Courting Trouble (Reality Romance Book 5) (18 page)

So damn good.

High on the wild, powerful sensation, she backed him against the rail. She rested her hands at either side of his waist, gently fisting them in the fabric of the T-shirt he’d been wearing since they sparred earlier. It smelled of him. Spicy, clean and masculine. She tipped her face up to his, falling in love with every line of his face, every single angle and curve of him.

“You’re amazing.” She put a hand behind his neck to draw him down to her and went up on her tiptoes to kiss him, her white knight. Her hero.

“That’s what they tell me,” he murmured when she finally released his lips.

“No. You are.” He was good in a way she’d never encountered before. Not because he should be. Not because he wanted people to see him that way. But because he was. Down to his core. Such a good man.

He bent his head down until their foreheads touched. “So are you.”

And he meant it too. That was what he saw when he looked at her. “Yeah. Maybe I am.” She grinned at him. “That must be why you’re so nice to me.”

“That might not be the only reason.”

“Oh?”

He kissed her. Long and sweet and hot, until her every cell was restless with the need to get closer to him.

“Don’t tell me you were just being nice to me because you were hoping to get laid,” she gasped when he let her come up for air. “Because talk about a wasted effort. I hate to break it to you, buddy, but you were already in. From day one.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” he murmured, voice husky. Then he kissed her again—and this time the kiss was different. Sweeter. Shivers ran across her skin. There was emotion in the kiss. Emotion she was afraid to look at too closely.

She turned her face away, breaking the kiss. “Don’t make this emo, champ.”

He cupped her chin, bringing her face back around to his. “Elena? Shut up.”

The next kiss rolled her under. She was dizzy with want when he finally released her lips to kiss down her throat. “God, Adam, when you have something to say, you don’t mess around.”

She felt his smile against her skin. Then he kissed her again and the world fell away.

Chapter Thirty

The next few weeks were a rollercoaster ride for Adam—even more than the previous few had been.

By the time he woke up on the morning after Cassie’s hoax, Elena had already packed everything she’d brought over to his place and all the extra clothes they’d bought and was practically bouncing with eagerness to get back to her apartment. Her laptop was there and she couldn’t wait to get started on her book, she explained, and they’d told the press they were just friends, hadn’t they? And she couldn’t very well let Mary-Kate run her off, could she? Never let them see you flinch!

The only way to corral her manic enthusiasm was to help her load up his Jeep and drive her back to her Hollywood apartment. He’d been ready for her to have to duck down to avoid being spotted, but by the time they drove out that morning the paparazzi outside his house had mostly dispersed and those that remained didn’t even try to jump in front of his car. They were old news already.

There was no parking near her place when they arrived, so she had him double park as she dragged her bags out of the backseat.

“Will I see you tonight?”

“Hm?” She gazed blankly at him, eyes distant, already lost inside the book in her head. “Oh. Sure! Yes. Dinner? Probably best that we don’t go out—”

“Why don’t you come out to the house? I’ll make us something.”

“Perfect,” she agreed, smiling. Then she gave him a little wave, bumped the door shut with her hip and charged toward her apartment. He watched her, feeling oddly bereft that she hadn’t even given him a kiss goodbye—not that he’d expected her to when they were playing at just friends—which he still didn’t freaking understand—but she could have at least winked at him or
something
.

A car honked behind him and Elena turned to look, shooing him off with another wave as she pulled out her keys.

He consoled himself that he would see her that evening, putting the Jeep in drive.

But that evening when he got home a text message buzzed on his phone.
In the zone. Gonna stay here and fuel my art with ramen. Raincheck?

He was understanding—of course they could do dinner another time, this was important to her, she was on a mission, he got it—but his house still felt empty without her energy vibrating through every room. The idea of cooking lost its appeal without her there to moan appreciatively over the end result.

He’d known that Elena was a force of nature, filling up all the empty spaces of his house, but he’d lived without her before. He hadn’t expected her absence to leave such a massive void.

He accepted her rain check and told himself to get over it. It was one night. But then the next night she canceled again—
Brain dead from binge writing. Gonna crash early. Tomorrow?

By the third postponement he was sensing a trend, but even though he missed her he couldn’t work up any irritation with her absence when he was also receiving periodic texts proclaiming,
I am a rock star goddess!
and
The world shall tremble in the face of my biting wit and genius prose!
Intermixed with
why did I think I could write a book?
and
this might be the crappiest piece of shit ever to hit the page
.

