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“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
“Why didn’t you tell me that from the beginning?”
“Because we have a relationship based on deceit.” He stretched out his hand. “Give me the bucket.”
“I don’t believe this!”
He fumbled for the bucket, his head still inside.
“I would have been more careful!” She thought of all the places she’d left the ring lying around, and she wanted to kick him. “I set it on the diving board when I went swimming yesterday!”
“That’s just stupid.” Water sloshed into the bucket. “Got it!” he said a moment later.
She sank down on the toilet lid and dropped her forehead into her hands. “I’m sick of having a marriage based on deceit.”
He emerged, bringing the bucket with him. “If you think about it, having a marriage based on deceit is all you know anything about. That should be a comfort.”
She leaped up. “I want a fake ring. I liked having a fake ring. Why don’t you ever do what you’re supposed to?”
“Because I can never figure out what that is.” He dropped the sink stopper and began washing off her not-fake ring. “When we get back downstairs, I’m going to pull Rory away. Don’t let anybody interrupt us, okay?”
“Georgie!” Meg called from the bottom of the stairs. “Georgie, you need to come down here. You have a guest.”
How could she have a guest with a guard stationed at the gate?
Bram grabbed her hand and slipped the ring back on. “Let’s be a little more careful this time.”
She stared down at the big stone. “I paid for this, didn’t I?”
“Everybody should have a rich wife.”
She jerked past him and hurried along the hall. Halfway down she stopped.
Her ex-husband stood at the bottom of the stairs.
Chapter 17
Meg tugged nervously on an amber earring. “I told him he couldn’t come in.”
Lance looked as bad as someone so buff could possibly look. He was apparently growing both a beard and long hair for his next action film because he had an inch of unkempt black scrub sprouting from his jaw, and his dark hair hung unevenly around his square face, not an attractive look, although one that was certain to improve after his hair and makeup people got done with him. His coffee-stained T-shirt stretched over the bulging muscles he spent several hours a day maintaining. Narrow braided bracelets, similar to Meg’s headband, but more frayed, hung at his wrist, and he wore sandals made of rope and canvas. Skillful dentistry had shaped his strong white teeth, but he’d never let anyone touch his slightly crooked nose. His press kit said he’d broken it in a teenage street fight, but he’d really tripped on the front steps of his college frat house and been too frightened of surgery to have it fixed.
“Georgie, I’ve left half a dozen messages. When you didn’t call me back, I was afraid—Why wouldn’t you call me back?”
Her fingers curled around the railing. “I didn’t want to.”
Like most of Hollywood’s leading men, he wasn’t exceptionally tall, barely five feet nine, but his granite jaw, manly chin-cleft, soulful dark eyes, and pronounced musculature compensated for his lack of height. “I needed to talk to you. I needed to hear your voice, to make sure you’re all right.”
More than anything, she wanted him to grovel. She wanted to hear him say he’d made the biggest mistake of his life, and he’d do anything to get her back, but that didn’t seem to be happening. She came down one step. “You look awful.”
“I drove here right from the airport. We just got in from the Philippines.”
She forced herself the rest of the way into the foyer. “You were in a private jet. How tough could the trip have been?”
“Two of our people got sick. It was—” He glanced over his shoulder at Meg standing guard behind him. She’d kicked off her orange boots, and the way her bare ankles emerged from her blue leopard-print leggings made her look as though she’d been dipped upside down into a tub of melted crayons. “Could we talk? Privately?”
“No. But Meg has always liked you. You can talk to her.”
“Not anymore,” Meg said. “I think you’re a creep.”
