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“I didn’t forget,” I snarl, standing quickly and throwing my suit coat over my arm. “I just lost track of time.”
If I haul ass, we can still make our ticket time.
If we miss it, we can go out to eat until the next showing.
“Someone’s in a hurry.” Deb keeps smirking as her gaze trails after me toward the door.
“I’m late,” I growl.
“Sure, sure, that’s all it is,” Deb says mockingly.
I stop before the door, impatience vibrating through me as I turn back to her. “Why are you being so smug?”
Deb whips out a folded paper she had under her arm and shakes it out so she can hold it up.
It’s a tabloid magazine.
Elle and I are on the cover, sitting next to each other on the beach, passing a container of strawberries and another one with cold chocolate fondue back and forth. She laughs brightly with her hair in tangles across her face from the wind.
I just start swearing.
“How the fuck is someone following us this closely without being noticed?”
“Dunno,” Deb answers too cheerfully. She taps her manicured green nails against the headline. BAREFOOT BILLIONAIRE’S BEACH BOUDOIR! “But you look like you’re having fun for once, Mr. Barefoot Billionaire.”
I grit my teeth.
The image stops me cold.
I don’t recognize myself on that cover.
I’d taken my suit coat off. My socks, too, because Elle insisted that the sand would be warm under the surface if I just dug my toes in.
She was wrong—it was goddamned arctic—but I kept my toes buried in the silky-soft sand anyway while the wind flipped my hair. My vest was half-unbuttoned because she’d stuffed me so full of sandwiches it was getting uncomfortable.
And I’m laughing.
She’s pointing toward the shore. A sea lion pup was doing barrel rolls in the shallows until it hit a deeper pool and sank with a splash, only to pop back up with a comically confused look on its face.
Even I couldn’t help it.
The little pup almost reminded me of one of Aunt Clara’s characters.
But that man in the photo—
I don’t know him.
I only see myself in the mirror when I’m shaving and styling my hair, or in press photos.
I never smile.
I’m always serious, thinking about anything besides how I look, beyond making sure I’m professional and clean and respectable.
Yet around Elle, I turn into someone different.
Apparently, I become a functioning human being.
“What’s that, big brother?” Deb teases. “Did you say something? Oh? You’re stunned silent, is that it? Embarrassed someone caught you smiling?”