On day four he arrived unannounced with In N’ Out burgers and she groaned, “Oh my God, you’re a prince,” before dragging him and his takeout bag into her apartment and kissing him ravenously. The kiss turned wild in a rush and before he knew it he had her on the kitchen floor, bracing her hands against the chipped faux-wood laminate cupboards as she screamed his name.

“God, I missed you,” she murmured in the afterglow, though the timing made him wonder if he’d misheard her and she’d really said she missed
this
.

“You can always write at the house,” he offered, tracing a pattern in the delicate skin at her nape as he lay on his back on the knobby rug with her sprawled over his front.

“You’re there. I’d never get any work done.”

“I wouldn’t distract you,” he promised.

“But I would want to keep stopping to tell you things. I need to be focused on telling the world.” She pushed off his chest as she sat up, catching her hair up in a ponytail as she searched for the clothes she’d lost. “And I somehow doubt it would be much fun for you to watch me commune with my laptop.”

“Even you need breaks.” He accepted the shirt she tossed his way, pulling it back on. “You can write while I’m at work and spend the evenings with me. Like regular adults.”

“Maybe,” she admitted, getting to her feet, but he could hear in her voice that she was just placating him.

She kicked him out shortly thereafter to get back to work. As much as he wanted her to, he wasn’t expecting her to come around and move back, so he braced himself for another week of lonely nights—but that Sunday he got another text.

Still want company?

He texted back that he always wanted to see her and half an hour later she was buzzing at his gate in her little yellow Beetle.

The last of the paparazzi had given up on him as boring a couple of days earlier, so there was no one there to see him buzz her in, or come out of the front door to greet her.

“I missed you,” she said simply, shoving the door of her little yellow Beetle closed. He met her halfway, kissing her senseless. He started to guide her toward the house without breaking the kiss but she pulled back. “Hang on. Before you get to have your way with me, you have to help me carry my stuff inside.”

It was then that he saw the suitcase in the backseat and the laptop bag on the passenger side. Relief flooded through him at the sight of her luggage. She was staying. “How about I have my way with you first and we worry about the luggage later?”

* * * * *

They fell into a new routine—if there could be anything routine about living with a woman on a mission to change the world through the written word.

“How’s your Elena doing?” Tank asked a few days later while he was torturing Adam in the weight room.

“She’s writing a book.” Which seemed like the only way he could answer the question. Just saying
good
seemed wrong somehow.

“Yeah?” Tank breathed through three more reps then lowered his weights, standing as they rotated so he could spot Adam as he took his turn. “Good for her.”

“Yeah. But it means she spends pretty much all of her time hunched over her laptop, glaring at the screen as if it has personally offended her. And when she isn’t doing that, she’s running around the house shouting, ‘I’m taking my power back!’ at the top of her lungs.”

Tank snorted a laugh and Adam grinned himself.

“She’s amazing. But I’m learning to be cautious. If she’s staring into space, totally zoned out like no one’s home, interrupting her thought process will lead to a scene like that head-spinning one from
The Exorcist
.”

“Terrifying.”

“Pretty much,” Adam agreed.

But he loved it.

He loved her. He just couldn’t tell her that because she’d already shown signs of bolting on their relationship—the Just Friends thing still grated under his skin.

She’d only brought a few days’ clothes when she came back and every few days she would vanish back to her apartment for a day or two, leaving his house feeling dead without her.

He’d told her he wanted her to stay, told her every way she was willing to hear, but she kept the distance between them as if she was waiting for him to wake up one morning and decide she wasn’t good enough for him anymore.

He wanted to punch Daniel. Not to mention her parents. Everyone who had turned her away and made her feel like she wasn’t good enough. All those small-minded assholes who hadn’t been able to accept her as she was. Who had taught her to be wary. To wait for the other shoe to drop.

The only way Adam knew to prove he wasn’t going to stop wanting her was to show her. So he just kept doing it.

He went to work. He came home. He cooked. He kissed her. He danced with her around the living room and curled up with her to watch television and lost his train of thought looking at her, hypnotized by the beauty and wildness and sensuality of her. He dragged her off to bed—and woke up in the middle of the night to find her hunched over her laptop again, her face illuminated by the bluish glow as her hands clattered over the keys. He fell asleep to the sound of her obsession. And then he did it all over again.

