by Lizzie Shane
Ginny shrugged, taking the seat he’d saved for her. “I was barely in Dax Scott after the editors got through with it. I think most people forget that I was working with you and Dame Agatha when The Tape came out. That sort of eclipsed everything else.”
Jack leaned forward in his chair. “Speaking of The Tape, I have a plan.”
Her stomach knotted nervously. She didn’t like the sound of that. “Jack…”
“I want to do what I should have done six months ago.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see. Tomorrow.” He grinned, little boy eager. He really was sweet. It would have been endearing if he wasn’t being so annoyingly vague.
“I don’t like surprises.” Any affection she’d ever had for them had been killed by the Surprise! Your career is over! Tape.
“Trust me. This is a good surprise.” His phone rang over the last sentence and he dug it out, frowning at the ring tone. “That’s my agent. Excuse me.”
He strode off to the far edge of the patio and Ginny glanced at the girl, who smiled and assured her, “His heart’s in the right place,” before standing and moving after him.
Alone with Jude, she glanced across the fire pit at him. “Do you know what’s going on?”
“I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you,” he admitted.
She looked across the patio, where Jack was still on the phone with his agent. She couldn’t handle him tonight. His heart might be in the right place, but her day had been crappy and she just wanted to get away from it all. She wanted to pretend to be just Ginny again.
She glanced back at Jude. “Do you want to get out of here before they come back?”
Jude looked as startled to hear the invitation as she was to issue it, but he didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely.”
He unfolded his long limbs, standing with surprising grace as she rose from her own chair and hurried around the front side of the hotel and to the street, with one last glance over her shoulder to see that Jack was still distracted and hadn’t noticed their escape.
She’d been obeying the rules, restraining herself and letting caution control her actions for the last six months. This tiny rebellion—even if it was just running off without saying goodbye—felt heady, and magnificent. Ginny didn’t slow down until they reached the corner and were hidden by the houses on the next block.
“Where are we going?” Jude asked, though he didn’t slow at her side.
“The locals told me about a pretty spot.”
“They did?”
She shot him a look in the waning light. It was getting dark fast, the summer sunset bearing down on them. “Not everyone thinks I’m the Antichrist.”
“I didn’t mean—” he started to explain, but she waved him off.
“I know, I know. No offense taken. It’s just been a day, you know?”
“Not every day your ex ambushes you at work?” he said, echoing their earlier conversation.
She smiled. “Something like that.” She slowed her pace to a less headlong rush and he matched her. Dusk closed in around them as the streetlights—few and far between in this part of town—slowly came on. There were no other pedestrians out at this hour, but the sidewalks were clean and even. It might not be a wealthy town, but they took pride in their community.
Ginny had always been good at playing pretend, sliding into her imagination and living in the possibilities of other lives. It was tempting to do it now—to pretend that this was her town, her boyfriend walking at her side. Or maybe a boy she thought she might want to be her boyfriend. To forget about scandal and mistakes and just be a girl walking with a boy on a summer evening, wondering if he would take her hand, wondering if he would have the courage to kiss her before he walked her home.
But then, as the silence stretched, Jude brought them back to reality as his soft, accented voice asked, “What happened between you two?”
Ginny shot him a look. Her expression was almost unreadable in the low light, but he could feel the wryness of it even before she spoke. “Don’t tell me you didn’t hear about my infamous scandal?”
“Sure, but I want to hear your side of it.”
Jude surprised himself with how true those words were. He’d never given much thought to her side of it before, but now he wanted to know if there was more to the story, pieces to the puzzle he’d never seen.
Ginny walked at his side, trailing a finger along a fence bordering the sidewalk, her red hair muted by the darkness. He thought for a moment she might not respond, but then she began to speak.
“Last year, I got the break of my life. Dax Scott; Edge of Vengeance.” She said the title with movie trailer drama, then dropped back into her normal voice. “ It wasn’t a lead or anything, only ten minutes or so of actual screen time, but I had this amazing speech and this kickass death scene and the rest of the cast was amazing. It was going to be a summer blockbuster for sure. I mean, if Jack Cooper was starring, how could I go wrong, right?”
They reached the end of the street and she stopped, squinting into the darkness. “I think it’s this way,” she murmured, leading him up a hill to the right. Jude followed silently, waiting for the next piece of the story he knew was coming.
“Things were great at first. Jack and I ‘became friends’,” she said, lifting her hands for air quotes. “The director seemed to like me. I was getting more auditions. I thought this could be it, you know? Straight shot to fame and fortune.”
Jude grimaced. He remembered that feeling all too well, even if his dream had been different than hers. “So what happened?” he asked.
“I had a bad day.” She grimaced. “Or, to put it more accurately, I had the mother of all shitty days. And at the end of it, someone I thought I could trust recorded me saying something I never should have said in the first place.” She huffed as the hill grew stepper beneath their feet. “I called one of the greatest actresses of our time a raging bitch who should learn to mind her own fucking business—and three weeks later the make-up artist who had recorded me was fired for something else and decided to make a quick buck by selling the tape to a tabloid site. Fame Game.” Her voice was saturated with bitterness. “J. Fucking Harrison Law.”
