Summer with a Star (Second Chances Book 1) (21 page)

She blinked and looked around the room. Her smile came back, and Spence let out a breath, dizzy with relief. Those pesky thoughts were still zipping through her brilliant, sharp mind, he was sure, but she was managing whatever they were. Managing it like a pro.

“I have a few ideas,” she said at last.

Their deliberations didn’t take long. Spence hardly listened to a word Tasha said about the merits of each piece of art. He was too busy drinking in the certainty of her words as she explained her reasons for her decisions. He was distracted by how gorgeous she looked in a t-shirt and shorts, and even more distracted by how she would look out of them once they got back to the house. He had the sudden urge to have her on top all night.

“Children, Spence, children.” Tasha’s sudden, mock scolding tone yanked him out of his carnal thoughts.

“What? Huh?”

She crossed her arms, shaking her head with a grin that brought a delicious pink flush to her cheeks. “We’re around children? I can see where your mind went as clearly as if it was painted in one of these pictures.”

“That would be the work of a precocious child,” he teased.

“Let’s let them be children first before they get to the good stuff of being an adult.” She winked.

He nodded, duly chastised. “So who are our winners?”

“Those who did the work,” she answered. Her words wrapped tightly around his heart, but it was the deep smile that filled her eyes that pierced it.

Giving out prizes to a bunch of eager kids was far more satisfying than Spence imagined accepting a prestigious award would be. He announced half of the winners and Tasha announced half, and even though he’d spent a chunk of his life in front of the camera, Tasha clearly spent her life in front of kids. She knew how to praise them without inflating their heads, how to console the ones who were disappointed without condescending to them, and best of all, she knew how to handle the parents with patience and respect. She was a star. She was
the
star.

“You’re amazing, you know,” he told her as they walked home down Beach Avenue, the sun lowering toward the horizon. Duke followed, several yards behind.

“Me?” She balked at his comment.

“Yes,” he laughed. “Those kids really responded to you. Far more than they responded to me.”

She shrugged. “That’s just because I’ve had training. I’m a boring teacher, remember?”

“No way. There is nothing boring about what I saw back there. I know love when I see it.” He knew love when he felt it too. Deep and pulsing in his gut. Yes, lower too, but the love that made him sway closer to her and take her hand as they made the turn onto Sand Dollar Point’s driveway was more than sex. He admired Tasha. He looked up to her.

He needed to do something about it.

“I do love teaching,” she said after a long silence. She chewed her lip, glancing out over the tops of the rose bushes to the watery horizon. Her brow was furrowed enough to tell him that her thoughts had taken over once again, but they weren’t torturing her this time.

“Good,” he said. “We should stick with what we love.” Or who.

“Yeah.” She let out a breath.

It took Spence a second to realize that the front door was open as they climbed the porch stairs. Mitch sat playing with his phone on a chair to the side. He looked up and nodded to them and to Duke behind them, so nothing could be seriously wrong. But Spence still had the feeling that—

“Spence. There you are.”

Yvonne’s honeyed voice greeted them the second they stepped through the front door. She sailed down the hall toward them from the living room, heels clicking on the hardwood, her phone in one hand and a stack of mail in the other.

“Yvonne.” Tasha muttered the name like a curse.

Spence darted an anxious glance to Tasha before summoning up a smile for Yvonne. “You’re back,” he said. “So soon.”

“Well there was no point to me staying in New York, sweetheart,” she said with an off-hand gesture. “Simon is off finding himself now, and the producers of Second Chances were breathing down my neck. I figured a few more days of R&R up here would do me good.”

Tasha crossed her arms during the speech. “Is that so?”

“Yes.” Yvonne ignored Tasha’s hostility with a smile. “Oh, by the way, I picked up your mail as I came in.”

“Mail?” He hadn’t even been aware there was a mailbox.

“Just a few things for the Cavanaros. Oh, and this was sitting in the box for you, Miss Pike.” She handed Tasha an ordinary envelope.

“Thanks,” Tasha replied with a suspicious arch of her brow.

She turned the envelope over. Spence caught something about a Portland school district on the return address. Tasha frowned and walked past Yvonne into the living room, opening the envelope with her finger.

“Why are you really here?” Spence lowered his voice to ask Yvonne once they were alone in the hall.

