, enthralled with his obvious competence with all of the equipment that was completely foreign to me.
“How big is it?” I wondered.
“Huh? Oh…she’s about eighteen feet, I think.”
“She…” I mused to myself when Will lapsed naturally into a sailor’s lexicon. I sat back in the seat and continued to watch him. He seemed more at ease going about these little tasks than at any other time I’d seen him.
Then I brightened. “Hey!” I shouted.
Will popped up with alarm. He pulled his sunglasses down, and his green eyes pierced. “What? What’s wrong?” He glanced all around the marina. “Is someone here?”
I grinned. “My, she sure is yar!” I pronounced, proudly quoting from Philadelphia Story, which I knew Will owned in his collection back at the lake.
His forehead crinkled adorably for a second or two. But then, as the quote registered, Will tipped his head back and laughed, really and truly, from deep down in his gut, louder and fuller than I’d ever heard him. I grinned back, feeling like I’d won the jackpot.
“Oh, shit,” he said as he wiped tears from his eyes. “You’re so fucking cute, Lil. You really are.” He clambered to me from the front of the boat, clasped my face over the back of the bench seat, and pressed a solid, full kiss to my still smiling lips. “God, I love you,” he pronounced as he stood back up. “You don’t know shit about sailing, Lily pad, but I love you like crazy.”
“Hoist the jib!” I called as he moved back to the front of the boat. “Drop the mainsail! Shiver me timbers! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”
Will just laughed even harder with every nonsensical nautical phrase I shouted. I relaxed and watched his perfectly shaped backside as he moved back to the tasks at hand. If this was all we were going to be doing, I was fine with that.
It was a good day for sailing, or at least that’s what Will said. A decent breeze made the boat fly over the waves, but nothing was so choppy that I ever felt jarred or even the slightest bit scared. For the most part, Will handled everything himself, even when a few big gusts of wind sent the boat off course. Only a few times did he direct me to help—mainly with anchoring—but he was a good teacher and could direct a complete sailing novice like me efficiently and easily.
We dropped anchor somewhere south of LA, in a harbor below steep cliffs covered with succulents and shrubs and topped with a lighthouse. Once we were set, I climbed to the front of the boat, where Will had spread a few large towels. We lay on our backs, watching the clouds rush by while waves lapped at the sides of the boat.
I peered toward the horizon, which was partially blocked by a long, low-lying land mass. “What’s that?” I pointed toward the shape.
Will followed my gaze. “Oh, that’s Catalina Island. It’s pretty, but kind of touristy.”
I shielded my eyes to look more closely. “Could we sail there?”
“We could. Not today, but we could. I’d rather go to the upper Channel Islands, though. No hotels or anything, so there aren’t as many crowds.” He turned to me curiously. “I never asked, but do you like camping, Lil?”
I shrugged. “Sure, it’s all right.”
Growing up in Eastern Washington, I’d done my fair share of camping around Spokane, Northern Idaho, and Montana, especially when Lucas and I were in high school. The woods were a common way for kids to get out of their parents’ supervision and police purview. They were also my escape from my mother’s problems (and boyfriends).
Will relaxed back into the towel. “Good,” he murmured. “Good.”
I sighed, leaning back into his chest while the sun sank a little toward the place where sky met sea.
“Did you always like camping?” I wondered. “When you were younger, I mean?”
Will nodded. “I did, yeah. My dad used to take me sometimes. We would sail, actually. That was originally how I learned, although later on I took lessons too. Dad was a great sailor. One summer we took over a week to sail up the coast of Long Island, all the way out to the east end of it, staying at campgrounds along the way.”
I frowned. “Does Long Island have campgrounds? I thought it was all suburbs and ritzy houses.”
Will chuckled. “A lot of it is. But there are plenty of places, especially farther out, where you can anchor and camp. Dad had a catamaran, without a cabin or anything, so sometimes we landed right on the beach and slept there. Who knows if we were allowed to? He never cared, actually.”
