Lana

“What are you thinking about?” Matt asked from the bathroom door, his chest speckled with water droplets.

He’d come back early from the wrap party last night. When his car pulled up at just before eleven I’d assumed it was someone else. I’d been a little too pleased to see him, which worried me. Tomorrow he’d be gone. He was just supposed to be a summer lover. But every day I spent with him, I yearned for a week more. And it was getting worse not better. This house would feel empty without him. I’d feel empty without him.

I was trying to untangle the damp knots in my hair and not think about how after tomorrow, there’d be no one around to ask me questions like that. “Everything. Nothing. Why? What are you thinking about?”

“I’m thinking that—” He paused and looked at his watch. “I’ve known you for nearly six weeks.”

“It’s been that long since I saved your life? Death in the bandstand? I really should have let you get struck by lightning. It would have made a good headline.”

He grinned and strode toward the bed. “Six weeks since you verbally abused and harassed me.”

I tilted my head back to look up at him. “I think you got off easy.”

“I wouldn’t change a thing.” He stroked his thumb over my cheekbone.

“I wonder if your fans know how sappy you can be. I heard you were a player, a ladies’ man. A heartthrob.” I shook my head. “What happened?”

He chuckled. “I have no idea. You have a magic body and soul. And Jesus, you give the best blow job in the whole of the US of A.”

“Okay, maybe you’re not so sappy.” I rolled my eyes.

He dipped and placed a kiss on my lips. How was I going to get used to him not being here?

“I have something to show you,” I said.

“Seeing you in my shirt, knowing you’re not wearing anything underneath is enough,” he said.

“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.