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“Anything for the shot. Let’s just get this thing installed so I can go home. I still have to walk Buster.”
Working together, in charged silence, they heaved the bar up onto the newly stained wooden base cabinets. Once it was up, he filmed her with his phone as she leveled and shimmed the top before screwing it down. Finally, something had gone right with this darn install.
With a satisfied grin, she stepped behind the bar and opened her cooler. “First official drink at the bar. What’ll it be?”
“What do you have?”
Frankie laughed as she displayed the cooler’s contents. “I can offer you the finest in diet soda beverages or bottled spring water.”
“No coffee?” he teased. “I’ll take a water. I don’t need the caffeine bad enough to pour that crap into my body.”
Frankie handed him the water and boosted herself up to sit on top of the bar with her feet on the lower counter. She cracked open a can of the diet and drank deeply. “Be careful. This ‘crap’ is the only thing that keeps me civil.”
“This is civil?” he joked.
“I haven’t finished it yet.”
When Jake hopped up next to her, his legs dangling over the front of the bar, she leaned over to tap his bottle with her can. The silence stretched, comfortable appreciation of a job well done.
“Do you really think you can’t make a mistake?” His quiet question had her brain clicking to catch up.
“I don’t think it. I know it. Do you know how many years I’ve spent trying to convince him to even give me a chance? All he needs is one error to throw heavily on the scale to prove he was right. You know how he hates to be wrong.”
Years of arguments and well-meant insults replayed in her mind. She’d fought tooth and nail since before Gabe had left for the army to be included in the plan for the future. She was not about to lose all of that progress when she was so close to the finish line. He was staring at her as if he could see what was going through her brain. Why did he care so much? His hot and cold reactions were confusing the hell out of her.
“Well, I haven’t seen anything so far that makes me concerned for the show.”
Frankie bit back a laugh. Forever damned with faint praise. She bumped his shoulder with hers. “Aww gee, thanks.”
“I mean it. That’s my bottom line, and you’re doing great. You play the game and get shit done. If Dom can’t see that, he’s blind.”
The intensity of his voice made her turn. She studied his profile as he drank deeply from his water bottle. He sat facing opposite her, so she had an excellent view of that Adam’s apple she wanted to lick.
Was there anything about him that wasn’t ridiculously attractive, other than his attitude? It wasn’t fair. She tried not to stare, and failed.
Stop looking. You can’t sit here and moon over the man.
Her internal self-preservation mechanism was poking her.He kissed you and then gave you the cold shoulder. He snuck out of the hospital without even saying goodbye. He can have any Hollywood starlet he wants.But what had been a comfortable silence was quickly becoming awkward because she could not stop staring.
Gah, I need to get laid. This is ridiculous.
Working hard on all these projects made Frankie a dull girl. Her dating life had definitely taken a hit, both because she was exhausted by the end of each day, and every new guy who popped up on her dating app led with seeing her on the show. She was even getting recognized at the grocery store now. She hadn’t considered how fame would impact her dating life, and it sucked.
Frankie cast around her tired mind for a conversational gambit that would give her an excuse to keep looking at him, since she clearly couldn’t get her eyes under control. “So what was it like being a child star?”
She watched as the shutters fell down and his eyes lost their sparkle.Shit. Wrong topic.
“It was pretty much just like being a regular kid only with more people telling you what to do.” He peeled the label off his water bottle and set the bottle down between them.
“Yeah, right. I’m not buying it. Sofia told me how popular your show was. That must’ve been crazy.”
She watched as he folded the paper into a carefully creased accordion and then into tiny triangles. “That’s a good word for it. My mom coerced the writer to base it on me, and it got picked up. I was just the cute kid saying lines. I didn’t have any real skills, just dimples and a good memory.”
“You must’ve developed some skills over an eight-year run," Frankie pressed.
He stared off into the mid-distance, reflecting. “I learned a lot from my director, watching how he ran things, the choices he made. Hell, I was around him more than my own father.”
“So that’s where you learned to be a control freak,” Frankie teased again, trying to drive away the sadness that had gotten through his shields and settled in his eyes.
