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I should give him space. I should go to sleep and try to forget about today. But I can’t. This is my life at stake.
I put on a white bikini that will get me thrown out of this Hilton if it gets wet, throw a sundress over it, and follow him down to the pool.
My damn luck. No cameras in sight. Just Gabriel Sinclair, cutting a perfect backstroke through the pool. I should go back to the room and take a nap, but before I can turn to leave, he spots me.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, swimming over to tread water in front of me.
I want to leave. The door is right there. He needs space and I do too.
But I can’t. If I walk away, he wins and I can’t let him, so I pull the sundress over my head and let it fall onto a lounge chair. “Swimming,” I say curtly.
I can’t swim, but he doesn’t need to know that. I’ll dip my toe in the shallow end, declare the water too cold, and go sit in the nearby hot tub for ten minutes. If anyone with a camera comes, I’ll watch him swim his laps with total adoration on my face, even if that feels like my personal Everest right now.
“Do you have to make everything so hard?” There’s something raw in his voice and it triggers one of my baser impulses: I want to grind my heel into whatever pain he feels and twist. I’ve never met anyone who elicits this response in me like he does.
And it’s not fair. I’m not making this any harder than he is, yet I get the blame. I’m defined by the role I played and he’s not, because I’m a woman who went on a loosely scripted reality TV show—therefore I am the persona I played—and he’s a serious actor. I get hatred for embracing what I am. He denies what he is and everyone adores him.
It would really suck if I wasn’t exactly as bad as everyone thinks I am.
The desire to drag Gabriel Sinclair down into the mud with me is so strong it leaves me shaking.
Carefully, I sit on the edge of the pool, slipping my legs into the cool water and trying not to notice how deep it is. If he can’t touch, it’s deep.
My tits are doing the work of holding up this bikini top, and I adjust it slightly to avoid a nip slip. “What am I makinghard?”
“Dating you. Getting to know you,” he says, ignoring my tits and my reference to his dick as he swims closer.
His dark eyes are unreadable, and I hesitate. Is he telling the truth? Does he want to get to know me?
That’s ridiculous. No one wants to get to know me. It’s easier to hate me that way.
Except they’d hate me more if they took the trouble to look closer.
I don’t like myself all that much today, either, but maybe I’m tired. Fake dating this man is exhausting.
“This is me,” I say. The concrete is cool on my hands as I lean back. “That’s all you need to know.”
He stares at the door for a minute, a dark expression on his face. “This isn’t working,” he says when he finally turns back to me.
“It’s not.” We finally agree on something. Miracle. Though I doubt he has a realistic idea of how to fix this.
“I’ll take you to the airport first thing in the morning. Get you on a flight to LA, first class. We’ll tell them it didn’t work out.”
Wait, what? He’s bailing?
“Just like that?” Panic slips up my spine. Sure, it’s been fun thinking about ending this farce, but I have nothing. No job prospects that don’t involve refilling baskets of breadsticks. I need this. I’m a shitty waitress. “You’re fake breaking up with me?”
“There’s plenty of bad girls in Hollywood to wreck my reputation with.” His brown eyes bore into me. Shit. He’s serious.
“You ass!” I snap, splashing him with a solid kick into the pool and sending a wall of water into his face.
He shakes it off, droplets flying from his dark hair. “Be a better person, Ashley. In your case, it’s not going to take much.”
That, from Gabriel Sinclair, might be one of the meanest things anyone has ever said to me. He’s drifting away as he treads water, and I’m going to splash him again. I scoot to the edge of the pool, gripping it tight, extending one leg as far as I can, the other propped against the pool wall for balance. I don’t care that a herd of kids is thundering closer and there will be parents with phones only too happy to catch this moment and make it go viral. I am going to splash the shit out of Gabriel Sinclair if it’s the last thing I—
One of the kids slips, slamming into me, and before I can scream, I fall into the pool.
Water surrounds me, pressing down on me as I stare up at the surface while I sink. It’s quiet down here. Like the world has retreated, leaving me alone.
