Page 32 of Tempting as Sin
“Shared between Bailey and me.”
“Not what you told Ruby.”
“Well, I had to saysomethingabout why you were with us, and that was all I could come up with.”
“Oh? Not a shared dog after all, then? You don’t want me to come get Chuck tomorrow morning so you can get to the porno store? And I see that smile. What are we looking for?”
“Harness,” she said, going through items on a rack like a personal shopper in a department store. “Instead of a collar for now. His neck’s still raw. He must have been tied with a rope, poor baby. Plus, if he doesn’t know about riding in a car, I’m betting he doesn’t know about walking on a leash. This will help train him not to pull. And I can’t believe that’s what people call my beautiful shop.”
“Another reason,” Rafe said, “that I should come get him. He wouldn’t want to get into your car, and I’d be taking him on leash walks every day. I’m very good with animals. Comes of being half animal myself. Oh, wait. That’s not actually me.” He sorted through leashes as he talked. He might not know everything about dogs, but he could do this. Leather, he reckoned. Leather was always better.
Lily put the harness in her cart and said, “As soon as he starts pulling, you stop walking. And that leash is fine, but I’m buying it. Put it in my cart. Also, you’ve lost Clay again. I’m just saying.”
“Oh.” He switched accents. “Nope. If we’re sharing, we’re sharing.” He didn’t think thatI’ll be happier if you’ll let me buy this for youwas going to work, even though it was the truth, and never mind why. “As for the accent, it must be being with you here after being in Aussie with you. It doesn’t normally happen.” Actually, itneverhappened. Staying in character was his job. Why did he keep reverting to…himself?
“You’re wondering why I’m being friendlier with you than I was back in Australia,” she said. “Not to mention back in Jace’s houseboat. And in the car. Oh, man. None of that has been easy to think about. I’ve never been that harsh in my life, and seeing you again in Australia after I’d done it was nerve-wracking.” She’d grabbed two steel dog dishes and a plastic mat, and he took them from her, threw them into his cart, and raised his eyebrows at her when she sighed.
“Yeah,” he said, “Iwaswondering that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m good with the change.” You could say that. She pulled him like he was magnetized, and he didn’t mind that, either.
She asked, “Can you reach me down that dog bed up there? The pale-green one with the walls? Extra large. I have a feeling Chuck is going to be a monster. And here I wanted an elegant dog. Man plans, God laughs.”
“You realize,” he said as he obliged, putting this one into her cart, because he didn’t have room, “that you’re setting yourself up to get hurt here with all of this. There’s Chuck, and then there’s Bailey. That’s a sad story all the way. Danger, heartbreak dead ahead. Do you always fall this hard?”
He met her gaze and forgot what he’d been doing, because she’d gone still. “Hang on,” he said. “That wasn’t a criticism. You have me worried, that’s all.”
“Worried.”
He’d swear that he could feel the warmth from her body, even though the air conditioning was set to arctic levels. “Yeah.”
“About me.”
“That would be the one.”
“You don’t have to worry. Nobody has to worry.” She wheeled her cart around and said, “Since we’re here, you should buy groceries. Save yourself a trip.”
He wanted to take her arm. He couldn’t. “Lily.”
She stopped, turned, and said, “OK. First—if caring about Bailey and Chuck is setting myself up to get hurt, what’s the alternative? Never caring again, never trying to help, because you can’t help enough, and it hurts too much when you lose that person? That’s the price of living. Or at least it’s the price of caring, and I’ll pay it. If I hurt, I hurt. I can be impulsive. Sure I can. I can follow my heart too hard. I’m tired of apologizing for that. It’s nobody’s problem but mine, and so what anyway? I’ve hurt before, and I’m still standing. I’m right here, and I’m asking for nothing. It’s about Bailey and Chuck, not me, and anyway—I’m nobody’s victim. I’m a survivor.”
She took his breath. She knocked him back. She was fierce, and she was beautiful. “All right,” he said, once he could say anything. It wasn’t what he wanted to say. That was more along the lines of,You shouldn’t be hurt. That’s nothing but wrong.Exactly the thing he couldn’t say, though, so he didn’t.
