Fanfare (17 page)

I fixed a gaze of acid-laced humor on him, and then a delayed burst of mirth escaped my lips.

“What’s funny?” he asked with amusement.

“This is so cheesy. It’s reminding me of that scene in ‘Dirty Dancing’ . . . I heard once that every girl deserves at least one ‘Dirty Dancing’ moment. I guess this is mine.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen that movie,” he stated.

“Loser! What kind of man doesn’t watch Patrick Swayze save Baby from being put in the corner?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he teased.

“I guess you’re just going to have to see it.”

“I guess so,” he replied as he ran the tip of his nose along my forehead.

“You’re not trying to take advantage of this situation, are you?” I sighed as I felt his hands move from my waist to rub seductively on my lower back.

“I most certainly . . . am,” he jibed.

I crossed my arms behind his neck and leaned forward to take his lower lip into my mouth with a smile of jest. He dragged me against his bare chest with a quiet rumble of laughter and kissed me back unabashedly. His hands moved under the hem of my shirt and began a tentative exploration upward. My heart took off at a crazed pace as warmth collected in my stomach and stunned me with its force. I positioned my fingers to grasp the tight muscles of his forearm as our embrace grew increasingly more inappropriate. His body did not have the hugely protruding musculature that I thought was requisite of a Hollywood actor . . . rather, it was completely devoid of fat and had sinewy muscles that showed their definition in movement—so incredibly sexy.

“Mommy!” A child’s voice punctuated the tree-lined edge of the lake behind us.

“Shit,” Tom muttered as we broke our embrace.

“Good Lord! This is a family camping ground! Take it someplace private!” A highly irritated female came into view as she gesticulated wildly for us to leave.

“I’m sorry!” I gasped back as shame washed over me. Tom had already turned back towards the embankment and tugged at my arm as he tried to keep himself from laughing out loud.

“It’s not funny!” I stage-whispered back at him. In truth, I was trying really hard to ignore my own mirth.

“Whatever you say,” he retorted through his pained attempts to stave off his amusement.

We walked leisurely back to the “campsite” in spite of the fact my heretofore- immaculate tennis shoes were soaked and covered with mud that sloshed in my socks with each step.

“My shoes are ruined,” I lamented as we arrived back at our shiteous shelter.

He shrugged. “We’ll get you some new ones. Frankly, I think our shoes are a small price to pay for that memory.”

I couldn’t help the quick smile that brightened my face.

We changed, wrapped ourselves in our sleeping bags, and placed our wet clothes on tree branches to dry. Utilizing the combined efforts of the two most pathetic excuses for campers the woods of North Carolina had ever seen, we managed to start a fire and skewer some hot dogs for dinner.

After we ate, Tom pulled out his guitar and strummed chords listlessly. His face expressed he was deep in thought as he stared at the dwindling embers.

“Can we trade questions?” he asked and abruptly stopped playing.

“What?” I replied, startled out of my own reverie.

“You can ask me any question, and if I choose to answer it, I have the right to ask you a question in return.”

“Why do we need a game to do that?” I queried.

He narrowed his grey eyes at me in consideration. “It’s too easy to avoid difficult topics in regular conversation.”

I sighed knowingly. “Do I get to start?”

“Yes.”

I thought for a moment. “Have you ever been in love?”

“Yes. The first girl I ever dated. I was sixteen. We were together for almost a year, and we broke it off because we grew out of it. I thought I was in love with another girl about two years ago, but I think it was more infatuation than anything else.”

I nodded. He was being forthright, and I was certain he expected nothing less from me. I had to admit that my curiosity had been the driving force behind my acquiescence to this exercise. Deep down, I knew nothing good could come out of delving too deeply into the past.

“What made you cry that night in my room?”

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. I knew it. I would be dying of curiosity, too. He had never once brought up the incident, and it must have been really hard for him to let it go for this long.

“Well, you don’t mess around, do you?” I said nervously.

He waited patiently with his arms linked around the guitar.

“Sometimes, er . . . I have nightmares about the night Ryan left me,” I stated with biting simplicity. I really hoped he wouldn’t ask me for details I couldn’t vocalize.

