LILY
We watched the sun set and then rigged up some audio recorders around and inside his truck. As the sky turned from dark blue to black, Gabe helped me back up onto the tailgate where we sat, waiting to see if anything happened that we might be able to say was Mary Goodwin. I kept the picnic basket between us in an effort to maintain a somewhat professional distance. But the facts were the facts: drinking champagne with him under the stars on Lovers’ Lane didn’t make me feel like being very professional, and I felt my resolve slowly start to flag.
Out over the ocean, a shooting star whizzed across the darkness from left to right, and I gasped a little. I’d have taken one shooting star for all the fireworks in the world. There was something so magical to me about that—a little sign in the sky. “That’s good luck, you know,” I said.
He added, “They also say that when you see one, you get to ask a question. And whoever you ask has to tell the truth.”
I turned to him and narrowed my eyes. I was very much up on my shooting star lore; that sounded a bit like baloney. “Did you just make that up?”
He clicked his tongue and looked out at the water, smiling. “Possibly. But you can’t blame a guy for trying.”
I’d been smiling so much that now my face actually hurt, and I lay down on the truck bed, still warm from the heat of the day. I looked up at the North Star and then glanced at him. His broad shoulders drew his T-shirt tight over his back, each muscle and ridge accentuated by the light of the moon. “All right then. Go ahead.”
Gabe lay down too, and though the basket was between our hips, our shoulders were roughly in line and there was nothing to stop us from turning to look at one another. But we both lay on our backs, like we were at a planetarium. “OK. I’ve got one for you. How’d you learn to sing like that? Your voice is just beautiful.”
I wasn’t even sure about somewhat OK, let alone beautiful. But it was awfully nice of him to say so. I turned to face him, pressing my cheek to the plastic liner. A lock of my hair fell into my eyes, and I blew it out of the way. “I practice a lot,” I said, and then added in a whisper, “with the General!”
Gabe laughed, stretching out a bit and making the truck rock slightly. “Now that’s something I’d kill to hear.” He tucked his forearm behind his head, and his clenched biceps accentuated the magnificent size of his arms. The rippling and untanned skin on the inside of his arms was somehow even sexier than the tanned and rugged outsides. “Your turn,” he said. “Ask me whatever you want.”
This all felt a little bit like playing cards with my sister—rules were just a mere suggestion. “So, wait . . . we get unlimited questions per star?” I asked.
He nodded at the sky. “Made-up star games are the best games.”
I couldn’t argue with him on that because there was, in fact, something about him that I was dying to know. I’d been wondering about it since the first time I saw him on TV, and since I’d begun thinking about what his life must really be like—different in every single way from mine, I was sure. “Did you always want to host your own show?”
“Hell no,” he said quickly. “I had no plans to be in show business. I went out to LA to go to graduate school.”
I didn’t know what I’d expected him to say—that maybe he’d planned to be an actor or a model. And yet, what he’d said rang much truer. Except he’d left out the really good part, so I asked, “Grad school for . . .”
He scoffed a little. “Archaeology. I wanted to teach it and take students around the world on digs. Ridiculous, right?”
Oh Lord. The very last word I’d have used was ridiculous. Him as a professor? Tweed, maybe? Blazers with patches? Or wait, wait . . . like Indiana Jones! Tanned and dusty in some faraway place, uncovering ancient secrets? Mmm-hmmm! “Hardly!” I rolled onto my side and propped my cheek on my palm. “You still investigate mysteries in faraway places. Makes sense to me.”
His eyes locked on to me for a long moment—a very intense few seconds when he stared deep into my eyes. And finally he said, “Nobody understands that about me, Lily. Not even my own family.”
“I definitely understand it.” I ran my fingertip over the corrugated ridges of the truck bed. “I can see it now—Archaeology 210: Ancient Civilizations and Their Legends with Professor Powers.”
He laughed to himself again and ran his hand down over his scrumptious stubble. “God, if only. But what happened was that I was playing a game of pickup basketball and some talent agency scout insisted on introducing me to Markowitz. I wasn’t really interested, but Markowitz is persistent as hell. He pitched this idea about an adventuring legend hunter; he said he’d been looking for a guy to do it and asked what I thought. At first, it sounded nuts. But I warmed up to it. Eventually, we came up with The Powers of Suggestion. Gave up grad school, got some capital saved up to do the first few seasons, and here I am.”
The wind caught the willows, and far away the sound of a freighter blowing its horn cut through the air. In barely more than a whisper, I told him, “I’m glad you’re here.”
Rolling over to face me, he reached across the gap between us and pushed that same pesky lock of hair away, tucking it behind my ear. “I am too. You’ve got no idea.”
He didn’t take his hand away, and I let my cheek rest against his palm. As I savored the warmth of his skin against mine, I found that the things that had worried me earlier—the yearbook factor, the buzzy phone, the fan club, the General’s strong opinions on him—began to feel less and less important. Each moment I spent with him showed me that he was much more than a celebrity studmuffin; the more I learned about him, the more he went from out there among the collarbone-fondling fans to right here. With me.
Looking into his eyes, I knew how utterly unlikely it was that this thing happening between us could be anything more than a fling. Our lives were too different, our worlds too far apart. We’d never be celebrating silver and gold anniversaries together, I was certain of that. But in twenty-five or fifty years, or even tomorrow, I didn’t want to look back on this moment with regret. I didn’t want to see him on television one day in the future and think to myself, Oh, Lily, if only you’d had the guts . . .
So I took a deep breath and asked the question that had been in the back of my mind since I’d read the contract. “If we did decide to . . .” I searched his face, like maybe I’d find the word there. “To . . . ignore the conduct clause . . .” I swallowed hard and let the rest of what I hadn’t quite known how to ask hang in the air unsaid.
Gabe’s expression got more serious, and he gently ran his thumb over my cheek. “Whatever happens here stays between us. I promise you that.”
I blinked a few times, purely out of nervous awkwardness, and couldn’t quite settle on which of his irises I should focus on. “And you won’t get in trouble?”
He shook his head. “If it’s what we both want, then neither of us will. I’ll make sure of that.”
A cool breeze off the water made me shudder. Gabe rolled up to sitting and grabbed his dress shirt from where he’d thrown it in the corner of the truck bed. He pushed the picnic basket back and helped me up to sitting, draping his shirt around my shoulders. “What do you say we wait for ‘Mary’ in the cab?” He offset her name with air quotes. “But I won’t push you. I promise.”
I laughed a little and pulled my hair out from under his shirt collar, letting it fall loose around my shoulders. My curls slipped across the starched fabric. There was something oh so sexy about feeling his shirt against my skin. His cologne. Him, so close to me. Him, enveloping me. “I think waiting in the cab sounds perfect.”