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Chapter Six
We were officially two daysinto the charity tour, and it was entirely sparkless so far. Dull. Boring. Blah. I was so lacking in sparks, you could wring me out and fill a glass with disappointment.
This was not normal for me.
The entire team was gathered in Rhett’s suite on the highest floor of our Chicago hotel, and everyone except me was looking at their phones. I was surreptitiously sneaking glances at Rhett over my makeup case and wondering who could absorb his attention so fully over text. Sunny Nash? Karina Bier? Naomi Price? His lineup of A-lister ex-girlfriends was a mile long.
Maybe it was his sister, Hallie, with pictures of Tank. Hey, a girl could hope.
After learning that Rhett had called Liam to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I’d half-expected him to treat me a little more casually. Like a friend or something, since we had shared friends between us. Now he was pretending I didn’t exist.
“The woman who won this date is called Heather Balinksi, and she’s a Chicago native,” Bridget explained. “She’s a forty-three-year-old recent divorcée and mother of two.”
Rhett looked up at this and nodded, clocking the information away for later.
“Want to bet her ex-husband’s money bought this date?” Adalyn asked, grinning.
Bridget shot her a small smile before she was back to business. Smiles were allotted for the assistant, but not the temp hair lady, evidently. “You’ll begin at the Bean for a photo op, then up to the Sky Deck for dinner on the Ledge.”
“For dinner?” Adalyn asked. “I’ve been up there. I don’t remember seeing a restaurant.”
“We rented it out for the night, and we’re having food brought in.”
I snagged a quick look at Rhett, but he didn’t glance up from his phone. The man was having an iconic Chicago observatory deckrented out for the evening so he could eat dinner on it, and he wasn’t even going to pretend to be impressed?
He must have felt the weight of my judgment, because when he finally looked up from his phone, his glorious blue eyes shot straight to me. I didn’t back down from the heat of his attention, though. I lifted an eyebrow at him—a trait my best friend was inordinately jealous of—and he raised one eyebrow back. It was as if he was saying,I rent out iconic landmarks all the time, so what’s the big deal?
Oh gosh. What if hediddo this sort of thing all the time, and that’s why it wasn’t impressive? Anyone with money could theoretically do exactly what Rhett had planned for his date tonight.
No. Enough theorizing. I wasn’t going to back down from my opinion. Whether or not this sort of thing was a regular Wednesday night for Rhett, he could still be thankful. His assistant and his publicist went to a lot of work to make it happen.
I re-engaged my judgy eyebrow. He saw it and upped the ante, lifting both of his. Then he cleared his throat. “Is there something you’d like to say, Frenchy?”
Frenchy? I looked over my shoulder, but only Chad, one of Rhett’s regular bodyguards, sat behind me. No, he definitely meant to direct that at me. And since none of our interactions thus far had included anything remotely France-related, I could think of only one reason he took a huge leap with the nickname. “If that’s aGreasereference, then I feel obligated to remind you that I am completely board certified and hold a cosmetology license with the state of California. I’m also specifically certified in advanced makeup technique.”
Rhett’s mouth ticked up in a smile. “And?”
We weren’t sitting close to each other, so by now everyone had tuned in to our conversation. I wasn’t about to call out a movie star for a lack of gratitude in front of his staff, all people being paid to do his bidding—including me. Especially not when the man equated me to a beauty-school dropout somehow in his brain. Was that why he hadn’t given me much attention yet?
I shook my head.
“Ready for hair and makeup?” Adalyn asked. “We should be out the door in forty-five.”
Rhett stood and stretched his arms above his head. His biceps strained against the short sleeves of his fitted T-shirt, and I drank in the view. I would never get used to seeing him in real life when he had previously lived rent-free in my head for so many years. I leaned down and pinched my thigh to make sure it wasn’t a dream. Yep, still wide awake.
My cases were set up on the kitchen island, and I stood to vacate the bar seat for Rhett. He slid onto it, and I pulled out my water mister. “Care if I re-wet your hair? Your cowlick is doing funny things back here.”
“Be my guest.”
I misted his hair until it was sufficiently wet, then plugged in my blow dryer to tame the cowlick. I worked in silence—or rather in the immense noise that came from my hair dryer—and got his hair perfectly dried.
“No makeup today?” he asked.
“You don’t need much. I was going to tackle those shadows under your eyes and powder your skin lightly. Do you want more than that? I can fill in your eyebrows a bit.”
“Nah, that’s good enough. I prefer my eyebrows to stay natural.”
“Which is why you tweeze them into submission?”