Jude’s stomach clenched as she snarled his name. He hadn’t forgotten for a second that he was the one who’d posted the tape, but he’d let himself forget that she didn’t know.
He should have told her who he was. Should tell her now. Guilt clawed up his esophagus but she was still speaking.
“Of course it destroyed my career. I’d built my brand as a nice girl, America’s sweetheart. And no one wants to watch Little Miss Sweet and Innocent when she’s really a bitch. Jack dropped me like a hot rock and my agent wasn’t far behind. The studio cut me out of the picture as much as they could without destroying the plot. And suddenly all those auditions I had were no longer available. Working on a little indie film that was hoping to capitalize on my notoriety was all I could get, so I took it and said thank you. And here we are.”
The crested the hill on her last words and Ginny stopped, gasping. “Damn,” she whispered. “That is one pretty sight.”
The town—which had seemed like simply another Podunk town in the middle of Bumblefuck, Nowhere—spread out below them, lights twinkling and reflecting off the river that threaded through it. It was gorgeous, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the woman at his side.
She wasn’t what he’d expected at all, recounting the facts of her downfall as if she was relating the plot of a movie. Was it a front? An act? Or was she really this woman in front of him, just trying to put her life back together, grateful for the chance to keep going?
And what role had Jack played? Why did he feel like he owed Ginny so much?
Jude cleared his throat roughly. “Did you love him?”
Chapter Five
Ginny turned toward Jude, startled by his question. “Jack?” She could make out his silhouette against the night sky more than his face, but she saw him nod. “
We were both good at pretending to be in love,” she admitted, looking back on those weeks with Jack without bitterness—perhaps for the first time. What was it about Jude that made all the slings and arrows of the past seem much less important? “He’s a method actor, you know, and I was playing his wife. Sometimes you even fool yourself.”
“But you aren’t…”
“Still pining for him?” She grinned, even though he probably couldn’t see it in the dark. There was something comforting about confessing to a man who couldn’t see her face. Like for once she didn’t have to consider what message her expressions were sending. “No. Nothing like that. Jack was a missed opportunity. A sweet guy. The kind of man with a genuinely good heart, and six-pack abs, but—”
She stopped herself before she said something negative, some instinct reminding her not to speak ill of anyone. But who could hear her up on this hill, far away from Hollywood’s eyes and ears? Just Jude.
“But?”
She tried to think of a kind way of saying why she and Jack would never work. She hadn’t realized it until he cut and ran, but there was something almost weak about him. A man who let himself be steered. Let himself be managed. Let himself be coddled.
“Never a blow that hasn’t been softened for him,” she said finally.
“Philadelphia Story?”
She looked up at Jude in surprise. “You know that movie?”
“Great film. Classic. I secretly wanted to be Macauley Connor when I grew up.”
She laughed, delighted by his affection for one of her favorite films. “You do sort of look like Jimmy Stewart. I secretly wanted to be Katherine Hepburn.”
“Katherine Hepburn, huh?” He lifted a hand, almost as if he might touch a lock of her hair, but his fingers only hovered, inches away. “Are you a natural redhead?”
“I’ll never tell.”
He chuckled, dropping his hand, the sound deep and intimate in the night, stirring something in her chest that made her feel nervous and excited and keenly aware of him standing beside her.
She looked out over the town, focusing on the lights she wasn’t seeing until her breathing slowed and she dared look at him again. “Mr. Connor, huh?” she asked after the silence had stretched too long.
“Yeah. I even wrote a book.”
“You did?”
“Don’t sound so impressed. It wasn’t very good.”
“Don’t say that. I bet it was wonderful. I can’t imagine doing anything like that. Pulling an idea out of your brain and putting it on paper. That’s amazing. I’m just a puppet in someone else’s show, but you created something.”
He snorted. “Something that should never have been created to begin with, if you believe my critics.”
“What do they know? Miserable assholes who delight in tearing other people down, that’s all they are. Don’t listen to them.”
“That’s easier said than done.” His voice was wry in the darkness. “I think I have my worst reviews memorized.”
She grimaced. “I can empathize, unfortunately. I have that horrible article that came out on Fame Game with the tape memorized.”
Jude closed his eyes, cringing against the guilt and glad she couldn’t make out his face. He should tell her who he was. This was wrong. But he didn’t want to destroy this moment between them—and the truth would definitely destroy it. She wouldn’t forgive him. And he couldn’t blame her. But she needed to know.
Before he could confess, she went on.
“Why is it so much easier to believe the negative things people say about you than the positive?”
“Because we secretly agree with them.” His answer was ready. This was one topic he’d given a lot of thought. “We doubt ourselves. We feel like we’re putting on a front, so as soon as someone says something negative it’s like they’re confirming what we already knew. They saw through us. They see that we don’t really belong here and we don’t know what we’re doing.”
She groaned. “That’s horrible. And entirely too true.” She thrust her hands into her pockets, rocking on her heels as she stared out over the town. “We really need a bottle of champagne to toast our failure. Your book and my career.”
