Page 77 of The Treasure Hunt Hookup

“Ivy?” I call after her, but she keeps moving, pausing only to snatch her bag and jacket from the front desk, then she steams out the main doors.

“What did you do?” Dot asks suspiciously as I pass.

“Nothing!” I protest, thrusting the box at her and hurrying out after Ivy. She’s across the street, heading determinedly to her car when I finally catch up. “Ivy? Ivy, wait!”

She whirls around. “What?” she snaps, and I take a step back, thrown by the fury in her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, confused. “I thought … I thought you’d be happy.”

“About your movie?” Ivy folds her arms.

“Yes! We’ll get to tell your family’s story,” I explain, “And I’ll be working here in town for months, we won’t have to be long-distance or travel to see each other. Unless …” I pause, feeling a sudden cold wash on all my excited plans. “Unless, you don’t want us to be together.”

“Of course I want us to be together!” Ivy cries, still furious. “That’s not the problem here. God, for a smart guy, you can be such an idiot sometimes!”

I stare at her, baffled.

“It’s not your story to tell,” Ivy explains fiercely. “Earl, and Madeline? That’s mine. Who do you think dug all those diaries and letters out of box in my parents’ basement and stopped them getting soaked in the last flood? Who do you think translated Earl’s god-awful handwriting so we could even know what they meant? Who even found these new treasure hunt clues? OK, you did that with me,” she admits quickly, “But the rest of it is my work. I did it.Me. And now you want to take all the credit?”

“What? No!” I protest, shocked. “Ivy, that’s crazy. I would never!”

Her scowl deepens. “Really, crazy? Whose name is going to be up there on-screen?” she demands. “A movie by Reeve Donavan. Written and directed by Reeve Donavan. You didn’t even ask permission to sell the story. You just swept in and took it all from me without even asking!”

“I haven’t taken anything,” I tell her, holding my hands up in surrender. “I swear. We’d work on this together, you would be an official researcher on the project,” I add, trying to figure a way to reassure her. “I’ll even give you script approval, so you’d have the final say on how Earl and Madeline are portrayed. You’d get credit, too.”

“Sure, in the small-print,” Ivy says with a glare. “Out of sight, and out of fucking mind. God, you men are really all the same. You expect me to bend over backwards doing all the work, running around like an obedient little secretary, while you take all the glory.”

And then it hits me.Fuck.

“This is about Jake,” I realize, thinking of everything she told me about her ex-husband, and the end of their marriage. How he sidelined her, and minimized her contributions, and made her feel invisible.

How could I have been so dumb?

“Ivy, it’s not like that,” I rush to explain. “You know, I would never—”

“Pitch my work as your own?” she cuts me off. “Be totally oblivious about how that would make me feel? God, I swore I wouldn’t put myself in that position again,” Ivy shakes her head. “But here I am! Falling for a man who’s perfectly happy to build his career on the back of my talent.”

She’s falling for me?

The revelation would make me fucking elated if the woman of my dreams wasn’t currently glaring at me with the fury of a thousand suns. “Look, can we talk about this?” I ask, trying to cool the moment. I have to make her see this is nothing like what happened with her ex. “If you can just take a moment, calm down—”

“Calm down?!” she echoes loudly, and I wince.Bad move.

Ivy draws herself up to her full height – all five foot three of her – scowls through her glasses at me, and huffs an angry breath. “I’ll calm down when you get a clue and stop acting like such … like such aman!”

She gets in her car and slams the door, backing straight at me so I have to leap aside to keep from losing a toe. With Stevie Nicks blasting at full volume, she screeches away.

Leaving me feeling like the biggest fool in the world.

A fool who needs to figure out a way to make amends, and fast.

20

IVY

“Can you believe that guy?!”I demand, sprawled in my sweatpants on Mary-Alice’s massive couch. She’s been kind enough to pour me a glass of wine and make popcorn, and also to act like I haven’t repeated the phrase “Can you believe that guy?!”at least half a dozen times this evening. “He’s just like Jake!”

“He has a better sense of humor than Jake,” Mary-Alice points out, as the sound of Ruby’s lullabies echo from down the hall. “And is better in bed, and wealthier, and more successful–”

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