An older lady said, “Excuse me,” her gaze darting between him and Lily, and he moved his cart to the side and was glad he hadn’t taken off the sunglasses, even though they were bloody inconvenient indoors.
Lily moved her cart, too, but then she focused on him again. “And as far as you and me,” she said, “you’ll be Paige’s brother-in-law in December, and Paige is my twin. We’re going to see each other, and if I can make that less awkward, I need to do it. And maybe I realized that I overreacted, too. We went out, we had fun, you kissed me hard, and you’re really good at it. So what? You’ve kissed hundreds of women.”
Another shopper, a bloke this time with a kid in the cart, walked by as she said it. His head swiveled. And then he crashed his cart into a battery display.
Lily was still talking. “I know it doesn’t mean anything. Just because I was at a…certain place in my life, that isn’t on you. And, yes, you used an alias in every way. People do that kind of thing all the time, too. I wasn’t careful enough, but that’s on me, too. Maybe there’s one way Idoneed not to follow my heart so much. Maybe I need to not be a woman who gets swept off her feet by a man. Again—not as much your problem, or your responsibility, as I’d like to have thought. And Bailey’s in the car. We need to get your groceries.”
She headed off, and he followed her down aisles and tossed things into the cart. “Women you kiss for the camera,” he said when she’d finally halted long enough for him to say it, “don’t count. It’s a job.”
“Which would be why,” she said, only the color in her cheeks betraying her emotions now, because her voice had steadied, “actors have affairs with their co-stars. Because kissing somebody, touching somebody, lying over her in bed, lacing your fingers through hers, neither of you wearing anything but a G-string, and pretending you’re having sex with her, doesn’t make you any more likely to follow through. Why is that hard to believe? Oh, yeah. Because it’s stupid. But I’m not stupid anymore.”
He tipped a carton of raspberries into a plastic bag, then added a second one, and reminded himself that this wasn’t about him, not really. It was about Antonio Carrera, who was a selfish bastard who’d hurt the woman he should have been holding closest. “I do mean that,” he told her. “We don’t all cheat. It’s not about whether you kiss her or not in the film anyway, or whether you do anything else. You want to know why? I’ll tell you why. Because that scene that gave the audience those tingles, the one where you slid her zipper all the way down her back, where your fingers brushed over her skin, and she gave that shiver? The way her dress fell to the floor? The way you held her shoulders and kissed her neck? The way her back arched and her head went back when you pulled out those pins and her hair fell down, and you wrapped your hand in it? That scene that has your fans rewinding so they can watch it over and over again?”
Surely she knew all this. He needed to tell her anyway. “Yeah, you took off her clothes and touched her body and kissed her neck. And it was nothing at all like kissing the woman who’s been knocking you out all night in a parking garage in the rain, and wanting to take her home more than you’ve wanted anything in a long, long time. Because you shot that scene twenty-six times. It took four hours. It was bloody hot under the lights. And maybe you liked her and you could joke about it, and it wasn’t that bad. Or maybe you heard her snapping at the wardrobe assistant and the makeup artist between every take, at people who were just as hot as she was and not making nearly as much money, and you had to kiss her neck for six more takes anyway and pretend she was somebody else in order to get some tenderness into it. Filmmaking’s a weird business. It’s all of that, and yet you get closer than you would doing another job, especially on location. You find the people you like, and you…bond. Shipboard romance, you could say, or at least shipboard friendship. Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s just that you have to open yourself up in order to be convincing, and that lays you raw. Some actors can separate the professional and the personal. Others, not so much. And some are good actors because they’ve lived their entire lives as mimics, as manipulators, and they’re monsters under the surface. There are those, too.”
“Who was the shipboard romance this time?” She’d turned away at last, was examining cantaloupe as if she’d be graded on the choice, but her voice wasn’t steady, and neither was her hand. He’d seen her face pale as he’d gone on. She’d seen the monster. She knew him too well.
