by Christa Wick
"Why don't they make people like you pay for two seats?" the woman-child asked.
Melanie resisted the urge to rip into the female, or point at the obvious enhancements and say it was for the same reason Little Miss Silicone didn't have to buy tickets for the twins. Instead, she just eased deeper into the seat, squirmed her ass and shoulders around to make sure her flesh was as spread out as possible and tried to think her way into falling asleep.
A massage usually helped. Not a real one, although that would have done the trick, too. But her love life being what it was (or wasn't), she satisfied herself with an imaginary rub down. The mental trick often worked to focus her on relaxing one muscle group at a time until she was asleep or in such a deeply meditative state she wouldn't hear the blonde complaining.
She started with an image of a man's hands pulling her hair back, gathering up the dark auburn locks, gently twisting them, then making a single loop so that her hair would lay neatly to the side. Next he curled his palms around her shoulders, the thumbs extended to rest lightly against the top few vertebrae of her spine.
A firm and rhythmic kneading of her flesh at that spot relaxed the muscles of her face and neck. From there, his hands spread out. His touch grew heavier and an unintended heat sparked low in her belly.
Immediately, she willed the hands back to the top of her shoulders, her mind hitting the restart button on the images playing through her head.
The visuals were supposed to be relaxing, not arousing.
Again, her face relaxed, his hands moved out, worked her biceps and the muscles covering her shoulder blades, fingers played up and down her spine.
Weight pressed heavily against her lower back as the plane began its ascent.
Feeling the pull of gravity, she pressed her thighs together and noticed an ache beginning to draw her nipples into thick, pouting points. She tried to open her eyes and pull herself out of the massage fantasy.
She couldn't. She was worn out and plummeting so quickly towards sleep that the man's hands could have their way with her. Forcing her thoughts inward, she turned her head in search of a glimpse of more than his hands.
"Don't look," a voice whispered in her ear.
That voice. His voice.
More of his weight settled against her backside. His hands roamed her arms, alongside her waist, over her hips and the fleshy outer thighs. His breath warmed her neck, coaxing her eyes to stay shut.
Melanie struggled in her seat, tried to inject her sleeping mind with some trace of reason. She was on a plane, surrounded by other passengers. She turned her head toward the window and fought, centimeter by centimeter, to open her eyes.
The plastic shield was up, the sky outside the plane already dark. A reflection winked at her before disappearing as she fully woke up.
She only needed that flashing second to recognize the scene that had been playing through her sleeping mind. Melanie and Declan on a bed, her flat on her stomach and his body draped over hers, his shaft buried deep inside her pussy, his tight, muscular ass grinding her to dust. They both had their heads turned in the same direction, both of them looking at the mirror she imagined he must have in his bedroom.
Only this time, when she saw the appreciative, satisfied smile on his face that she’d noticed so many times when she was dressing him during production, she realized he wasn't looking at his reflection.
He was looking at hers.
Melanie released a shaky breath as the seat belt light came on. The captain's voice spoke over the PA system announcing that they were beginning their descent into Denver's airport, the seemingly short dream lasting far longer than she realized.
She looked to her left to find that the blonde had managed to whine her way into a different seat several rows over. The stewardesses skimmed by with plastic trash bags half full, their gaze alert for errant trays, unfastened seat belts and any garbage.
Melanie looked out the window, forcing herself to stare past her reflection so that she could see the city lights. As much as she tried, she couldn't get the dream out of her head. Feeling a hard tug on her hair, she looked to find her fingers trapped in a thick knot, her stress making her pull at it.
Using her nails as a comb, she smoothed out the tangles she’d created.
She didn't want to think what the rest of her looked like. She hadn't put on makeup after her boss's early morning call, just quickly showered while she waited for a cab because the surprise call-in meant she couldn't take the bus and Cammie had only been home from work for a few hours.
Her clothes had been almost as haphazard—a pair of jeans, some aqua blue sandals and a breezy peasant blouse. She had intended to change before boarding the plane, but the delay at the studio meant she would have to wait until she landed before digging out the hoodie and putting on tennis shoes.
She exhaled, trying to breathe out a little of the tension that kept building inside her. It was silly, even after the dream, to worry about Declan Bain. Her real worry was her mother. The visit home, as short as it was scheduled to be, would hopefully help put those fears to rest.
Her stomach lurched as the plane neared the ground, its deceleration increasing at a faster rate. She could see the asphalt and small lights, then the faces of the ground crew.
The landing gear made contact with the runway. Melanie bounced in her seat, her hands around the buckle of her safety belt. Contrary to the captain's instructions, she and ninety percent of the other passengers released their belts and reached for the bags they had stowed under their seats. With no one beside her, she slid over to the row seat so she could stand as soon as the plane came to a halt.
Hearing the soft electronic tone that signaled they could take their belts off, she shot upward, shouldered her bag, and popped the overhead bin open. It took only a few seconds to wrestle her rolling weekend bag out. She moved backwards as she did so, extending the handle and letting it drop to the seat. With a quick flick of her wrist, she brought it into the aisle.
She started toward the exit, one hip bumping the platinum blonde back into her seat.
