“I don’t,” I said. “But Nana does so she can keep track of all of her friends.”
“It’s the worst thing,” she confided. “So much information. Too much, really. I’d prefer not to know about all their biopsies and colonoscopies and medical procedures. Why would they share something like that with the whole wide world?”
Devon laughed, but he kept his eyes on me. It was surreal enough to be some kind of wonderful dream, with him in our home, only it was a nightmare. I didn’t like the man one bit, and he’d invaded my space, somehow winning Nana over in the process.
“Sometimes people share things online that they don’t realize would be a mistake until after it’s already said and done,” he said.
A mistake? Was he trying to warn me against posting that bad photo of him? Was he threatening me? Here? In front of Nana?
“Or maybe they know exactly what they’re doing,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Maybe they want the world to know just how ugly they, um…their polyps are.”
“No need to be vulgar,” Nana said, scrunching up her nose at me. “Think of how many likes I’ll get from posting a photo like this one. You’re okay with me posting it, aren’t you, Devon?”
“Of course I am,” he said, grinning at her, full of charisma once again. “But only if we both look good in it. From what I can tell, you’re crazy photogenic. I tend to blink.”
“Oh, you’re sweet,” Nana said. “Isn’t he sweet, June? I don’t think any of his photos come out too terribly.”
I made a noncommittal grunt. “The one I took yesterday was pretty wretched.”
“We all have our bad days,” Nana said.
“That’s right.” Devon’s focus was back on me, and I felt like I was in danger of withering. He really knew how to dial up the smolder. “We all have our bad days, June.”
“Sure thing,” I said weakly.
“Well, I don’t want to keep you all,” Devon said, patting Nana fondly on the shoulder as if she were his own grandmother. I couldn’t help but feel a stab of jealousy at the way she beamed up at him lovingly. “I know you’re both busy people. I was just wondering, though, June, if you could please help me find my car. I parked it a couple of blocks away because I got the directions mixed up, and I’m not familiar with the neighborhood, especially now that it’s dark.”
“I have no idea where you parked,” I said. It sounded a lot like Devon wanted to get me alone.
“Oh, June, for goodness’ sake,” Nana complained. “Help the man. He’s not from here, like we are. It’s completely natural to get turned around. He asked you nicely.”
Sure, he asked me nicely, but I was pretty certain that he was going to stop being so nice once we were outside. Outside, I wasn’t sure what he was planning to do.
“Nana, it was such a pleasure,” Devon said. “I really do think you’re my biggest fan.”
“I bet you say that to everyone,” she said, giving a girlish laugh. I had to smile behind my hand at her.
“I’ll be back in a couple minutes, Nana,” I said, raising my eyebrows in a warning to Devon. “Any longer than that and you better call someone.” Someone like the cops, maybe, or the paparazzi to scare the man away.
“Oh, June, you’re such a teaser,” she said. “Go on, then. I’m sure Devon has places he needs to be.”
“I do, in fact, several,” he confirmed. “Thank you again for your hospitality.” I noticed for the first time the pair of teacups and the plate of cookies between them. God—how long had he been here? All evening?
“Be right back, Nana,” I said again as a reminder to him. He followed me to the front door and I practically pushed him through it.
“Hey, careful,” he said as he stumbled out onto the front stoop.
“You be careful,” I shot back lamely. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here, anyway? This is my house. How did you even get the address?”
“It wasn’t hard,” he said. “I called the pizza place. Got some more details about you. Made some other calls until I found the place.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, hard, and rubbed my forehead. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re even here.”
“Look, I’m just trying to do some damage control,” Devon said, his million-watt smile fading from his face. It was almost a relief, as if I were going to go blind if I kept staring at it for too long.
“What kind of damage control?” I asked, frowning at him. “And why did you have to drag Nana into this? When she figures out what kind of person you really are, you’re just going to disappoint her. Couldn’t you do without that on your conscience—disappointing a little old lady?”
“She was nothing but pleased in there,” he said. “The only person who would disappoint her would be you.”
What ripe new bullshit was this? “Watch your goddamn mouth,” I warned him. “You don’t know anything about Nana, and you know even less about me.”
“Delete the photo, June.”
“The photo I just took of you and Nana? Hell, no. She’d kill me.”
“You know that’s not the photo I’m talking about.” He scowled, and I instantly realized just the photo he was interested in and laughed.
“Oh, no,” I said. “That photo isn’t going anywhere. It’s too good to delete. I’m probably going to make it my wallpaper on my phone. It makes me laugh every single time I see it.”
“If that photo gets out, it would be a PR disaster,” he groaned.
“What kind of PR disaster?” I asked, cocking my head at him. “The kind of disaster where your fans see how you really are? That you trash hotel rooms? That you can’t clean up after yourself? Would it be the bottle-of-vodka-you-can-see-in-the-background type of disaster? Drinking alone, in the middle of the day? Bingeing on pizza? Is that a disaster? That’s not so bad. Or would it be the fact that you tried to force yourself on me? That’s a pretty big disaster, I’d think.”
