SAM
Our cottage nestled in the beautiful valley on the coast of St. Martin was the perfect place to relax and unwind—too bad it always felt like we were constantly on the go with very little time to kick back. In the evening, my heart would ache to go back home, and it didn’t have anything to do with the fact that I was tired. I had a serious case of longing for my little house. I wanted to stay there forever. The place was simply magical.
Of course, it might have been because I had the best roommate one could ask for, and maybe also due to the fact that trying to be professional at work was increasingly difficult. At the end of the day, I ached to go back home with my man, but it wasn’t just that. There was something about seeing the cottage in the valley and the sea on the horizon that relaxed me instantly. Sometimes we’d leave before dawn and I couldn’t see a thing, could only hear the lulling sound of the ocean waves in the distance.
Coming home in the evening was also one of my favorite things.
Home sweet home, indeed.
Most times, we’d eat what craft services had prepared, but a few days a week, I used my brand-new crockpot—I had given Cecilia the one I’d purchased last year.
“I made a stew for this evening. Did you have dinner already?” I asked Hugh once we took our jackets off.
He exhaled a deep breath, and his eyebrows pulled together in a frown.
“Not sure I can eat that, mo chridhe.”
“It’s okay if you’re not hungry. I can put it in the fridge and reheat it tomorrow.”
“It’s not that . . .” He hesitated, looked down for a second, and when his eyes met mine again, there was a look of weariness mixed with . . . embarrassment?
“I can’t eat your stew, Sam, or pretty much anything you cook, unless it’s allowed by the plan.”
The plan?
I narrowed my eyes. “What plan?”
Another deep exhale. What was stressing him so much?
“Winston said I got too soft around my middle. He’s putting me on a low-carb diet.”
“What?”
“He said I got a little fat, and he’s not wrong. I did gain some weight, just a bit,” he said, patting his stomach. “I gained over half a stone in the last few months. I have been working out, but I haven’t been so good at keeping track of my diet. I need to get back on track.” He ran a hand down the back of his head, messing up his hair, making it look completely disheveled. There was a hint of shyness in his eyes, as if he needed to apologize for something.
I was so confused.
My man had to be on a diet? I mean, I knew he watched his weight and what he ate, but he worked out a lot, and we had long days. He didn’t seem to have this issue. Then again, we hadn’t lived together, so I didn’t really know how strict his diet had been in the past. Before, it seemed he was following a high protein but well-balanced diet.
Now his trainer said he was fat?
“Bullcrap,” I muttered in disbelief.
“It’s true,” he replied, his accent coloring the words with a different sound than what I was used to.
“Wait, what’s a whole stone? How many pounds is that?”
After a short Google search, we established that a stone was fourteen pounds, and Hugh had gained over half a stone, which meant he’d probably gained about eight or nine pounds at the most.
“I just want you to know you are perfect to me, just the way you are. How dare Winston say you look fat?”
He gave me a shy smile followed by a nod.
“Well, he said I got soft in the middle.”
“Soft?” I asked in a horrified tone.
“That’s what he said.”
“I don’t like Winston Styles very much anymore. How could he? How could he tell you you’re going soft?”
“It’s not that big of a deal, Sam. I just have to do it. I don’t have much of a choice, after all.”
“No one can tell the difference, Hugh, believe me. I touch you all the time. You are anything but soft.”
“I did gain weight, Sam. Don’t say I didn’t. Look.” He took off his thermal Henley and stared at me with arms open to show me I was wrong. Well, maybe he was just slightly, slightly less taut around his waist, but I would call it slight bloating, not weight gain.
“This is insanity,” I muttered. “And if you’re soft, what does that make me?”
Granted, I wasn’t the one who often had to be shirtless in front of a camera. Still, I instinctively looked down at my belly and tightened the muscles of my abdomen, trying to make my little pouch disappear, and Hugh noticed.
“Don’t. Don’t do that, Sam. You’re beautiful. I love this spot right here,” he said, brushing the skin right below my belly button, “this slight curve here . . . that leads to the sweetest valley.” His accent was maddeningly sexy when he spoke in a low, gruff voice.
I loved the way he said valley. It drove me insane, just like his touch.
His fingers across my belly sent a shiver traveling across my skin, and a sweet ache bloomed between my thighs.
“And I love this,” he said, tracing the curve of my hip, going up to the hollow of my waist, tracing a finger around the curve of my breast.
I sighed and looked up to him. His eyes were the bluest of blue when he stared at me intently, with arousal, but then something flashed across them, as if he’d forgotten something, and the maddening intensity disappeared.
“Winston just wants to make sure I get back on track and keep up with the regimen I was following. He said it might be difficult with my fiancée spoiling me at home. I’ll have to be strong and resist your culinary talent, lass.”
I shook my head as I kept surveying the area. Soft. What an absurd notion.
“Well, I haven’t been here long enough to do much damage. Winston should really blame it on the press tour.”
“He does. Oh well, whatever—all those croissants in Paris were worth it,” Hugh said with a grin and a dreamy look in his eyes. He then let out a sigh and my chest filled with a strange ache. This happens to Hollywood actresses all the time, I thought. My sister followed an elaborate plan constructed by a nutritionist, but luckily, she never had to starve herself. It was my first time witnessing this type of situation, and I was a bit sad for him, I had to admit.
I knew when it came to his career, he would do almost anything. I threw my hands up in the air, resigned. He needed to do what he needed to do.
“Okay, so what can I do to help? Do you have a meal plan?”