Oopsie! she thought then immediately chastised herself for the intentional act.
Seriously, what was wrong with her lately? She wasn't about physical aggression, hadn't been raised that way.
Maybe Los Angeles, particularly the film industry, was finally getting under her skin and it was time, as her mother had suggested, for her to come home, room with her mom at the house Melanie grew up in, open an Etsy shop or something for smaller costume creations and forget about the bigger dreams that had drawn her to Hollywood to begin with.
That would be one way to purge Declan Bain from her system forever.
5
"You've barely said a word since I picked you up at the airport," Nancy Winslow crisply noted as they neared the entrance to the subdivision Melanie had grown up in.
Melanie pretended to look at the houses they were passing until a sigh snuck past her lips. "Mom, you and I both know how the conversation would go. You’d ask me how L.A. is, and when I started talking about my latest work on yet another movie you won't ever watch, we’ll end up right back here in silence." She could one day win an Oscar for costume design and, even then, her mother would almost assuredly not bring herself to watch the film.
They were just from two different worlds. A librarian by education and profession, Nancy Winslow mostly belonged in an era before there was cinema. The older the book, the better.
No billionaire, biker bad boys with secret babies for this librarian. Give her Ivanhoe or Beowulf. If someone really wanted to make her dizzy with delight and curl her toes, all they had to do was request a copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or, better yet, Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queene.
And the longer Melanie worked in Hollywood, the bigger the divide between their worlds grew.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled, giving her mother a weak smile. "I’m just tired. Why don’t we talk more about your trip instead? You were gushing the first two weeks abo
ut all the old bookshops, but then you clammed up all of a sudden. You didn't even post any pictures of the London Library."
Unfortunately, as much as her mother eschewed television, she was a regular pro at Facebook because it let her keep up with other diehard readers. But her feed had been oddly empty since the beginning of her third week in England.
Before Nancy could offer any further explanation on the matter, however, they arrived at the small ranch home her mother owned. Frowning, Melanie looked from the driveway, to her mother, then back to the driveway.
"Did you win the lottery and forget to tell me?" she asked, staring at the midnight blue Audi R8 parked in a spot where no car that expensive had ever been before.
"Oh..." The sound escaped Nancy like she just had the wind punched out of her. "Um, well, that must be Roger's nephew’s. Roger did say his nephew was well-off...although I thought he was just going to rent something at the airport. Who knew they rented cars like that at our little old airport?"
Melanie couldn't help but process her mother's words in reverse. Musings about the airport, then someone’s nephew being well-off…
The car in the driveway, her mom’s weirdly nervous vibe--all of it boiled down to one key factor Melanie was finally going to get to the bottom of right now.
"Mom, who in the heck is Roger?"
Putting the vehicle in park, Nancy took her hands off the steering wheel then anxiously patted her palms together. After the fourth pat she scratched the pointed end of her chin twice then patted her hands together three more times before whispering a reply.
Melanie had never seen her mom take so long to formulate a reply. She expected an encyclopedia worth of words to spill forward.
Nancy gave her eighteen words, all strung together in one cathartic exhale.
"Roger’s-a-wonderful-man-and-I’m-sorry-I-didn’t-tell-you-about-him-but-he's-your-new stepfather."
Whoa.
The answer refused to sink in for several long seconds. And when it eventually did, Melanie gaped at the near stranger sitting next to her. "You were only gone for six weeks, Mom!"
When her mother just smiled and nodded, Melanie blinked at her in disbelief. Absolutely none of what she was hearing right now was even remotely possible. Nancy Winslow was the last person in the world to go off on a vacation touring bookstores and come home married.
"Unless, is this someone you were dating from before you left for your trip?”
At least that would make some sense.
But no, the now nervous smile playing on her mother's lips suggested Melanie's first guess had been correct. Her mother had met a man in England and married him mere weeks later.
"Melalee, honey..."
"Don't even start that," Melanie warned. Every time she was in trouble with either of her parents, they had always given her the full name treatment.
Melanie Lee Archer.
But when it was her mom in trouble, like any of the dozen times Nancy forgot to sign a permission slip or missed a parent-teacher conference or any of the other things normal parents remembered to do because they didn't have their nose perpetually buried in a book, out came the sheepish, "Melalee," the cutesy smashing together of her first and middle names.
"Melanie, honey," her mother corrected. "I'm not a young woman in case you haven't noticed. I don't have the months and years to make sure my head is satisfied with what my heart already knows."
"Good lord," Melanie bit out. "What book did you pull that from?"
Nancy touched her fingers lightly against her own chest, their position approximately over her heart.
"This one."
Melanie huffed but softened at the maudlin gesture. Maybe her mom hadn't done something insane. Maybe she'd done something entirely reasonable that just happened to be romantic and daring and life changing all at the same time.
Melanie figured she could at least go in and meet the guy before drawing any other conclusions—or hiring a private investigator to check him out.
"Fine," she relented, unhooking her seatbelt and opening the passenger door slowly so she wouldn't risk hitting a car that had a base price of six figures.
"So you haven't met his nephew?"