And for the first time ever, returning to the house started feeling like coming home. Because she was there.

Though it may also have had something to do with the conversation he had with Sandy when she came by the house two days after what the media had taken to calling The Newton Hoax.

He’d known who it was as soon as he looked out the front window and saw the nondescript SUV with darkly tinted windows pull past his gate. He opened the door as soon as she and her entourage spilled out onto his driveway. Sandy waved the others to stay behind, gliding toward him with the innate elegance and poise that had earned her the nickname the Queen of Hollywood. She’d been an ingénue once, and the beauty that had defined her in her youth was still there in the distinctive bone structure of her face, but the sharp radiance of her had softened over the years as she’d made the transition from rom-com star to serious actress.

“Adam.” She paused on his doorstep.

“Sandy. Would you like to come in?”

She nodded, looking about as enthused as if he’d just asked her if she’d like to clean toilets all afternoon. She moved past him into the house and he trailed her down to the sunken living room.

He glanced around automatically for traces of Elena—almost relieved she’d moved out. She wasn’t a neat person, always leaving a shoe here and a scarf there—and he found himself looking for that evidence like a teenager who’d had a party when his parents got home. He was too old for that feeling.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, thank you. I won’t keep you long.” She looked around at the white couches she’d bought when the house was hers, as if unsure where to sit. Adam waved her onto the loveseat, taking the couch opposite.

“How’s Cassie doing?” he asked and Sandy’s face crumpled.

It was so surprising it took him a moment to realize Sandy Newton was crying in his living room. He looked around helplessly—where was a tissue box when you needed one?—but before he could do more than lurch to his feet, she was pulling a linen handkerchief from her pocket and waving him back to his chair. “I’m sorry. Apparently I’m a mess.”

Her voice broke on the last word.

“It’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t. I’m so sorry, Adam. I owe you more than apologies.”

Please, don’t give me another house
. “You don’t owe me—”

“I’m not a good mother.”

“That isn’t—”

“I’m not,” Sandy insisted. “Cassie’s father was my second husband and he’s never spent much time with her. He used to take her on an extravagant vacation once a year when she was younger. Disney World if she wanted. The south of France. Skiing in Switzerland. But he was never really a father figure. And then a few years ago he remarried and started a new family. Stopped taking Cassie at all.”

Adam sat very still, uncomfortable with her confessional air.

“I didn’t know about the drugs and the alcohol,” Sandy whispered. “But I think I knew without knowing, if that makes any sense. I knew she was different. I knew things were getting bad between us, but I didn’t know what to do so I pretended not to see. I pretended it was normal teenage rebellion and tried to fix it by promising she could come with me the next time I had to shoot on location in Europe—even if it meant taking her out of school. Parent of the year, eh?”

“Teenagers are tough to read. You didn’t know.”

“Thank you for trying to make me feel better, but the truth was I was a shitty mother. I wasn’t even surprised when the police called me the night of the fire. I’d been expecting her to get arrested. I just hadn’t been expecting them to call to tell me she’d almost died. It woke me up to how stupid I’d been. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight—but I also couldn’t bear to punish her for the drinking and the drugs because I was so glad she was all right.”

“It’s understandable.”

“I knew she had a crush on you, but I also knew you’d never look at her that way so it seemed safe. Harmless. And then it started to help. She stopped drinking and cleaned up her act because she wanted to be good enough for you. I had my daughter back and I hadn’t even had to be the bad guy. So I encouraged it.”

A weight landed in his gut. “And then she saw me with Elena.”

Sandy sniffled. “I’m so sorry about the story,” she said. “When I saw it…”

“It wouldn’t be surprising if you wondered if some part of it was true.”

She shook her head. “There were too many discrepancies in her story. I knew you’d been refusing to see her. She’d been complaining to me about how you only saw her as a little girl—and I was so thrilled she was confiding in me at all that I didn’t remind her that she still is one in the eyes of the law.” She wadded up the handkerchief, grimacing. “And it wasn’t the first time she’d made up vicious stories when she was upset. I fired two of her nannies for stealing when she was a child before I realized she was telling tales, trying to get rid of them so I’d be forced to pay more attention to her.”