Chapter Eight
“Why are we being so clandestine about this?” Jake took the stubby piece of wood Becca proffered and wedged it vertically into the open windowpane. The frame creaked as it lowered, threatening to splinter the hastily manufactured support beam, but it held. Barely. “We had Liam drop us off out front. The guy at the ticket counter waved at you.”
“This is how Sara and I used to do it.”
He looked at the tiny window, just big enough to fit the heads and hips of a pair of teenage girls with a greater sense of adventure than common sense, and sighed. The alley behind the theater smelled as if it contained no fewer than three dead bodies, and he was pretty sure what Becca thought was a stray dog was actually some kind of mutant rat, but this was how she and Sara used to do it.
It would take a far stronger man than he to defy that kind of logic.
He laced his hands to form a platform and gestured for her to climb up. “No wonder you end up in the tabloids five days out of every seven. You’re practically giving the scandals away for free at this point. And in a dirty back alley, no less.”
“Unlike your scandals, which are always so classy and elegant.” She braced a hand on his shoulder and slipped her foot into his waiting hands. Something wet and sticky transferred from the bottom of her high heel to his palm. “Ooh, this is a lot easier with a strong man to help. I like it. We used to have to drag the garbage over and climb on top of it.”
She pushed her arms through the window and hoisted herself up, body wriggling efficiently through. This clearly wasn’t her first time, though Jake doubted she’d ever accounted for the flash of her ass, tightly encased in a pair of white lace panties, as her skirt rode high. It would have been a perfect paparazzi shot—he was certainly enjoying the view from his angle—but she slipped through before he could do much more than shake his head in a mixture of wonder and respect.
Becca never did anything without turning it into an endless loop of sex and scandal. He wished he could determine whether that was a virtue or one of the biggest fatal flaws he’d ever encountered in his life. Since there weren’t any cameras going off in the distance—this time—he decided to reserve judgment.
Her face materialized where her ass had been just seconds before. “Hand me the bottle. I don’t want you to drop it.”
He held out the paper-bag-encased bottle of tequila, which they’d thankfully purchased rather than stole at a liquor store farther uptown, and followed it with his jacket. There was no elegant way to foist himself up the side of a building, so he had to make do with getting a good grip on the window’s ledge and swinging his legs up in a fairly impressive gymnastic feat. Like moving through the birth canal, his shoulders were the hardest fit, and he had to try several different positions before he was finally able to slip through.
“You know, if this engagement thing doesn’t work out, we could totally head out on the lam and be cat burglars together.” Becca waited until he was on his feet again before handing him the bottle, now open and missing an inch of liquid off the top. “We’ll be a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde.”
He took a grateful swing of the alcohol—cheap and burning and his very first drink out of a paper bag. “You know they were shot to pieces in the end, right?”
“We could invest in a good pair of bulletproof vests first.”
He didn’t have a chance to reply to that sound bit of wisdom, as a middle-aged woman with several pins sticking out of a band on her hand rushed up to embrace Becca. Jake had to give them a wide berth to avoid being stabbed.
“Hey, honey,” the woman said, not the least bit surprised to find them lingering near the propped window. “I didn’t know you were stopping by today. I don’t suppose you came to help with the costumes, did you? I was just putting together the fabric order, and I could use your opinion before I send it off. You always have such a good eye for colors.”
“We’re not here.” Becca winked at Jake and wound her arm through his. “We’re sneaking in today.”
The wardrobe matron nodded as if this was a perfectly normal occurrence. “Oh, then don’t let me stop you. I haven’t seen a thing. You two go on and have fun.” She turned before she got too far. “By the way, there’s a sandwich tray in the lounge from your favorite deli. You can grab a few on your way down. And maybe you can swing by later this week about the costumes?”
Becca beamed. “I’d love to.”
The woman beamed right back and slid off into a dark hallway, part of the maze of backstage and storage rooms that seemed to make up this part of the theater.
“Just how much money did you give this place?” Jake asked as Becca led him expertly through, several more people appearing to say hello or wave a greeting or otherwise treat her as a benefactress of godlike proportions. To hear them speak, you’d think Becca had singlehandedly written, directed and performed their last twelve shows.
“I think I might technically own it, but I’m not sure.” She stopped them at a rickety ladder that led to an unknown abyss. “It was really close to shutting down. You’d have to talk to my mom’s financial advisor to get all the details, but I don’t recommend that unless you’re desperate. She doesn’t approve of the arts. She only believes in real estate and securities.”
Jake felt a churning in his stomach that had nothing to do with their descent down a ladder that seemed rickety enough to leave them stranded underneath the stage. Becca had a lot more money than he’d previously thought if she was buying businesses and real estate like he might pick up concert tickets. It had never been a secret that the Clares had money—more, even, than the Montgomerys—but this went beyond anything he’d imagined.
These are the lengths to which I’ve gone. I’m a gold digger. I’ve proposed fake marriage to a billionaire and been accepted.