“That’s hardly the same thing.”
“Because I destroyed my own career?”
“Because I had one book published—primarily by nepotism—which was then justifiably massacred by reviewers, but you are an incredible actress.”
She turned toward him and he could feel her trying to see him through the darkness. “You say that like it’s a fact.”
“Isn’t it? Even if I hadn’t heard how fabulous you are. I saw you on set today. You’re one of the most amazing actresses I’ve ever seen. And that’s saying something.”
She snorted. “Just not such an amazing person, as it turns out.”
He looked at her, and now he was wishing for better light so he could see her. “I’m not so sure.”
Her face tipped up to him and the moon chose that moment to pierce through the clouds that had gathered, casting her face in flawless light that made his throat close at her beauty.
“Why did you say it?” he asked softly.
Ginny blinked, bemused for a moment, then seemed to realize what he was asking. “I’d had a bad day. Jack and I were fighting. Dame Agatha had… said something to me. Something…unkind.” She grimaced. “And then my mother called.”
“Your mother?” Something tickled at the back of his memory, some whisper of gossip he couldn’t place.
“She’s pretty much your typical stage mom. Or she was, when I was a teenager and she was managing my career. She used to do that all the time—be catty behind someone’s back when she felt like they’d wronged her. Or wronged me. It always embarrassed me. I never wanted to be that person. She remarried a couple years ago and her new husband became her obsession, so she stopped micromanaging me, but that afternoon she called me and I was already feeling like I wasn’t good enough for Jack or Dame Agatha and no one winds me up like my mother, so when my make-up artist said something snarky about Dame A I became my mother and piled on. I couldn’t even have told you what I said—until later when the tape was everywhere and everyone was quoting me.” She turned to face the view again. “For one moment I was everything I hate, and now it’s all anyone will ever know me for.”
Guilt dug into his chest. He’d done that to her. He’d made that one moment of weakness into her legacy. “You don’t know that. People have short memories. There’s a new scandal along every five minutes.”
“Yeah, but I’ll always be that bitch who insulted Dame Agatha Kelly.” She turned back toward the hill they’d come up. “We should probably get back.”
They began the climb down, slower going now that the moon had gone behind another cloud and they could barely see where they were putting their feet.
“I’m sorry,” Jude said when they’d gone half a dozen steps.
“Don’t be.” Her voice was light, easy. “I did it to myself.”
“You were human. You’re allowed to have a shitty day and not have to worry about your venting being broadcast to the whole world.”
“With the rich and mighty, always a little patience?” she quipped, quoting The Philadelphia Story again.
“You’re allowed to be human, Ms. Hepburn.”
She chuckled, making slow progress down the hill. “You do know Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart totally got it on in that movie.”
He knew he should pursue his apology to the end, but he couldn’t bear to lose her laughter, so he kept it light, playful. “Ms. Hepburn, are you propositioning me?”
“And if I was?” she asked, her voice daring him in the darkness.
Then she stumbled on the uneven ground, squeaking as she lost her footing. He reached out, catching her more by luck than skill—or maybe it wasn’t luck. Maybe she’d been reaching toward him as well. He steadied her against his chest, his hands framing her shoulders. She felt so delicate in his arms, vulnerable. But
there was such a strength to her. Such determination. She’d never given up. Not like him.
She laughed as she braced her hands on his chest. “Why, Mr. Connor…”
He should set her away from him. He knew he should. “You know their relationship was doomed from the start,” he murmured instead.
She tipped her face up to his in the dark. “Yeah, but they had that one incredible night…”
She wouldn’t forgive him. He’d shredded her life because he’d been certain he was in the right, certain she’d viciously attacked for no reason someone he cared about. He’d thought he was protecting Agatha, that he was exposing a horrible woman for what she really was. But that wasn’t Ginny—and he wasn’t sure he deserved her forgiveness.
He certainly didn’t deserve her.
But she was right there… and she was so easy to kiss…
Chapter Six
Maybe it was the darkness—things always seemed more possible in the dark. Maybe it was the romantic view, working its magic on her as it doubtless had on countless other couples over the years. Or maybe it was the gentle net of flirtation closing around her, that feeling that Jude somehow understood her and accepted her in a way no one had since The Tape. Or maybe ever.
Whatever the reason, Ginny found herself kissing a man she barely knew in the shadow of a hill in the middle of the night.
She arched up, his shoulders bowed down, his entire body seeming to shelter hers as she leaned into the kiss. For a moment their lips just touched and held—a chaste PG kiss, like a Disney princess and her prince. She’d never known PG kisses could feel like this—like a building storm of potential, a deeper kiss waiting to happen as her breath backed up and tingles shivered across her skin as her toes curled in her shoes.
Then she exhaled, the tension that had been building inside her released and everything changed.
What had started as a sweet potential of a harmless kiss in the dark—something that couldn’t possibly chase them into the light of day—suddenly became something else entirely. His hand cupped the side of her face, long fingers spearing into her hair, and he was angling his head, angling hers, kissing her more deeply, taking advantage of her sigh to pillage.