Devon surprised me by laughing. “Okay, I might’ve let you have that one until that last part. I definitely didn’t try to force myself on you. You entered the hotel room of your own volition. And you seemed really into it.”
I didn’t like being called out like that. Of course I’d been into it—at first. Devon Ray was an attractive, rich, and very famous man. I had been alone with him in a hotel room, and I had been ready for something to happen…until I hadn’t been. Until I’d stopped being starstruck and faced the music—that Devon was just a horny lush.
“You’re pretty on the outside, Devon, but I got a taste of what was inside,” I told him, lifting my chin defiantly, skirting around his accusation. “I stand by what I said to you, and I’ll repeat it, because you were so drunk, I don’t think you probably remember.”
“I remember everything,” he snapped.
“Then remember this. Just because you’re rich and handsome and famous doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to everything you think you want. I’m a human being, and I have every right to say no to you. I don’t give a shit who you are. And you can’t come stalking me to my house, endearing yourself to my grandmother.”
“I wanted to pay you for the pizza,” he said, his shoulders hunched forward protectively, almost sheepishly. “I realized that, after everything, I forgot to pay you, and that’s inexcusable to me. I know you work hard.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“Let me pay for the pizza,” he insisted, reaching in his wallet. “I’m sure you probably got in trouble because of it.”
“I didn’t get in trouble,” I said. “Keep your money. I don’t want it.”
“You’ll take it.”
“The hell I will.”
“Just let me do this,” Devon said, thrusting too many bills at me. “Yesterday was shit, okay? I get it. It was a shit show. I’m trying to make it up to you right now.”
“All you’re doing is trying to toss money at a problem,” I told him. “I don’t want your money.”
“But you’re a problem?”
He peered at me.
“If you keep harassing me, yes. I am a problem. A very big problem.”
“You want me to leave, don’t you?” he asked. “To get off your property and never come back? Is that pretty close to the truth?”
“Pretty close.” I wanted him to go do a few other things, too, but I was pretty sure he could use his imagination for those without me having to spell them out.
“You’d never see me again if you showed me the photo you took of me and deleted it in front of me,” he said. “I’d leave immediately, and I’d never come back.”
“What are you going to do if I don’t?” I asked dubiously. “Move in? Become best friends with Nana?”
“I…I don’t know. I just really want that photo gone. That photo is of me in a really bad place, and I don’t want anyone seeing it.”
I actually pitied him for a moment before I remembered that he figured out where I lived and befriended my grandmother just to try to manipulate me into doing something.
“You’re just going to have to trust me that I won’t show it to anyone else,” I said.
“How can I trust you? How do I know you’re not going to sell it?”
I was a lot of things—self-righteous, fiercely protective, a little bit subversive, maybe, but never cruel. Never vindictive. I knew then, looking at how pathetically desperate Devon was, that no matter what I said or he did, I’d never sell that photo. I’d never even post it myself. No matter what he’d done, no matter how he’d acted toward me, I couldn’t do something like that to him. It would harm his image, and his image was his life.
I gave a long sigh. “Look. I would never do that, okay? If you knew anything about me, you’d know that I’d never do that.”
“That’s the problem,” he said. “I don’t know anything about you. In the kind of business I’m in. You don’t know who you can trust.”
“It’s Hollywood, Devon. Not the mob.”
“You’d be surprised,” he said wryly. “But I guess I don’t have anything I can do except trust you. Even though I don’t know you.”
“You know my address,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, there’s that.” He jammed his hands in his pockets and made a move to walk away. Just as I’d suspected. He hadn’t needed my help getting back to his car. He wasn’t turned around in the slightest. He’d asked me to come out here for the sole purpose of trying to get me to delete the photo. It was that important to him.
“Devon.”
“Yeah?” He looked over his shoulder at me.
I held out my phone, which showed the crappy picture I’d taken of him in the hotel room.
“I see it,” he said tiredly.
“Now you don’t.” I deleted it, just as he’d come to try and convince me to do. It was too much power to hold over a person, no matter how much I might dislike said person.
I don’t know what I expected. Gratitude, maybe. Or reassurance that he’d leave Nana and me alone.
What I didn’t except was for him to take a couple of quick steps over to me and envelop me in a bear hug.
“You don’t understand how worried I was about that stupid photo,” he said, squeezing me too tightly.
“I understand,” I managed to gasp out, patting him awkwardly on the back in what I hoped was Morse code for “let go immediately.”
He seemed to get the message, releasing me. “That was the only copy, wasn’t it?” he demanded suddenly. “Did you save one? Send it to anyone else?”
I could appreciate that the existence of the photo made him nervous, but I’d just deleted it in his presence.
“That was it!” I exclaimed. “Jeez! You need to work on your trust issues!”
“And now you sound like my therapist,” he said, frowning. “Are you sure you haven’t worked in Hollywood before?”
“Enough,” I said, pushing him away from me. “Get out of here. You promised you’d leave us alone if I just deleted the damn photo, and I did. You’re unbearable.”
His wounded look would’ve made me feel bad, but I was able to remember just in time that he was an actor. He could throw any look he wanted my way to try and manipulate me.
