Chapter Twenty-Seven

Alex

I climbed up the stairs to our new office space with an extra pep in my step that had nothing to do with the extra large coffee from Coffee Haus in my hand. Melissa was already at her desk, typing away at something when I walked in.

“Good morning,” I sang out, my voice sounding overly chipper even to me.

Melissa pushed back from her desk and crossed her arms over her chest. “Is it now? Would that have anything to do with your date with Damian last night?”

“We had a perfectly lovely evening.” I plopped into my chair and propped my feet up on the desk. “We went to movies, ate the best popcorn in Colorado, and then went home.”

“Yeah?” Melissa stood and leaned against her desk, lifting an eyebrow at me. “And whose house did you go to?”

“Damian’s mother is still in town,” I chastised with mock concern. “My house of course.”

Melissa sat back in her chair, laughing. “I’m surprised you could find the bed in that pig sty.”

“Who said anything about using the bed?” I winked at her and took another sip of my coffee.

“On that note, I’m just going to run downstairs and talk to Harlan about these invoices.” She jumped back out of her chair, waving a small stack of papers as she dashed to the door.

My phone rang from my pocket, the only thing that saved Melissa from me running after her with more details about last night. And there were plenty of details considering how very little sleep Damian and I got.

I hit the call button without looking. “Hello?”

“Alex, my sweet girl.” A soft breathy voice crooned into the phone. “I need you.”

“Mom? Is everything okay?”

My heart rate sped up. My mother never called me. Never. In the six months that I’d lived in Aspenridge, I was always the one who called her. Dutifully every Sunday to say hello and confirm that I wasn’t homeless yet, a prediction she’d made at least monthly since I decided to quit working for her and dad.

It wasn’t that my mother didn’t love me. She just didn’t exactly love having a child. I’d known for as long as I could remember that my birth was never part of her grand plan for stardom. By the time I was five, I could recite word for word the story of how she was passed over for the lead in Silence of the Lambs because the director didn’t think a new mother could handle the psychological toll of the role. It didn’t help that Jodie Foster went on to win an Oscar for the part. To this day, the woman kept a blank spot in her award cabinet for where the Oscar she thought she should have won should be.

“My love, I simply can’t take it anymore.” Her desperate whine brought my attention back to the call.

I resisted rolling my eyes. “What’s the problem, Mom?”

“Your father is making a mess of things again, and my new assistant is useless.” She sucked in a deep breath.

I could picture her perfectly. She’d just wrapped filming on next summer’s attempt at an Oscar, so she wouldn’t be up and dressed yet at this hour. Probably lounging in bed, swathed in a satiny robe over expensive silk pajamas. One hand delicately holding the phone to her ear, the other bringing a long stem cigarette to her pursed lips like a 1920s flapper.

“Mom, you’ve only had this new assistant for a week. How could she possibly have messed up already?”

My mother sighed deeply as if I was missing something obvious to anyone with half a brain. “Your father let his indiscretions get a little too public last night, so I asked her to write up a press release to distract the useless media. It’s garbage.”

I let out a sigh of my own, but kept it soft enough that my mother couldn’t hear. The press release was probably more than fine. I’d personally hired this assistant, and she came highly recommended with a bachelor’s degree in public relations from UCLA. My mother wasn’t upset about the wording of a pointless press release, but it would be useless to argue.

The reality was my father liked to dally with younger women. The media had stopped paying attention years ago, and my mother was more concerned with what the ladies at the spa would think than the actual infidelity. But she sent out these press releases anyway, convincing herself that this was the only reason her husband’s affairs weren’t front page news on every tabloid across the country.

“Why don’t you send it to me, and I’ll fix it up, okay?”

“Oh, Alex.” My mother sighed and took another drag from her cigarette. “What in the world would I do without you?”

Besides win an Oscar? “Of course, Mom.” One of these days, I would tell my parents I was done playing clean up like a member of the staff instead of just being their daughter. But today wasn’t that day.

“Oh, and your father wanted me to pass along his appreciation. He got a lovely phone call from that producer friend of his. He and his wife were absolutely charmed by you at dinner the other night.”

I cringed. My father’s producer friend ended up being a sixty-five-year-old man with wandering hands and a droll wife. Dinner had been long and exhausting. “Glad I could help.”

My mother launched into a story about her latest spa trip, but I tuned her out. If I wanted to hear about women with too much money complain about how cold her masseur's hands were, I’d watch some bad reality TV.

Melissa walked back into the office and shot me a questioning look.

“Listen, Mom, I’d love to talk more, but I’m at work. I need to go.”

She stopped mid-sentence as if she didn’t want to talk about her spa trip anymore than I wanted to hear about it. “Right, how is the little brewery thing going?”

“Good, Mom.” I couldn’t hold back the eye roll any longer. “Actually, we’re doing really well, which is why I’m so busy. I’ll talk to you on Sunday, okay?”

“Okay. Bye, dear. Kisses.”

The line clicked off, and I tossed the phone onto my desk. Conversations with my mother were always draining. My computer dinged with an incoming email from Valerie, Mom’s soon-to-be-ex assistant. I scanned the press release, and as expected, it was perfectly fine. Still, I’d tweak a word or two and send it back. Mom would call me a genius and beg me to come back and work for her.

“How is her majesty?”

Melissa knew Brittney Boone-Nichols, AKA Mom, by reputation only. Mom never once came to visit me in college, claiming that she didn’t want her star power to detract from my college experience and steal the show away from me. Dad had come a few times, though he spent most of his visits on the phone or complaining about Mom.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Melissa nodded and set her papers down to give me her full attention. “Shoot.”

“Are your parents still in love?”

“Of course,” Melissa answered automatically before sinking back in her chair. “I mean, they don’t run around shouting ‘I love you’ and pinching each other on the rear, but they’re still married, right?”

“Right.” Except my parents were married, and I’m pretty sure they’d never been in love. At least, not with each other.

In fact, that was the kind of love I saw all the time...fake, false, plastic, in name only. As a kid of Hollywood, I’d seen it all—the trysts in backrooms, the groping in the kitchen, the lies told every day in the name of love and marriage. It was never real.

But if that were the case, what would happen between Lake and Walsh? Melissa and Anthony? They were all so happy and thought they were in love. Were they all doomed to unhappy endings?

Hell and fuck—was I? Last night, I’d asked Damian to love me. I wasn’t made for love, but I couldn’t imagine a future without him anymore. My blood froze in my veins.

I glanced at the calendar. Somehow the time had flown by. Lake would be back from her honeymoon in three days, which meant Damian would be heading back to Denver in less than a week. I rubbed at my chest. It hurt to think of him leaving here to go back to an empty house where there wouldn’t be anyone to drag him out to a movie theater just to watch old movies and eat popcorn. It hurt even more to think that maybe he would find someone else to do those things with.

But maybe that was a good thing. Because Damian was the kind of guy who deserved to have someone. And not just for amazing sex against the front door. He deserved a forever someone. I’d decided a long time ago that could never be me. I’d just never expected to meet someone like him—someone that tempted me to risk more, to risk giving him my heart. Would he accept it if I became brave enough to risk giving it?