Page 14 of Second Act
Jessica liked his self-deprecation. The conversation flowed easily through the appetizers and the main course as they traded memories of their hometown and the people in it.
When the waiter offered them dessert menus, Pete checked his watch before he gave her a glinting smile. “I think we can have one more course before I have to take you home.”
The pleasure of Pete’s company had made Jessica forget all about her self-imposed curfew. “My fairy godmother will probably cut me a break just this once,” she said, taking the heavy vellum menu. “After all, the whole point of eating dinner is to get to dessert.”
“That wasn’tmypoint in having dinner with you,” Pete said, his smile changing to something less playful and more intent.
A flush crept up her cheeks. Torn between being flattered and being uncertain of where she wanted this to go, she dropped her gaze to the list of sweets. “What is abrigadeiro?” she asked.
“It’s a classic Brazilian treat,” Pete said. “Sort of like soft chocolate fudge, only here they serve it in a glass with a spoon.”
“Well, it’s chocolate, so I’m going with that.” She put her menu down.
Pete ordered a cheese platter. “And a Sandeman forty-year-old tawny port for each of us,” he added. “You appear to have a sweet tooth, so it seems like the right after-dinner drink.”
After the waiter departed, Pete lounged back in his chair. “You can tell me that it’s none of my business, but Aidan says that you were once engaged to Hugh Baker.”
Jessica almost choked on her last swallow of wine. Why the hell would Aidan share that with Pete? “Did he also tell you that it was a long time ago?”
“He did, but I don’t imagine you forget someone that famous. I’m surprised no one in Wellsburg ever mentioned it.”
“Hugh wasn’t Julian Best back then, so it wasn’t big news.” His casting as the super spy had brought the problems in their engagement to a crisis point, in fact. “It also didn’t last long.” Their entire relationship had been seventeen months of first heaven and then torment. She wished she didn’t remember both so vividly.
The waiter presented them with two tulip-shaped glasses filled with a tawny liquid. Glad of the interruption, Jessica took a sip and savored the sweet burn on her tongue and the smooth slide down her throat. “Nice.”
He acknowledged her compliment with a pleased nod. “Kind of hard to compete with Julian Best, though.”
She decided to address the easy part rather than the implication that Pete considered himself in competition with her ex-fiancé. “Everyone gets that wrong. In real life, Hugh isn’t a suave, dangerous, tuxedo-wearing secret agent. He’s an actor who takes on a persona on the set. At home, he’s just a regular guy with morning breath, poor taste in neckties, and an addiction to cheese puffs. The only thing not normal about Hugh is that he’s never had a bad hair day in his life. I hated that about him.”
Pete swirled his port in the glass. “Good to know that he’s almost human.”
Hugh had been quite human when they’d met on the set of a low-budget indie movie he was starring in.Starringwas a loose term, because the focus of the movie was a pack of dogs, one of whom had died duringfilming. That was where Jessica had come in. She’d been fresh out of vet school, working at the big, cutting-edge veterinary hospital in Los Angeles where they treated everything from dogs with gunshot wounds to a king cobra with pneumonia. When the movie got some bad press for allegedly working the dog to death, the director contracted with the animal hospital for a vet to be on set all the time. Since Jessica was the newest and therefore least valuable member of the staff, she’d gotten the job.
Turned out the dog had died because it had a heart defect, not because the director was inhumane, so her job was easy. When the dogs weren’t required for shooting, she kept them hydrated and in the shade of a canopy set up especially for the canine actors. When the dogs were in action, she helped the grateful dog trainer wrangle them for the cameras. She’d been so focused on the dogs for the first couple of days that she had paid no attention to the human actors.
Then Hugh had come over to visit the dog tent. His beauty was blinding. The black hair, the surreal turquoise eyes. She’d asked him if they were colored contact lenses, which had made him laugh. The bone structure of his face was striking, with its clean, slashing angles that made the camera linger. He was in costume, which meant jeans and a ripped T-shirt that displayed the symmetrical ridges of his abdominal muscles and the dusting of dark hair over his pecs.
He’d told her that he needed to interact more with the dogs to deepen his interpretation of his role. Jessica had seen no reason to doubt him, since he seemed like a celestial being who could have no possible interest in her. But Hugh later confessed that he’d used that as a ploy to talk with her, an admission she’d found both baffling and immensely flattering. As far as she was concerned, someone who looked like Hugh didn’t need an excuse to chat her up, but part of his appeal was that he felt he had.
When Hugh asked her out for dinner a few days later, she thought she’d heard him wrong.
“Poor choice of topic, I guess,” Pete said, pulling her mind back to the present.
“It’s fine,” Jessica said. “I’m long over Hugh.” Or so she’d thought until the last couple of days.
Pete lifted an eyebrow in a way that indicated he wasn’t convinced, so she decided not to mention that she’d just run into her ex. “Our lives have taken very different directions for a reason.”
“I hear you,” he said. “Opposite coasts and all.”
“And different stratospheres.”
Except Hugh was on her coast at the moment. But that wouldn’t last. The Julian Best movies always shot in a multitude of exotic locations. Hugh would move on and forget her existence again. Annoying that the thought hurt.
She welcomed the arrival of dessert and cheese. Thebrigadeirowas rich and silky with the contrast of a crunchy cookie-crumb topping. “This is worth turning into a pumpkin for,” she said.
Pete held out a small chunk of bread topped with cheese drizzled with honey. “Try this aged pecorino. Next time you might skip the chocolate.”
As she took it from him, her fingertips brushed his. A ripple of awareness ran through her. Something shifted on Pete’s face as well. When she bit into his offering, his gaze was on her lips. The sweetness of the honey brought out the sharp, smoky flavor of the cheese. “Mmm, you might have made a convert,” she said, polishing it off.