“What are you waiting for?” Becca tugged on his pant leg, urging him to hurry. “Did you want to stop and grab some sandwiches first?”
“No, thank you. Food is not my problem right now.” He landed on both feet, looking past the coils of rope and set props to a tiny alcove where Becca had clearly made her mark. Colorful pillows created a seating space, a wispy curtain allowed for privacy—and overhead, the muted voices of actors could be heard.
He lifted the tequila bottle to his lips again. “What I need is more to drink.”
* * *
“What did he just say?” Becca tilted her ear toward the ceiling and paused. “Did he finally propose to her?”
“No. He said he’d rather have his heart torn from his chest and tossed into the ocean than break her family apart.” Jake rolled his eyes—or close enough to it to count. He probably didn’t have the physical capabilities to roll them all the way. It was far too emotive an expression. “This play is terrible. It sounds like it was written by a twelve-year-old who just broke up with his first online girlfriend.”
“That’s not fair. You’d hate any production where an integral part of the plot revolves around love. I bet you break out in applause when Romeo and Juliet die.”
“Of course I do,” he said. “It’s the end of the play. It’d be rude not to.”
Becca giggled. She should have known better. If given the chance, Jake would always demolish sentiment with reason.
“What they need to do is replace that man speaking in baritone with the one wearing clogs and stomping around like an elephant,” he mused, mostly to himself. “He’s clearly the stronger actor of the two.”
She paused for a moment, listening. “You know, I think you might be right.”
“Of course I am. I was born for the stage.”
“Hardly. You’re just really good at pointing out other people’s shortcomings.” She didn’t give him a chance to point out any more of hers. “How do you even understand all this anyway? I had no idea you spoke Spanish.”
“I und
erstand it better than I speak it—lots of listening to foreign language tapes when I was a kid. It was always my dad’s hope that I’d oversee his international hotels, so he started me young. Fortunately for us both, Jenna is more than capable of picking up my slack.” He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He’d been grumpily doubtful about crawling into her lair and mussing up his clothes, but now that he was here, he seemed perfectly at ease. Long legs extended casually in front of him, head cocked to hear the sounds from above, and he sat just far enough away that they weren’t touching...yeah. That was about as relaxed as he was capable of getting. “I also speak decent French, terrible Italian, and—if you count highly inappropriate references to the act of copulation—a touch of Icelandic.”
“Really?” She liked the sound of that last one. “Tell me something dirty we could do in Iceland.”
He looked at her levelly. “Við gætum velt okkur um með kindunum.”
She gave an involuntary shiver at the rough way the unfamiliar words rolled off his tongue. “I have no idea what you just said, but I like it. Let’s do that. Let’s do that right here.”
“Not a chance, Tiger. It’s the wrong kind of dirty.”
“Fine. Keep being annoying.” Here they were, bundled in a nest of pillows and low lights, half-drunk on cheap tequila, and he still wouldn’t slip her a little foreign tongue. “You win.”
He eyed her speculatively. “I almost always do.”
How nice that must be. She held up the bottle in a one-sided toast. “Sara always said I was the most annoying person she knew, but I think that’s because she never met you. To Sara, who’s going to miss out on a lot of great things, but who at least had the good fortune never to share a pretend engagement with Jake Montgomery.”
“To Sara,” he echoed. He paused for a full minute, his unreadable gaze holding her much-too-obvious one, before speaking again. “Why here, by the way? What’s so great about this place that you two broke the law to get in?”
Nothing, really. If anything, this place contained more sad memories than good ones. She still remembered the first time she and Sara had come—through the front door and with tickets in hand. Sara had a major crush on the lead actor at the time, a darkly good-looking college guy who was much too old and far too worldly for her.
Nothing had come of it, of course. A kid drooling at a grown man from the front row was hardly the start of a lifelong romance, but it had marked one of the first times Becca had seen for herself how fixated Sara could get on unattainable things—on unattainable men, in particular.
“It was a love affair, of course,” Becca said, fully willing to end the conversation there. She wasn’t sure how much of this Jake actually cared to know, and how much of it was him being polite. “One that could have been written by a twelve-year-old who just broke up with his first online girlfriend.”
“Was the love affair yours?” he asked.
Apparently, he was willing to go a little deeper. “Unfortunately, no,” she said. “Sara had a thing for one of the actors. We saw the play he was in at least twenty times during its run. She thought that if we just kept showing up, if he could just see how devoted she was, he’d eventually come around and declare his undying love for her.”
“Affection born of persistence?”
“Something like that.” Affection born of persistence and obsession and the unerring belief that she could will it into existence, if only she tried. All Sara had ever wanted was for people to love her—and when they didn’t, as men and the media and her too-busy father were wont to do—she coped by turning off, usually for months at a time. Her highs were always a blur of parties and fun, but her lows were downright scary. “When the show ended and the actor moved away without so much as a backward glance, the Sara I knew sort of disappeared for a while. She’d skip school to break in here and stare at the empty stage for hours. I got in the habit of coming along to keep her company.”
“That was nice of you.”