His gaze hardened. “I thought as much. At first, I wondered if it had anything to do with your father, but nightmares don’t usually come from things we’re at peace with, and you’ve always had open dialogue with me about your father.”

I stared down at the ground for a moment while I dragged a twig through the dirt. Was my answer sufficient?

“Your turn,” he murmured. Thank you.

I glanced up at the handsome movie star next to me. His tousled hair fell into his face, and the light from the fire made the flecks of green and gold in his eyes even more noticeable. I had a question I’d been dying to ask him for several months, but it was a question an insecure person would ask . . . oh well, he was going for blood, so I might as well get this answer while I had the chance.

“How many girls have you slept with?”

He couldn’t stop himself from smiling as he glanced down into the fire. “I guess I brought that one on myself.” He paused momentarily.

“I’ve slept with six women. Two of them are the women I mentioned earlier . . . one was from a drunken night in London where loneliness overcame me. It wasn’t a one-night stand, and I tried to make it work afterwards, but it was mostly out of a sense of guilt. I’ve found that relationships created from guilt are rarely destined to work out well. Another woman was someone I dated for about six months, but she moved away and wasn’t interested in long distance. I’m particularly embarrassed about the last two. In a nutshell, I had sex with them to see if I could. One was this rich party girl in L.A.—a regular fixture at the clubs. Anyway, she threw herself at me and told me she wanted to have sex . . . so one night I did it. I kept telling myself that this was what I was supposed to do. Young Hollywood. How boorish, eh? I was terrified afterwards that she would want more, but that appeared to be it. I guess she just wanted to see what it was like or something . . . then I was scared shitless that she would start spreading rumors about me. ‘Tom Abramson’s a lousy lay’ or some shite like that. The other girl was actually someone I was attracted to in L.A., but she just wanted to have a good time. I was pretty uncomfortable with that experience as well.”

“God, you’re honest,” I murmured.

“There’s no reason to lie . . . Do you think about him often?” The piercing way his eyes bored into mine showed me that this question meant a lot to him . . . a lot more than his seeming nonchalance indicated.

I shifted uncomfortably in my space. “Yes,” I whispered before taking a slow breath. “Mostly because it’s impossible not to. He was so much a part of my life, and everywhere I go there are memories. Usually when I think of him, it’s because I feel bitter . . . bitter that he got away so easily, so unscathed. I never contacted him after that night, and I just . . . I just don’t understand why he did that to me. I don’t know what I did that drove him to treat me like that. When I’m left to think about it, I can’t help but feel bitter.” I paused a moment. “Does this bother you?” I asked carefully.

Now I watched as he warred with himself. “Yes, it does.”

I waited while he searched for the right words.

“When I first met you, you were so . . . guarded. I knew it was because you’d been hurt before. I thought I would just wait for you to tell me what happened. I’m not sure why it bothers me so much, but I swear if I saw the wanker, I’d be really conflicted as to whether or not I’d thrash him or shake his hand in thanks. After all, if he hadn’t treated you so abominably, we wouldn’t be here.”

He took a deep breath, and for a moment I saw a much younger boy sitting next to me—a boy anxious about something. “Would you take him back?” He was extremely careful not to show emotion in the words he spoke, and his effort belied his objective. In that instant, I realized something that frightened me almost as much as it astounded me: Thomas Abramson cared deeply enough to be afraid of losing me.

I shuffled closer to him in my sleeping bag.

“No,” I said without hesitation. “I would never take back a man who cheated on me. I can’t love freely without trust. It might be a weakness on my part, but it’s who I am . . . so take note,” I stated with a small smile as I rested my cheek on his shoulder.

“Noted,” he replied as he kissed the top of my head affectionately.

He strummed his guitar again, then proceeded to launch into a mellow version of the song Use Somebody by Kings of Leon. He was a very talented guitarist, and I watched as he settled himself to play in earnest. His voice was raspy, and he was honestly a more gifted player than he was a vocalist, but the passion conveyed in his performance negated any discrepancy in skill. This man loved music, and it only made him even more attractive to me. As he sang the last line of the song, he immediately shifted his technique from strumming to fingerpicking. As he played the first few notes of the next song, I sat up in surprise.

“Explosions in the Sky?” I stated incredulously.

