AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He groaned, grabbing her hips. “Jesus Christ, Bronte. You need to stop. Now.”
“Why?” She laughed, breaking away from his grasp to face him, walking backward. “Is someone getting a little tight in his jeans?”
When he lunged for her, she jumped back, but her heel caught on the sidewalk and she tripped, almost hitting the pavement if it weren’t for Chris’s grip on her arm.
“See.” He righted her. “That’s what you get for teasing me.”
“Like you don’t love it.”
He opened the door to the movie theater and lightly smacked her behind on the way in. “Behave.”
She playfully glowered at him over her shoulder. He was telling her to behave?
Once inside the dark theater, Chris led Bronte to the last row. The movie was some action flick that’d been out for a while, so only a handful of other people were there, and they all sat toward the front, leaving Chris and Bronte alone in the back to make out like high school kids. Which they did. With vigor.
Bronte had to slap his hand away when he went for the button of her jeans.
They snuck out before the credits rolled and hightailed it to his car, but he abruptly stopped with a curse, his eyes on his cell phone.
“What?”
He didn’t answer, and her nerves got the best of her.
“What is it?”
He ran his hand through his hair and rocked back on his heels before finally meeting her gaze, his face a mixture of irritation and distress.
“What?” she asked again.
“A couple texts from Wes.” He held up the screen so she could see.
Her eyebrows narrowed on the picture. It was a screenshot from Wes’s phone, but she couldn’t tell what she was looking at. “What is that?”
“Twitter.”
“Okay?”
Chris handed her his phone with the text still up. “You know what trending means?
“I’m not that behind the times.”
“Okay, well, I’m apparently what people are talking about on Twitter.”
Bronte’s eyes scanned the screenshot again, and there it was: I found CJ Cunningham. Right below Worst New Year’s Resolutions and Sherlock but above POTUS.
“You’re more popular than the president, but not as much as a PBS show.”
He growled something unintelligible and started making his way to the car again. Bronte followed while reading through Wes’s texts explaining people from the restaurant tonight were tweeting about him, some with pictures. Others blatantly lied, saying they spotted him in other cities and states, like he was the Loch Ness Monster come up to sunbathe for a while.
“This is bizarre,” Bronte said, handing Chris his phone back.
“Yeah, and terrifying. These people are able to send out details of where I am to the entire world.” As they reached his car, his phone dinged with another text. Chris shook his head in disgust. “Wes says it shows people are still interested in me after all this time out of the spotlight. It’s a good thing.”
Intellectually, she could understand Wes’s point. The old adage, There is no such thing as bad publicity. Yet, she couldn’t help but feel outrage at Chris’s invasion of privacy—and hell, hers as well. To them, he was CJ Cunningham, the public figure, bad boy, movie star. He was something to point at and watch, a sideshow act in the circus of show business. But Bronte took solace in the fact that she knew the truth about him.
That Christopher Judd Cunningham was a man who was afraid to fly. That he was rather soft-spoken and thoughtful. That his lips moved when he read to himself, and he hated when his food touched. His social media fans would never see him interact with Luke, or hear his voice shake when he talked about his family, or ever have to deal with his annoying habit of leaving the toilet seat up. No, they would never know the real Chris.
He was her secret.