“Was it?” She—and her nightmares—weren’t so sure. “Sometimes I feel like it was the exact opposite. I can’t help but think it would have been better to make her adopt the Rebecca Clare Method of Problem-Solving instead.”
“And by method of problem-solving, you mean losing control and making a public spectacle of yourself?”
“Yes,” she said firmly. Anything was better than an isolated, pill-infused depression. Her mother and Trish Callahan and even Jake might think it was better to shove the feelings down and put a brave face on things, but look what a brave face had done for Sara. You could only muffle the sound of a heart breaking for so long before it broke everything else. “I know it’s not socially acceptable, and I’m always sorry afterward, but I have to do something to get it all out. You should try it sometime. It’s almost as effective as working out with Max.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
They sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes, their bodies not touching but a palpable sense of affinity swelling in the empty spaces between. It would have been the perfect moment for him to kiss her or swoop her into his arms or at least discuss the fact that they were essentially hiding in a hole to avoid the reality of their day’s handiwork, but all he did was grab her wrist. She thought for a startled moment that they were going to actually hold hands—in which case she’d need to have Jake checked for signs of possession—but he merely turned her hand over, palm-side up.
“Can I show you a trick?”
“A magic trick?” She was oddly tickled at the idea. Was he going to pull a quarter out of her ear? Wow her with fast hands and tight pants?
“Not that kind of trick, I’m afraid. It’s more of a technique. It’s what I do when I know I’m reaching my limit and need to calm down.”
“Oh, please. If you got any calmer, your heart rate would stop altogether. I hardly think we’re in the same league when it comes to emotional outbursts.”
“Do you want to know my trick or not?”
Was he kidding? She wanted to know all his tricks. She wanted to know how he got his hair to look so good without even trying. She wanted to know why people continued to treat him with respect no matter how many times he screwed up. She wanted to know if his famous ability to stay calm in a crisis came at the cost of his soul.
This seemed as reasonable a place to start as any. “Okay, sensei. Show me.”
He lifted two fingers in what was either a Boy Scout salute or a promise to start fingering her right there on the cushions. It turned out to be neither. With a quick movement, he tapped lightly on her wrist. One, two, three, four. Pause. One, two, three, four. Pause. There was nothing erotic or even all that intimate about his touch, but she felt each beat of his fingers as if she were a drum he was playing, a minion he was piping to his tune.
“I usually repeat it about five times. If you don’t feel any calmer, you can grip instead, like this.” He wrapped his hand around her wrist and squeezed tightly, a testament to his strength. “But people tend to look at you funny if you do it too hard. I find the tapping can be done on the sly, especially if you use your thumb.”
She watched as he repeated the motions on her other wrist, and then he released her, tossing her hands into her lap as if he was tired of them already. “It looks silly, but it works. Better than counting or breathing or Xanax, anyway.”
“I bet it’s because there are like six acupressure points in there.” She held up her wrists and flexed them. “Some of those points are bound to be related to emotional balance. I had no idea you were so alternative-health friendly. I’m starting to feel like I’m engaged to a stranger.”
She couldn’t have chosen a better insult if she’d hand-selected it. He scowled. “It has nothing to do with alternative health. It’s just a thing I learned from my nanny growing up.”
“Sure it is.”
“Mind over matter.”
“I don’t doubt it.” When his scowl didn’t ease up, she softened. It wasn’t nice to poke the devil when he was trying so hard to be helpful. “And thank you. In exchange for your magic trick, I’ll do something for you.”
“Hire new actors?”
“This company gets fantastic peer reviews, I’ll have you know. No one touches the Artista.” She’d buy up the whole block if she had to. This place had become her sanctuary, not just because it reminded her of Sara, but because she’d come to learn just how hard the staff worked to make a success of the off-off-way-off Broadway circuit. The Artista reminded her that life went on, that everyone was struggling to find their footing. “But what I will do is call our engagement off whenever you want. We should probably give my mom a few days to calm down and forget about Tranquility Ranch, but she tends to get over these things quickly. It’ll be a week, tops, and then you can get back to your regularly scheduled life.”
“About that...” For the first time, Jake looked out of place down here. He shifted his position and studied his hands.
“I won’t make you look bad,” she promised. “We can put all the blame on me. Maybe I can stage a public meltdown or have a diva moment or something. I’m good at those.”
“Or—and I’m just throwing this out here—we could eke this thing out a bit longer. Maybe even for a few months. Until after the holidays.”
“Oh?” She licked her lips. “Any particular reason?”
“Not that one.” He shot her a warning glance. “I hate to show my true colors so soon in our grand romance, but offering you fake marriage wasn’t an entirely altruistic move. You’ve got something I want in return.”
She laughed and leaned in to drop a kiss on his nose. One didn’t normally treat a man like him with such casual condescension, but she couldn’t help it. He really did think she was an idiot on top of everything else. “I know. You need a place to stay while you’re in New York, and you’re hoping I’ll let you shack up with me.”
When I Fall Page 9