“You know this band?” He was impressed.

“Know this band? I love this band.”

He continued playing the melodic line of Your Hand in Mine, and I wrapped my arms around my knees inside of the sleeping bag. No matter how cheesy I would have judged this scenario to be as an outsider, I could not deny that there was a deep-rooted sense of peace pervading the space around us as Tom played his guitar by the fire and the stars lit the night sky above our heads. The glowing embers from the waning flames still managed to pop and fizz intermittently.

“This is nice,” I said softly.

“It is.”

One of the things that I loved about being around those closest to me was the ability to sit in complete stillness with them and not feel an irresistible urge to fill the void with conversation. There was a closeness in comfortable silence that even the most carefully chosen words failed to enhance.

When the last few notes resonated into the night air, Tom moved to the tent to put the guitar away in its case. I stood up to stretch and then began to collect the remnants of our meal so we wouldn’t attract the attention of any animals in the area. I was holding a plastic bag full of garbage when . . .

“OH BUGGER!” Tom came crashing out of the tent with a look of horrified shock on his face.

“What?” I demanded.

“There’s . . . a SNAKE in the tent! It slithered across my bloody foot!”

“AHHHHH!” I screamed as I proceeded to jump backwards in terror. “There are SNAKES here?” I yelled.

As he managed to regain control of himself, I wasn’t too surprised by his next outburst . . . of laughter.

“You’re totally going to take the mickey out of me for that one, aren’t you?”

“If you mean mock you endlessly, then yes, but first we need to figure out what we’re going to do . . . because I’m sure as hell not sleeping in that tent with a snake in it,” I managed to bite back.

“You think I’m going to sleep in there?”

“Get rid of it!” I gasped.

“You get rid of it! Prior snarky comment regarding Leicester Square ring a bell?” He was still chuckling uncontrollably.

Fifteen minutes later, we were sleeping on top of each other in the backseat of the Jeep, covered up in our sleeping bags.

“Well, this didn’t go exactly as I planned,” Tom said with mirth.

“Whatever made you think that?” I teased.

“I was hoping to get some action tonight, but seeing as how I can barely stretch out in the backseat of this car comfortably, I’m assuming that’s not going to happen.”

I shoved his shoulder. “Between that, the snake, and me smelling like old lake water, it’s a pretty safe assumption . . . but you’re welcome to give it a try. I figure once you hit your head on the roof of the car in a moment of passion, some sense will be knocked into you.”

“Promise me something,” he said with a smile.

“What?”

“Let’s never go camping again,” he murmured as he pulled me even closer.

“Amen, brother. Amen.”

Chapter Thirteen

The second flight to LA was decidedly more stressful than the first. In retrospect, I can’t place all of the blame on Hana. We were both uber-paranoid about this particular kind of problem. After all, a man had cheated on me once before with far fewer temptations dangling in his midst.

As I waited to board the plane at ten o’clock that Friday morning, I received a phone call from my best friend.

“Cris?” By the sound of her voice, something bothered her a great deal.

“What’s wrong?”

“Uh, look . . . I really struggled with whether or not to call you about this, and I might be completely out of line, but—” She hesitated.

“They’re getting ready to board, babe. Just say it.”

“Naz doesn’t want me to tell you because he thinks it’s ridiculous, but has Tom ever mentioned someone named Jenna Morrow?” she asked.

“Are you talking about the actress? They’re filming a movie together right now,” I responded patiently.

“Yeah. Well, there are pictures on the web of him with her at some party this past weekend. She’s—she’s all over him . . . and it looks like he doesn’t mind one bit.”

I was silent.

“Cris? I mean, it’s probably nothing . . . but three days ago there were also pictures of him hanging out with that heiress girl, Brooklyn Beresford.”

“The reality TV chick? The one who argued that Africa was a country, not a continent?” I sneered pejoratively.

“Uh, yeah . . . all these sites are clamoring to suggest that Tom Abramson is ‘sowing his oats,’ and he’s enjoying his newfound fame in the arms of California girls. There’s a paparazzi picture of ‘TomTom,’ as they call him, allegedly leaving Jenna Morrow’s house later that same night—around three o’clock in the morning. An unnamed source says they’re seeing one another.”