When he rounded the block, walking away, I hoped it was the last time I would ever see him. But it didn’t help that I could still feel his arms around me.
Chapter 4
I thought my troubles were over. Then again, I never thought that my troubles would take on the corporeal form of one of Hollywood’s finest. I actually looked forward to work delivering pizzas because I thought driving around Dallas would take my mind off of things.
It didn’t. Being alone with my thoughts in the car magnified everything. I analyzed every tiny detail about the encounters I’d had with Devon up until this point. A week ago, I would’ve laughed myself out of the car to think I’d be anguishing over Devon Ray. But here I was, driving around the city, trying to figure out if I could’ve done anything differently.
It was a relief to get home and out of the car, for once. I looked forward to decompressing in front of the TV with Nana, losing myself in someone else’s story. I just hoped that I could convince her to watch something other than a Devon Ray movie.
“Look who’s back!” Nana crowed as I walked in the door, before I could holler that I was home.
“Is it Milo?” I asked, frowning and checking the time on my phone. It couldn’t be Milo. The home healthcare professionals were almost always done with their visit and gone by the time I got back to the house from a regular shift.
“No, it’s Devon Ray!” she cackled, but by the time she said that, I could already see who her surprise guest was. He looked almost guilty, crouched in front of the television, plugging some wires into the back of it.
“Seriously?” I said, my jaw just about dropping to the floor. “Are you seriously here right now?”
“I know,” Nana said excitedly. “Can you believe it?”
“No, I really can’t,” I said, shaking my head at him and putting my hands on my hips. “What is it tonight, Devon?”
“Well, I noticed when I was here yesterday that you two only had a DVD player,” he said. “And Nana said that you all had watched some movies so many times that they were scratched, so I thought I’d stop by and drop this Blu-ray player off.”
I cringed to hear him call her Nana.
“Devon says that this is the newest thing for movies,” Nana said. “He says that playing a movie on one of these things makes it even better quality than in the theater.”
“That’s if you play a Blu-ray disc on it, Nana,” I said. “We don’t have any of those. Just DVDs.”
“I also took the liberty of picking up a few movies on Blu-ray, to help you rebuild your library,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder as he finished up his work.
I walked around behind the couch to see what he was talking about, and my eyes bugged out. There were literally hundreds of movies piled up behind him, representing an investment worth thousands of dollars. He had bought us thousands of dollars’ worth of movies.
“Look, June,” Nana said, still brimming with excitement. “He even replaced all the movies of his that we had—even my favorite. We can watch it without it skipping.”
My heart did something stupid, in that moment. It warmed to the man fiddling with the wires on our television, flip-flopping because he’d made Nana so happy and excited. I didn’t know if the movies represented hush money or what, but I was thrilled that he’d made her feel like this. It made me not regret leaving her in the house every day when I went to work.
“Devon…this is too much,” I said.
“I told him the same thing,” Nana said, somber. “But he won’t take them back.”
“I just wanted to do something nice for you all,” he said, turning the television back around and settling the Blu-ray player in the same spot the DVD player used to reside. “There. All set. You all were so kind to me, tolerating me just dropping in. I know how much Nana loves her movies,
so I wanted to make sure she stayed entertained.”
“June,” Nana whispered, practically vibrating with energy. “There are some movies that I haven’t even seen before. Not even once.”
“Well, thanks, Devon,” I said. “Thank you for this. This is too much, but if you insist…”
“Of course I insist,” he said. “In fact, I also wanted to come here to ask you both something.”
“Ask us anything,” Nana said, delirious with joy.
“I don’t know if you were here already, June, but yesterday I mentioned that some friends had invited me back to Hawaii, back to the location in one of the films that Nana likes so much,” he said.
“My favorite film,” Nana emphasized. “With the beach.”
I’d been here when he’d mentioned it, lurking in the shadows and trying to figure out what I was going to do with the actor in my house.
“And then Nana said something that stuck with me,” Devon continued. “That if it was important enough to me, I’d find the time for it. Well, I’ve made the time. I’m going to Hawaii to visit them. And I was wondering if you two would do me the honor of joining me there.”
My eyes bugged out of my head. “What? Are you crazy?”
“You’re talking about that beach?” Nana asked, peering at him. “The beach in the movie?”
“The very same,” Devon said. “If I hadn’t talked to you about it yesterday, it never would’ve happened for me. And I know you love that beach in the movie, Nana. I want to show it to you.”
“We can’t go to Hawaii,” I said flatly. “It’s an insane idea. We don’t even know you.”
“Of course we know him,” Nana argued. “He’s Devon Ray. What else is there to know?”
“Nana, it’s just not good logistics,” I told her, panic rising in my throat. What the hell was this? We couldn’t just go to Hawaii. And why did Devon want us there?
“I want you both to come,” he said stubbornly. “What’s not going to work? I can help you figure things out.”
“You can’t just throw money at things and expect them to work out,” I snapped at him. “I have a job. Nana needs to be in contact with her doctors. We can’t just up and leave.”
KYLE: A Mafia Romance (The Callahans Book 4) Page 38
