Page 80 of Blue Moon

“I’ll ask Priest. If you keep the camera angle tight, he might let you use our pool.”

“You have a waterfall?”

“Sure. Plus a swim-up bar and a water slide.”

A water slide? Again, the man seemed dead serious. Didn’t he share a house with Tulsa? Ryder couldn’t imagine her splashing around in the pool on the weekends. Shani seemed to be going through the same thought process.

“A…water slide?”

“The house used to belong to Dick Steele, better known as the Prince of Porn. When Priest moved in, there was a thirty-foot-wide bed in the master, and the whole ceiling above it was covered in mirrors.”

“Is that why it’s called Casa del Gato? The Cathouse?”

“Oh, no, that was Jez’s idea of a joke, and it stuck. I’ll speak with Priest and call you later.” He gave a chirpy wave. “Toodle-oo.”

21

LUNA

“Ithought that was good news, but…” Ryder studied my face as we sat in the parking lot. “But now I’m not so sure.”

Getting to the appointment with the OB-GYN had been a fun challenge. No way could I take the paparazzi along. They’d jump to the obvious conclusion—that I was pregnant—and the showbiz world would lose its collective mind. So Shani had roped two colleagues into helping with our deception. Well, one was actually a colleague’s sixteen-year-old daughter, a cute blonde who ran a make-up channel on YouTube. She’d seemed slightly starstruck when we exchanged clothes. Jon, the other participant in our charade, looked enough like Ryder that a passing glance through sun-glare on a windshield wouldn’t tell them apart, and when the two of them left through the front gate in Ryder’s SUV, the battalion of reporters had followed. I’d actually watched live on social media, and Danny Wells’s face when he realised the blonde wasn’t me had me laughing out loud. By then, Ryder and I were nearly at the clinic in Shani’s Audi.

And I had a diagnosis. Was it good news? The jury was still out on that. The doctor had been kind, a sweet grey-haired lady who reminded me of someone’s grandma. Not mine, obviously, because Grandma Puckett had succumbed to a heart attack before I was born, and Grandma Fotherington-Gale thought I was trash.

“I hoped they could just give me a pill or something.”

“If only life were that easy.”

I had vaginismus. My brain thought that anything stuck inside me would cause pain and send a signal to my vaginal muscles to repel, repel, repel. Julius’s attack had been the trigger, and years of fear and anxiety had made the problem worse.

“At least the doctor gave me hope.”

There were treatments available, but to start with, I had to address the psychological aspect, although I thought I’d already made some progress on that with Ryder. I wanted him to touch me. Too bad my subconscious hadn’t gotten the message yet, but at least I understood what was wrong with me now.

The first step would be just enjoying each other’s company for a week. Don’t go too fast, the doctor had warned Ryder, and he’d nodded solemnly while I tried not to die from embarrassment. Then we’d move on to internal massage and dilators, with local anaesthetic to numb the pain if necessary. And if that didn’t work out? Well, then there was Botox. Which would be super awkward because the next time someone accused me of using it, I wouldn’t be able to issue the same emphatic denial I usually did. No, I’d turn the colour of Julius’s Ferrari instead.

“I know talking about things made you a little uncomfortable, moon, but it’ll get easier.”

“A little uncomfortable? She made me look at my bits in a freaking mirror.”

“I’d be more worried if you could look at them without a mirror. We’d probably need an exorcist.”

How could he joke in the middle of…of this?

“I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“That you came to Vegas for a vacation and ended up holding my hand in the doctor’s office.”

“I’m not sorry, and there’s nowhere I’d rather be than by your side. In ten years, we’ll look back at this month and smile.”

“You think we’ll still be together in ten years?”

He twisted to look at me through the gap in the seats—yes, we were back to the chauffeur/client arrangement again—and raised an eyebrow.

“You don’t?”

---