“I told you. The producers of Second Chances want an answer, and they want it yesterday,” she said. “I’m here to light a fire under your ass and to fan the flames until you commit.”

“What a charming metaphor.” He headed into the kitchen to get a glass of water. “You want anything?” he offered Yvonne.

“I want you to tell me you’ll sign on to the show,” she said. “This heel-dragging, soul-searching was cute for a couple of weeks, but you know how this business works. The longer you’re out of the public eye, the harder it is to get back into it.”

She was right. He wasn’t sure that would be such a bad thing, though. That afternoon had proved as much. Making the decision about Second Chances seemed less important than figuring out the best way to keep Tasha in his life.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, filling a glass with water from the sink. “I’ll give you an answer about Second Chances if you leave without offending Tasha.”

“What, right now?” Yvonne started.

Guilt pricked at him. She’d just gotten there. “Okay, maybe not immediately, but don’t make yourself too much at home.”

Yvonne’s smile returned in full force. “You give me an answer, and I’ll leave the planet to you and your teacher as soon as you do.”

“Deal,” he said, sealing it with a stern look.

Tasha walked into the kitchen a moment later, reading the letter she’d been sent.

“What did you get?” he asked, fighting the pinch of uncertainty in his chest.

“It’s my class list.” Tasha studied the page for a few more seconds, then met his eyes. “For next year. The kids I’ll be teaching. I told them I wasn’t going to be online much this summer, so they had better mail it to me here when it was out.”

“How nice,” Yvonne said. “And when does school start again?”

“August 28
th
,” Tasha replied, “but I have to be back for pre-school set-up by the 21
st
.

August 21
st
. That was just over two weeks away.

Chapter Sixteen

It was time to make some serious decisions. If the art show hadn’t shown Tasha that, the class list would have. She stood at the dining room table, searching for the right pieces to finish the puzzle. In more ways than one.

“I think she’s serious when she says she’ll leave as soon as I make a decision about Second Chances,” Spence said. He’d been trying to convince her that Yvonne would leave soon since they came home and found her the day before.

“So make a decision, then,” she said

Make a decision. Was she a boring teacher or wasn’t she?

Spence huffed what might have been a laugh. “It’s not quite as simple as all that.”

He reached for a segment of six pieces that had already been fit together, turned it sideways, and attached it to a gap in the main puzzle. The lighthouse was actually beginning to look like a lighthouse now.

Tasha glanced up at him. They stood on opposite sides of the table today, something she had orchestrated. At least he’d stopped trying to inch around to her side. Inching led to touching, and touching led to her brain being too scattered to sort out the tangle she was in.

“What about the decision isn’t simple?” she asked, him and herself. “It’s a TV pilot. Don’t those things film, like, a year before anyone decides whether to actually air the series?”

“In theory.” Spence rubbed his chin. He hadn’t shaved. Scruff looked good on him, but after almost six weeks, she knew it for a sign that something was bothering him. “The producers are confident in the script. They’ve got serious talent behind it in terms of directing and cast. The network has given them about as big a green light as a pilot can get.”

“There you go.” She shrugged and focused on the puzzle. There was one piece, one annoying little spot of ocean that she just couldn’t find, for some reason. It would make an entire section of the bigger picture make sense. “Yvonne keeps saying that this would be an excellent career move for you, so why not jump at it?”

He let out a breath. “I’m not jumping at it because I don’t want to commit myself to something that might….”

He stopped. Tasha looked up. He was staring at her with that heady mix of affection and tension. Oh boy.

“That might?” she prompted in spite of the knot growing in her stomach.

He let his shoulders drop and held his arms to the sides. “I don’t want to commit to something that might interfere with another commitment I want to make. There. I said it.”

Heat flooded Tasha’s face, swirling in her gut. She wasn’t dumb. He was talking about her. He wanted to make a commitment to her, though God only knew why.

“What’s to say that those two things will conflict?” She wasn’t dumb, but she sure would play dumb if it bought her time to sort out her own crap.

She went back to searching the table for puzzle pieces. She could feel him watching her.

“I don’t want to commit to something only to have it drag me off to New York, or worse, L.A. Not when I’m happy here.” She couldn’t tell from his tone if he knew she was deliberately avoiding the issue or not, and she wasn’t about to look into his eyes to gauge what he was thinking.