As it turned out, Winston had Hugh signed up for one of those fancy meal delivery plans Hollywood stars are known to use. Surprisingly, they delivered the food all the way up to St. Martin, and the very next day, we had a huge delivery at the set. All of Hugh’s food for the entire week was carefully labeled and placed in a giant cooler for us to take home.
“Mornin’, Sam,” Winston said with a cheery smile as I exited Hugh’s trailer. I knew he was there for a midday workout session with my beau. The right word to describe Winston was imposing, with his above-average height and solid frame. With his carefully styled dirty blond uppercut, short beard, and piercing blue eyes, he had that mix of charm and roughness that women seemed to like so much. I knew I was right because I had seen pretty much every straight woman on set swoon for him as much as they did for the male lead and other hunky actors on the show.
“Don’t try to charm me, Winston. You’re on my shit list.”
“Aye, lass, go easy on me, will you?” He let out a guffawed laugh, and I glared at him.
“Seriously, Styles, if you’re not nice to my man, I will cut you. How dare you tell him he’s gone soft?”
“It was just for motivation. He has some important scenes coming up, and he has to look his best. He agreed with me.”
“Pfff.”
“Don’t be mad at me. I’m just doing my job. Besides, don’t you want him to look hot?”
“He already does,” I replied, folding my arms across my chest. He gave me a sardonic smile and I let out a frustrated breath. “Look, I get it, it’s your job to make him look his best on screen. Just . . . go easy on him, okay? I don’t want him to get stressed out about his nonexistent gut.”
He nodded slightly, bidding me goodbye. “You have my word . . . sort of. I’ll try to go easy on him.”
I shook my head and walked back to the makeup trailer.
HUGH
A few days later, we were about to head home for the day when a buzzing sound coming from Sam’s mobile distracted her. She turned around to grab it, and as she read her notifications, I saw her eyes cloud over. She sat down on the chair behind her, still reading the message on her phone.
“Sam, what’s wrong?”
“My sister is missing. No one knows where she is.” I saw the look of terror wash over her features, the color disappearing from her face. “How is that possible?” she asked herself.
“What do you mean, Sam? What happened? What’s going on? Where is Amira?”
SAM
“No one knows,” I replied in a choked voice. “Not my parents or my brother. Not even her publicist knows where she is. My mother told me something happened. Some pictures . . . oh my God, what has she done?”
I logged back into the laptop and searched for the latest info on Amira Farouk.
“Oh, fuck. Didn’t she realize someone was taking pictures of her? How fucked up was she? Look!” I told Hugh, urging him to look at the pictures that were now apparently all over the Internet.
“I really don’t want to see pictures of your sister naked, if that’s what you’re looking at.”
I almost snorted before I realized that whoever had done this might have even more explicit shots of her. I shook my head and pressed my lips together. “It’s not that. This is what happened,” I said, turning the laptop around so he could see.
The pictures were of Amira and another girl kissing, and not just small, chaste kisses. It was an intense make-out session with tongue and touching—a lot of touching. Thankfully, she wasn’t naked in the photos, but I didn’t know how much difference that would make. As a popular actress, my sister had an image to protect. In the last few years, she’d become the press’s darling, and despite Hollywood still being quite racist at heart, Amira had found a good amount of success as an actress of mixed heritage, one whose skin and looks were not like those of America’s other sweethearts.
She had been able to get ahead thanks to her skills and good looks, on top of her easygoing personality. I was afraid something like this would damage her reputation forever.
Sure, times had changed, and a scandal in this day and age wasn’t always a bad thing—celebrities seemed to bounce back from public upsets like nobody’s business. Nude pictures, tone-deaf comments, anti-Semitic remarks, sex-abuse allegations . . . the public opinion these days seemed to get past the most obnoxious things and shoved them under a rug—or was that accurate only when it came to rich and powerful white men?
My brain kept rambling on its own as I clicked on every shady blog that had posted the pictures of my sister’s “Sexy Night Out.” I simply couldn’t help myself, in a way. I needed to see the extent of the damage with my own eyes.
Poor Amira.
I was a bit puzzled by the pictures I was looking at, because my sister had always been cautious as to whom she hung out with. She knew she needed to surround herself with a few trusted friends, and I was positive none of her friends had done this. I didn’t recognize the girl she was kissing; she didn’t look like anyone I knew.
My mind kept rambling, so much so that I’d managed to shut Hugh out, who had apparently been trying to get my attention.
“Do you know who she is?”
“No. I have no idea how this could have happened—I mean, unless the phone of the person taking pictures was hacked. I don’t recognize the other girl. The people in Mira’s circle would never betray her trust like this, and now no one can get ahold of her? My mom said she’s not at her house in LA or the one in New York. None of her friends have seen her since the pictures leaked. Where could have she gone?”
“Did your sister always swing both ways?” he asked in a low, tentative tone.
“No, I don’t think she’s bisexual, at least she never gave me that vibe. I never . . . we never talked about it.” I hesitated, trying to recall any situation that might have been an indication of Mira’s preferences.
He cocked one eyebrow and gave me a slight shrug.
“I mean, she very well could be. Maybe she’s just now trying to figure it out herself.”
Hugh wasn’t wrong. Have I been missing the obvious?
“You don’t think she was just having fun? Kissing a girl out of curiosity?”
“Maybe, or maybe there might be more to it, and it might be the reason no one can get ahold of her. Maybe she’s not ready to confront her feelings and face her family. She’ll turn up somewhere. Your sister is not stupid. At the moment, she’s probably just deeply hurt and confused. Hopefully she’ll get in touch with someone soon.”