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ASPEN
* * *
Luke’s place was amazing. Built on one floor, it was expansive. Multiple bedrooms, fancy kitchen, huge deck. Set up in the Hollywood Hills, it had amazing views of LA through floor-to-ceiling windows. In fact, the entire back of his house was glass. It was late so the city lights twinkled like colored stars in an upside-down night sky.
But it was also depressing. He had a black leather couch and a TV and a freestanding lamp in his living room. That was it. No artwork. No carpets. No photos. Heck, no color. His bedroom wasn’t much better. A king-sized bed, two nightstands, and a dresser. Nothing else.
“Did you just move in?” I asked, when he opened the master bath door and turned on the light as part of the tour.
“Um… three years ago.”
“Three years and you don’t have curtains.”
He grinned at me. “Maybe I should get some drapes. Hungry?”
“I could eat,” I said.
He held out his hand and led me back to the kitchen. Ever since we had sex on the plane, we’d hardly stopped touching each other. It was as if we needed the contact to breathe. I felt connected to him like I had no other. For something fake, it all felt really real. Like when he said he wanted a real relationship, and it might actually be a possibility. But this house was a reminder that our worlds were vastly different. While our chemistry was insane, nothing else intersected. He was a famous TV star, and I was the clueless woman who didn’t have many cultural references. No wonder he’d been so good at that trivia topic.
I wasn’t enough for him. I couldn’t be. Not with Sierra and my yoga studio and my tiny apartment in Hunter Valley. He lived in the spotlight, and I ran from it. Literally and figuratively.
He opened a drawer by the massive fridge. “I’ve got takeout menus for every place around here. What do you feel like?”
“We can cook something,” I offered, not wanting to wait for delivery and not interested in spending money when we could make it ourselves.
He gave me a look I couldn’t understand and opened his fridge. There was flavored seltzers, beer, and a jug of pulp orange juice. Nothing else. “I don’t cook.”
“Ever?” I asked, stunned.
He opened a cabinet. Empty.
Then another. Also, empty.
“Nope. I have a coffee maker.” He pointed to the shiny machine on the counter. The only thing on the vast granite.
“Okay.”
His house was bare. His kitchen was bare.
“How much are you here?”
“At my house?” He shrugged. “When we’re filming, not much. Only to sleep. We start before dawn and usually go all day. For months.”
“Don’t you get hungry for a snack or something?”
He patted his flat stomach. “Besides takeout, my dietician delivers meals that she’s coordinated with my personal trainer. Plus, they serve tons of food on set. I’m supposed to be in Montana, so we have to fend for ourselves.”
He grabbed the menus from the drawer and set them before me on the counter. “It drives my mother crazy, my inability to cook.”
“I bet.” I glanced around. “Do you have a photo of your family anywhere?”
He pulled his cell from his pocket and swiped so I could see his home screen. There was Luke and his family, piled together on a couch smiling and laughing. It was blatantly obvious they were all related, right down to the little nieces and nephews.
“I keep my pics in here,” he said, pointing to his phone that I held. “This house is just a place for me to crash.”
I nodded in understanding. My parents’ house, the one I lived in when I was little before they moved into the governor’s mansion, had been a showpiece. While it was fully furnished, it also had drapes in every window. Actual drapes. Not curtains or blinds, God forbid. There were rooms I hadn’t been allowed to enter. Furniture I wasn’t allowed to sit on. Even my bedroom had to be perfect. I remembered the walls had been pale pink with a canopy bed and a dollhouse. I had to make my bed every morning, even though there was a housekeeper. My clothes had to be in my closet. There was no dirty laundry visible. No wet towels. No toys strewn about.
It wasn’t as if their friends came to my room, but it had to be ready as if a photographer might pop in and capture my parents at leisure in their perfect home.