“Fair enough,” she said, finding a piece—not the one she wanted—and fitting it into place. “Theoretically speaking, if the producers decide to film the show in a location that you like, would you take the role?”

“I suppose so,” he said, then added, “Yeah. Yeah, I would.”

“Then you should take the role,” she concluded. “From everything you’ve told me, it sounds like the right part for you.”

And what was the right part for her?

The answer swooped in faster than she expected it to. Getting her class list yesterday had been a bittersweet drop of excitement in the middle of what had been shaping up to be a great day, until Yvonne showed up. She was always excited to get the list, to see which names were the younger siblings of students she’d already had, which were new to her, and which were known to be children that needed extra attention. Her fellow teachers thought she was crazy for loving to see the names of those problem children on her roster. Those were the kids who needed her the most.

They needed her. She needed them. She was a teacher. That’s just the way things were.

And why not? She burst into a smile as she found the piece that had been driving her crazy at last. With a satisfying snick, she fit it into the puzzle, completing that section of ocean.

“You found it,” Spence congratulated her. “It’s all starting to come together.”

“Yeah.” She tilted her head and grinned at the puzzle. Then she glanced up to Spence. “Do you think I’m boring?”

Spence blinked, his smile slipping for half a second before coming back in full force. “Absolutely not.” He chuckled as he came around the table to slide his arms around her waist. His hands grabbed her backside, and he kissed her.

Damn, that felt good. And totally wrong.

When he let her take a breath, she said, “Brad thought I was boring because I loved spending time with kids, and because I would rather stay home and write a new lesson plan than go out bar hopping in Portland.” She’d never spit out the truth of it like that before. Oddly enough, it felt good.

Spence kissed her lightly. “Brad is a douche. He didn’t deserve you.”

“No, he didn’t.”

Wow. She’d never spit that out either. Here she’d been walking around, bummed out because she wasn’t good enough. Ugh. How long had she fallen for that crap line of thought? How many women fell for that every day?

She leaned back and looked up at him. “So you don’t think teachers are boring.”

“Teachers are amazing,” he said. “They are the best, bravest people on the planet. They are the real celebrities.”

An endorsement like that, coming from a shining star, was something to chew on.

Spence bent to kiss her, but as much as she wanted to stay where she was, all warm and wriggly inside, she edged her way out of his arms and back to the table. He gave her a wicked grin that told her he thought that they were playing.

Only, they weren’t playing.

Tasha had never felt so light and so heavy at the same time. There it was. She was a teacher. She was good at it, she loved it. Spence may have played his roles, but this was the role that was right for her. Teacher.

Not movie star girlfriend.

She scooted her way to the far end of the table, focusing on another section of the puzzle. Spence moved with her, brushing her arm as he came to stand close. Her body ran hot, but her mind was stuck cold. Sand Dollar Point had been her dream since forever. Spence had been her dream for weeks now. Beautiful, sexy, wild dreams. So what was reality? Her heart was telling her one thing, but her head was high on the piece of self-discovery she’d just fit into place. In two weeks, she would be back in a classroom. She would be happy. What then? Where did Spence fit into the whole thing? He sent her heart pounding and her insides quivering, but so had Brad, once upon a time. Was she ready to go there again?

The puzzle would be finished soon. Her time to figure out what she wanted was running out.

He had a decision to make—a decision that had nothing to do with Second Chances. It was about time he made it.

“Can I talk to you?” he asked Yvonne, plopping into the wicker chair opposite her on the south side of the porch.

Yvonne set down the script she’d been reading and adjusted her sunglasses to look down her nose at him. “Where’s your sweet Tasha?”

“Upstairs. We finished the puzzle, so she went to take a nap before dinner.”

“Oh.” Yvonne smiled, removing her sunglasses and folding them on top of the script, now in her lap. “What can I help you with, honey?”

“Second Chances.”

He could have just offered her a mansion in Barbados with her choice of cabana boys and her eyes wouldn’t have glowed more. “Yes?” Her voice practically quivered in anticipation.

“Have they decided on locations for remote filming yet?”

Yvonne’s joy deflated a bit. The sparkle in her eyes turned to business. “Last I heard, they were scouting a few places in New England. It’s supposedly set in rural Vermont, you know.”