I nuzzled into his chest, enjoying the warmth. Maybe that was why Will always seemed to smell slightly of a spray of water, like fresh rain or a briny wave. The water was where his heart had always been.
“Why didn’t you get a boat for the lake?” I wondered. “Most people have speedboats, but I’ve seen a few little sailboats around.”
“I thought about it,” he admitted. “But…I don’t know, Lil. It always seemed so…exposed. Being out there on the water like that. It’s not like the ocean, you know? There’s nowhere to run on a lake.”
“Well, you managed to hide there successfully for four years,” I remarked, only a little bitter.
Will was quiet, sensing my tension. His stomach muscles flexed as he kissed the top of my head. “I’m sorry I never told you,” he said quietly, again with that odd ability of his to read my thoughts.
I nosed into his chest. “You’re forgiven.” And it was true. It was too soon to have forgotten that betrayal, but I meant what I said. I had forgiven him for everything. “There’s one thing I still don’t understand, though. The logistics of it. How could you have lived there for years without anyone seeing you, ever? How did you get food? How did you have the place remodeled like that? What about buying your car or going to the doctor or…”
I continued to gesture with my hand, indicating all of the ways a person had to interact with others at some point. There was no way Will could have avoided them all.
Will squeezed me with the arm around my shoulders, and held up his other hand to count on his fingers as he spoke. “Food: I ordered it. You didn’t ask, but I also had a housekeeper who would come twice a month. I’d go camping, and he or she—I never met them—would clean and deliver groceries. Sort of like a property manager, I guess. So that was that.” He crossed his ankles, getting more comfortable as he spoke. “The house remodel was harder. I lived in another rental for the better part of six months while Benny acted as a middle man. He really, really hated that, but I couldn’t risk it. It took me two full years to grow my hair out, you know, and close to one for the beard.”
I twisted around to look at him. I’d gotten used to the way he looked now—and he was ridiculously handsome—but I sort of missed the hair and the beard. Though I spent weeks wondering what he looked like under that mask of sorts, I still associated them with the Will I had first met—someone rough, unpolished, beautifully broken. Now, all buffed and perfect for the camera, he often looked almos
t inaccessible.
Will turned on his side so we were facing each other. His green eyes reflected the blue of the sky and the water, turning them more turquoise than green.
My stomach settled. He was still my Will, no matter what length his hair.
“And the doctor?” I prodded his washboard belly. “Dentist? How did you take care of yourself for all that time?”
“Well, I’ll tell you this, Lil.” He smiled grimly, revealing teeth that had been whitened since he’d arrived in LA. “I did the best I could, but I still had to have four cavities filled when I got to New York.” His smile turned lopsided. “Bad, huh?”
“You don’t want to know how much dental work Mama has had.” I shook my head. “Was it really that bad before? So bad that you had to flee everything? Everyone? So bad that you couldn’t even take care of yourself properly?”
Will sighed again, rolling onto his back. “You want the truth? It didn’t really feel like that to me. Not until…well, not until maybe a few months before we met.”
“You weren’t lonely?”
“No, I was definitely lonely. But no more than when I had millions of people watching my every move. But I…okay, so I guess I thought of it kind of like this. I’d grown up with this incredibly privileged life—a life no normal kid ever comes close to having. I’d never had to do chores. Never had to go to school. Never had a shitty teenager job. I got everything I wanted so long as I memorized a few lines.” He folded his long hands over his chest. “And then I was alone. I imagined I was one of those kids out in the bush way back when. I didn’t want to be around anyone else because I wanted to see if I could survive without them. Without anyone.” He turned again and blinked almost guiltily. “I sound like a jackass, don’t I?”
I couldn’t help but smile a little. “Maybe a little. I mean, living in a beautiful house on a lake and missing some dentist appointments isn’t exactly having to kill your dinner in the woods.”
Will snorted. “Yeah, no shit. But in the end, I still found out the same thing. That all I needed was myself.”
Indiscreet (The Discreet Duet Book 2) Page 23