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Thorne shrugged. “No, but we both agreed the fewer people that know this is a ruse, the better.” Then he laughed. “Plus, I raised his commission. Take a look,” he said. “Those are your copies. You’ll want to read them all, so you’re familiar.”
“I’m not following.”
“In a nutshell, you’re a devout fan that reached out to me via fan mail. There was something about you that intrigued me, and so I wrote back. Our love story started from there.”
“Via letters?” I said, not loving the cover story but not entirely hating it either.
“I know. I thought the letter thing was kind of lame, but my agent assured me the old-fashioned vibe would be romantic and score points with the public. Plus, the press eats this crap up,andwe have a paper trail if we need one.”
I glanced from him back down to the letters and began to read. “My heart beats for you . . . I’m looking up at the stars, thinking about you, wishing you were here . . .” I nearly gagged and flipped to the next one. “You looked so gorgeous on-screen, I nearly cried. I wish I weren’t so jealous of your costar. I hope when you kiss her, you think of me because I go to bed at night thinking of you, dreaming of you . . .”
I tossed the papers down and choked out a sound. “These are terrible. Like, completely and utterly nauseatingly cheesy. The absolute worst.”
“I know,” he said, uncapping his water and taking a drink.
“Do you?” I glanced back down at the letters, eyes wide, partly unable to believe I actually had to go along with it. “Why aren’t the ones from you as ridiculous? Why do you get to say normal things, like,” I picked a random letter up and read, “’you’re so hot. I can’t wait to kiss your smart mouth. I’m missing you like mad’? While I’m practically quoting Chaucer and howling into the moon?”
“Don’t be so dramatic. They’re notthatbad?”
I scowled at him harder, but he merely laughed. “Okay, maybe they are that bad. But they can’t make me look too lame, or no one will ever believe it, and they’ll call our bluff.”
I huffed and flopped back onto the couch.
I didn’t like it. Not at all.
“Okay, so when did we see each other between all the mooning in these letters?” I asked.
“We started exchanging letters in June and have been writing back and forth for months, getting more and more serious. Then, in late August, just before your summer break ended, on a trip you took to New York, you visited me at my hotel in Manhattan while I was in town for a press event.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.How the heck did he know I’d been in New York?
“What? I had my people look into your travels.”
Of course he did.
My hackles rose. I didn’t like his people checking up on me and more than I liked those cheesy letters. “I took a road trip to visit Parsons in August, and I stayed with my aunt.”
“Which makes it the perfect cover. In between there, you visited with me for a few days. After that, we continued swapping love letters and later met up again when I surprised you by showing up at your parent’s bakery. It’s also one reason I fought so hard for my role inThe Soldiers Within Us. With filming only forty minutes away, I could be nearby for most of the year. Pretty simple, right?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. I had to admit, the story was straightforward, with little chance of screwing up. As far as lies go, it was fairly foolproof.
“Now,” he said, glancing at his watch, “how much time do you have?”
“Why?” I asked, suspicious. “Didn’t we just go over our cover story?”
He let out a mirthless laugh. “Maybe. But we have a lot more ground to cover. If we’ve been talking since June and are supposedly in love, then we should know everything about each other. I suggest we order some food and get down to business. If we’re lucky, we might cover enough ground by midnight.”
“I have a curfew,” I said, like it should be obvious because, well, I was only a senior in high school. But then, this was Thorne Roberts I was talking to. He answered to no one. Look at him, in his giant penthouse suite, no parents or adult supervision to be found, like he wasn’t practically a kid himself. In fact, it was easy to forget he was only nineteen.
“Then I guess we’d better get started,” he said.
I hovered over the coffee table covered in half-empty dishes of food. Crumbs covered the smooth surface and stuck to the rug on the floor. Water marks ringed the once-immaculate glass from our drinks.
“You did not do that,” I said.
“Swear.” He held up two fingers in scout’s honor. “I swallowed it whole, and I could feel it flopping in my stomach.”
I stuck my tongue out and fake gagged. “The class goldfish?”