He nodded. That was one of the reasons he hadn’t written the idea off entirely.

“Are there any front-runners?” he asked with deadly seriousness.

“They’re exploring an option in Vermont, one in New Hampshire. There’s even a spot in Maine, close to here, believe it or not. A retirement home called Twin Pines that’s looking to make money by renting space to Hollywood.”

Spence’s brow flew up. “Near here?”

“Yes.” The sparkle drifted back into her eyes as she caught on to his line of questions. “Only half an hour away, or so. That’s the nice thing about Maine. You’ve got mountains and you’ve got oceans, all within a day’s drive.”

“How likely are they to choose the Maine location?”

Yvonne shifted forward. “How likely are you to agree to the part if they choose to shoot in Maine?”

Yep. She had his number. “Very,” he answered.

“I see.” Her lips twitched, but he knew her well enough to know that she hadn’t reached the point of declaring victory yet. “You know your sweetie lives in Portland, not in Summerbury, don’t you?”

He shrugged, choosing to play it cool, even though he felt like his mom was grilling him about his prom date. “We’re not that far from Portland here. Plus, Tasha loves this place. Didn’t you say the owners are thinking of selling so they can retire.”

“Did I say that?” Yvonne leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, cagy as ever.

“You did. And I’m saying this. If the producers agree to use the Maine location to film, then I’ll agree to do the part.”

“All this for a woman?” she pressed him.

“She’s not just any woman,” Spence said.

“Actually, sweetheart, she
is
just any woman. She won’t do a thing for your image.”

He tried not to grip the arms of his chair hard enough to crush them. It wasn’t easy. “I disagree with you. She’s beautiful and intelligent, and even though you might not like it, marrying a regular woman would be fantastic for my image.”

“
Marrying
her?” Yvonne’s eyes flew so wide he thought they might pop out of her head. “Oh, honey, you don’t want to go there.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “I love Tasha, and I want to marry her.”

“After five weeks?”

“Nearly six.”

Yvonne huffed. “That’s not much of a difference. And I don’t care who you are, it’s not enough time to know whether someone is worth marrying.”

“I disagree.” Firmly. Stubbornly. Bullishly. “Sometimes that’s all it takes.”

She shook her head.

“I’ve never met anyone like Tasha in my life. She’s the one for me, Yvonne, I know it. I’ve never been more sure of anything.”

“And what does Tasha think of all this?” She picked up her sunglasses and started tapping them against the arm of the chair.

The satisfaction of having really annoyed Yvonne was squelched by the truth behind the answer to her question. “I haven’t talked to her about it yet.”

Yvonne stopped tapping. She let out a breath. “Don’t you think you might want to do that before you start hiring caterers and booking the honeymoon?”

“I’m sure she loves me,” he told her. “We’re just so right together, so natural.”

“Has she said anything about marriage?”

“No. We’ve just been enjoying the summer so far.”

“Uh-huh. And are you sure it’s not just a fling for her?”

“A
fling
?” Now he was the one who was annoyed.

“You know. A hot summer romance with a superstar? You have to admit, it’s quite a fantasy.”

He refused to be suckered by Yvonne’s below-the-belt tactics. “Tasha is not the kind of girl who would have a casual fling.”

“Honey,
every
girl is the kind who would have a casual fling if a man like you walked into their life and stripped down.”

“You’re wrong,” he insisted, standing so that his frustration wouldn’t cause the chair to spontaneously combust. “You’re wrong and I’ll prove you wrong.”

“All right,” she sighed. “If you think this is going down the aisle, then go talk to her about it.”

“I will,” he insisted. In spite of the fact that his gut clenched at the thought.

He turned to storm off the porch and into the house. Yvonne was jaded. She’s spent too long in Hollywood. She didn’t know Tasha the way he did.

He
did
know her. They’d shared so much in the last few weeks. He hadn’t been lying when he told Yvonne that for some people, all it took was a few weeks to know that you wanted to spend the rest of your life with them.

He took the stairs up to the second floor two at a time. Of course, it was obvious to him now. That thing he’d been missing from his life for so long, that need he hadn’t been able to fulfill, was for love. Honest, ordinary love. He’d found that with Tasha. She was the rock that would keep him honest, the home that would keep him balanced in a crazy world. He needed her.