"No," Nancy answered with a warble as her voice dropped lower. "Don't say anything to either of them, but Roger's brother fathered a child out of wedlock in his youth. Both Roger's parents and his brother himself wouldn't acknowledge the boy’s existence, not back then, and not now either. Roger has only recently been able to track him down…from papers in his brother's estate. That's why Roger was in London. He was settling affairs as its executor."
"So a long lost illegitimate child. That all sounds sketchy at best, and a really long line of bullshit at worst," Melanie mumbled as she grabbed her luggage from the back seat. “This all sounds like some kind of bizarre set-up, Mom.”
With a frown, Nancy waved the idea aside. "Hollywood has turned you into a cynic."
"Maybe. But better a cynic than a sucker," Melanie said, shutting the door and extending the handle on her suitcase. Gesturing toward the front door, she offered her mom a big, bright Hollywood smile.
"Okay, then. Let's get this circus started!"
6
Melanie and her mother entered through the front door into the living room. Two couch-side lamps were on, the area dimly lit. Forgetting for a second that she had just acquired in the matter of a few seconds a stepfather and an unknown number of step-relations, Melanie instinctively braced for a full barrel assault by Bujo, the dog her mother had adopted shortly after the death of Melanie's father.
Greeted by nothing but silence, she looked at Nancy with a question in her eyes.
"They must be in the kitchen, or maybe the backyard. Roger smokes a pipe..."
Melanie shook her head. "You didn't get rid of Bujo, did you?"
"No, honey." Nancy wrapped a shaky hand around her daughter's elbow. "Let's go find the men, shall we?"
Melanie let her mother lead her through the living room and dining area. As they were about to push through the swinging door that opened onto the kitchen, she heard a man's voice, the speech cultured but with a definite New England accent to it.
"Really now, I don't see—"
Before he could finish, Nancy and Melanie entered the room. The speaker, Roger by default of his age and the fact that his lips had been moving mid-sentence, faced the swinging door and stopped talking at the interruption.
The other man had his back to them, but Melanie only barely noticed his presence. There was something about her new stepfather's face, something she recognized but her brain refused to acknowledge.
With her gaze solidly stuck on Roger's face, she stumbled and hit her hip against the kitchen counter when it suddenly hit her.
No…no way in hell.
Turning in the periphery of Melanie's vision, the younger male visitor who had literally no business being in the kitchen of her book-loving mother abruptly made his presence known.
"You’ve got to be kidding me," he growled. "You?"
Honestly, she wanted to say the exact same thing to him.
With the same slow hesitation she would have used pulling a sliver of glass out of her eye, Melanie looked from Roger to their extraordinarily rude guest, cataloging all the familial similarities. Same masked expression, same hard stare, same harsh demeanor. Both men had nearly identical flinty gray irises, and matching strong, angular facial features. The only difference was that Roger’s had been marked by more decades.
This can't be real…
She had to be on the plane, still asleep, her mind slipping from one nightmare to another, both of them starring Declan Bain.
Only, it was real.
When she blinked and found him taking a step toward her, she squared off, ready for whatever verbal grenade Declan was planning on throwing her way next.
"You might have mentioned this earlier," he groused, eyes narrowed like she’d committed some sort of crime she’d failed to confess to.
> "For your information, I didn't even know your uncle here even existed until we pulled in the drive."
Realizing how stupid that sounded, she shook her head even harder. "I mean, no one even told me about the wedding, let alone that I’d have to be semi-related to you now for the rest of my life."
Running a hand through his short cut hair, Declan shot a caustic glance over his shoulder at Roger. "I think I'll take that drink now, uncle."
Melanie stood numb as Declan shouldered his way past her. At least his rudeness was no longer being directed at her.
To his credit, her new stepfather didn’t look particularly fazed by his nephew’s behavior. Though Melanie couldn’t help but replay the way Declan had just said the word, ‘uncle,’ and think she was missing a whole lot more here.
With the men now talking quietly amongst themselves on the other side of the room, her mom took her hand, a quiet apology shimmering in her gaze. "I'm so sorry, honey, I remember now Roger saying something about Declan working in the film industry...I honestly didn't think you'd necessarily know one another."
A laugh of pure irony escaped Melanie. Of course it would be her mother the librarian who would marry a man related to a blockbuster movie star she’d never even heard of.
And the fact that two strangers were currently drinking the last of George Archer's scotch, the eighteen-year-old bottle of Macallan now four years older than the last time it had been poured, pretty much summed up her life at the moment.
"Don't worry, mom," she said with a tired sigh, pushing on the swinging door. "It’s no big deal. Declan and I likely won’t be working on any more things together, anyway.”
Marching past Roger, Melanie headed straight for the liquor cabinet Declan was currently leaning against with his perfectly muscled hip. She seldom drank and had never had alcohol in front of her mother, but there was a time for everything and tonight was one of those times.
She moved the bottles around, each one looking harsher and stronger than the one before it, until she landed on an unopened bottle of peppermint Schnapps. Perfect. Breaking the seal, she poured herself two fingers. She wanted to slam the liquid down her throat, but she barely got the first sip past her lips without coughing it back up her throat.
