Page 78 of Lucky Star

Chapter Thirty

Sarah

Our mornings were spent hiking the lush temperate rainforests of the island, and our afternoons surfing the beach outside our house with Hal and Drea. Or in my case, attempting a handful of times to get up on a board before rolling to shore. Cameron, on the other hand, had taken to cold water surfing like a seal. Later, we spent our evenings drinking beer and eating fresh-caught seafood with our new friends.

And at night? Well, that was downright magical. I’d never felt more connected to Cameron than I did during those long, languid hours we spent making love. Whether he cornered me in the shower after a long, wet day in the surf, laid me down in front of the fire where flames danced over his muscled back and sculpted chest, or carried me upstairs to bed at the end of the night, we couldn’t get enough of each other. Though our days in Eagle Harbour were dwindling faster than I would have expected, I never wanted our trip to end.

As December loomed in front of us and the time for filming in Vancouver drew closer and closer, I knew we’d have to speak with Broderick. Cameron knew it as well, but neither of us made the effort to reach out to our boss. That he hadn’t tried contacting us either was a very bad sign. He wasn’t exactly the type of man who kept his feelings to himself, much less when he thought he’d been wronged. And Broderick would have viewed what we’d done as the worst sort of disloyalty.

On the morning of our eighth day in Eagle Harbour, we lay in bed, our limbs tangled up in rumpled sheets, when my phone buzzed on the nightstand next to my head.

“Ignore it,” Cameron groaned, his arm thrown over his eyes to block out the bright rays of a full winter’s sun streaking through the open curtains. “Nothing can be as important as sleeping for two more hours.”

“As if you’re sleeping.”

“Okay, maybe I’m not.” He rolled over, his big body looming over me. “But I can think of other ways to spend our time that don’t include talking on the phone.” He kissed me in an effort to distract me from the device that was now vibrating off its pedestal. After the sixth ring there was a pause indicating the caller had hung up but then the trilling started all over again.

“I have to get it,” I told Cameron, breaking away. “It might be an emergency.”

Cameron dropped his forehead to mine in resignation. “Fine. But I’m not done here.” He flopped over and resumed his previous position, as if hadn’t just tried to seduce me into ignoring my phone.

I picked up my phone and checked the name on the screen before answering, lest it be my mother calling with another one of her gossip emergencies. Cameron and I had agreed not to check Twitter or Facebook for the remainder of our trip, so if people were talking about us, we didn’t know.

“It’s Shanna,” I told him.

“And so it begins,” he said, sitting up and grabbing his own phone. “Be brave, my sweet girl.”

“Hi Shanna, what’s up?”

“Don’t play coy with me, Sarah Travers. You know exactly what’s up.” Instead of censure, her voice held a note of humor. “Broderick is in the kitchen right now cursing the day he hired you away from me. You and Cameron have been naughty.”

Slipping out of bed, I walked naked down the stairs to stare out windows that overlooked the empty beach. “Before you say anything, it was an accident—”

“You better not apologize,” Shanna interrupted. “In fact, it’s everyone else who should be apologizing to you. You did nothing wrong. And besides, it doesn’t matter now. I’ve taken care of everything.”

A woman in Shanna’s position—married to a major Hollywood power broker but with significant cash and prestige of her own—could choose to ignore anything she damn well pleased, thinking nothing of situations that were very consequential for people like me. Shanna knew her place in the world and the benefits her status afforded her, and she wasn’t afraid to leverage them.

“Broderick is very angry with you, by the way. He trusted you to do right by him, Sarah, and now he feels like you deceived him. Or rather, he felt that way until I explained to him, at length, how ridiculous this whole PR campaign was from the get go.

“There is no way Cameron and Jillian could have kept up this farce over the course of the five years it’s going to take for all of the movies to be filmed and released. And there’s certainly no way I was going to let you put off marrying him for the sake of a movie that doesn’t need extra publicity to succeed anyhow. That woman Aerin … well, let’s just say the less said about her, the better.”

This was unexpectedly fantastic news. There was only one person in the world whose opinion Broderick trusted more than his own, and she was currently telling me she had my back. “Thank you so much, Shanna. Your support means the world to me.”

“I just wish you’d have come to me first, instead of me having to hear about it from one of my girlfriends. You know you can trust me, right?”

Unless I was mistaken, I detected a hint of vulnerability, which was surprising because I wouldn’t have thought Shanna had an unguarded bone in her body.

“Of course, I know that,” I rushed to assure her. “I just didn’t want to bother you with something like this when you have your own family and husband to worry about. I respect and admire you so much, but I didn’t want to lay this problem at your feet.”

“Pshaw,” she exhaled on a disgusted sigh. “When it’s my husband’s fault and I can fix it, I damn well expect you to tell me how I can help. Speaking of, I was talking with my sister over lunch the other day and I told her all about you and Cameron. You never shared all of the details with me, of course, but I know something major went down between you two this summer. Now, here you are months later, finally able to tell the world you are in love, and there’s my dolt of a husband trying to force you to keep it a secret.”

I’d forgotten that when Shanna got wound up about something she could talk a mile a minute. I had to really focus on what she was saying to keep up with the conversation and all the various twists and turns she included while telling a story.

“Anyhow, as I was saying. When Marnie and I were discussing you two, she told me she thought Broderick should scrap the movie and make one about your relationship instead.”

Her excitement over the idea came through loud and clear, not to mention them being eerily similar to what I had told Cameron as we’d stood on the roadside days before. While no one doubted The Ties That Bind would be a huge international hit, Shanna and I both recognized there would always be an audience for sweeter stories like ours.

“Hello, Sarah. You still there?”

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