Sparked (city2city: Hollywood) (7 page)

He never saw her run after him as the car pulled away from the curb, waving her arms and shouting, “Wait! You…you don’t have my number.”
 

He never watched her face fall when Aimi joined her on the sidewalk, curving a comforting arm around her daughter’s slim shoulders, as they both stared solemnly down the road at the retreating taillights.
 

He never heard her whisper, brokenly, “He doesn’t have my number, Mum.”

And, though he desperately wanted to, he never looked back.
 

FIVE

Los Angeles, Present Day

Sadie had forgotten how good he smelled. Clean and fresh, simple scents more closely aligned with products from the corner drug than a department store. Deodorant, bar soap, and aftershave. Add in the spice of his sweat, post-orgasm, and one whiff of Ryan Young spun her higher than any drug could possibly hope to.
 

She felt her lips curve, her expression smug as she nuzzled into the open collar of his white dress shirt, the tip of her nose finding the smooth hollow of his throat. That poor shirt had been so crisp, so clean when it had arrived at the theater, and now bore a shockingly red lipstick stain on the shoulder. One of her hands slid beneath the placket, between buttons. Her fingertips stroked over the soft cotton of his undershirt, itching to feel hot skin instead of fabric.
 

He’d had a nice amount of chest hair ten years ago. She remembered being startled at the sight of those tawny curls, when she’d urgently yanked his sweatshirt over his head, because until that moment, she hadn’t really felt like she was getting naked with a
man
. Until that moment, Ryan had been a guy, maybe even a boy. In wondering silence, she had settled her palms on his naked chest and allowed her fingers to sift through those curls.

Lust had gripped her. Real hot, wet, aching lust, for the first time in her life, and it was for the tall young man with the hair on his chest, who had been staring down at her like she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
 

Was it selfish of her to wish he would look at her that way again? Was it selfish to want to strip him naked, right here in the storage closet, and ogle the hair on his chest as she had so long ago?
 

Probably so, but she was too delighted by this turn of events to worry that her greed was showing. To think, she’d been ready to give up on him, when they still had so much between them—passion, tenderness, potential. Whole worlds of potential, judging by the confessions that had spilled from him in the moments before they came.
 

He shifted against her, his long arms bracketing her body, hands planted on either side of her on the cabinet’s flat surface. “Your dress…”

She tried not to smirk. “I’ll let
you
drop it off at the cleaners, shall I?”

A little thrill shot through her at his quiet huff of laughter. “Sounds like a plan.” He paused. “Seriously, though, where is the stain?”

Dabbing gently with her fingertips, she found the wet patch he’d left on her gown. “Underside, near the bottom hem. No one will be able to see it beneath the sequins.” She grinned up at him and, too delighted with him to resist, teasingly nipped the tip of his nose. “Really, Ryan. A gentleman would have planned for this contingency.”

Pushing away, he began tidying his appearance, starting with his open fly. “I’ll admit, I wasn’t exactly thinking about containment.”

Laughing softly, still pleasantly buzzed with a sensual glow, she hopped off the cabinet and let her skirts fall to swish at her feet. “That was fun.” Such long-awaited, longed-for fun. A thrill shot through her at the thought that they could do this again as soon as the premiere ended—this, and more. She tried to remember the state of her bedroom, if she and Fiona had left it tidy, and decided Ryan wouldn’t care about how many shirts were on the floor, not after ten years of waiting to have one another again. “Would you care to—”

 
“I need to tell you something.”

“Oh?” She couldn’t keep the hopeful breathiness out of her voice.
 

Discomfort stole over his features. “You’re not going to like it.”

The scrape of chairs sounded suddenly from the projection booth, signaling movement. Not keen on the idea of spending the entire premiere in the storage closet, especially not now that new awkwardness had descended between them, Sadie pressed her ear to the door, concentrating on making out the employees’ words.
 

“—texted me. He says Wes Jackson just snuck out the back entrance.”

“Why would he do that? It’s his movie!”

“I know, right? Omigod, Janey. We
have to
follow him. Like, now.”

“But why?”

“Because Wes Jackson just snuck out of his own movie, dumbass. That’s fishy as fuck.” Rustling movement, footsteps, the squeak of hinges as the external door opened. “You owe me for getting you this job in the first place, so come on.”

“I don’t—”

“You do, and you know it. We’re going. Move your perky ass, bitch.”

After a few seconds of shuffling on the other side of the door that signaled the reluctant Janey’s exit, silence reigned. With a glance at Ryan, standing tall and serious behind her, Sadie cracked open the door and peered into the booth.
 

Empty. Grabbing her purse, she strode from the closet, fighting against the fear that had set in at his words.
You’re not going to like it
. It was going to be all right. It had to be all right, because if it wasn’t… If it wasn’t, she was going to need to book an immediate flight to London and cry her eyes out in her mother’s arms. Just like the last time. Facing him with what she prayed was a serene smile, she asked, “What do you need to tell me?”

“I was engaged once,” he said quietly, and watched the color drain from her face. Her mouth opened, then closed, and she shook her head, looking for all the world as though he’d slapped her.
 

Why did she have to wear every emotion on her sleeve like that? Just
out there
for everyone to see, as if she didn’t care how much people saw of her innermost self? As if she had no secrets she wished to keep hidden.
 

He was angry with her, he realized. Freaking furious, as a matter of fact. How dare she be so hurt at the idea of him wanting to marry someone else? “Life moves on, you know,” he muttered, scowling. “I never asked you to wait for me.”

“I didn’t.”

Frown deepening, he straightened. “You didn’t?” His thousands of late-night searches scrolled through his head.

Sadie Bower single.

Sadie Bower dating.

Sadie Bower boyfriend.

Sadie Bower fiancé.

Sadie Bower husband.

Her delicate jaw clenched at the accusation in his tone, faint though it was. “No, I didn’t. I dated.” When he said nothing, she narrowed her gaze on him. “Just because nothing showed up on Google doesn’t mean nothing happened. What’s the phrase—discretion is the better part of valor?”
 

Scorn laced her tone, and Ryan knew that he had disappointed her all over again. “I’m sorry.”

Her hands fisted at her sides. “You keep saying that. I don’t think it means what you think it means.” Without giving him a chance to speak, she continued, “Because what it looks like—what it feels like—from here is that you…you thought I was waiting for you.” Anger crept into her voice, her accent haughtier, colder, than ever before. “You got off on the idea that Sadie Bower was tucked away in her lonely bed, pining for you like fucking Ophelia and debating the merits of slit wrists versus drowning.” Her eyes glittered with obsidian fire. “All while you,
you
, go off and ask another woman to marry you!” She trembled visibly. “You bloody hypocrite.”

Guilt and shame crashed into him, shaking the ground beneath his feet like an earthquake. She was right, because of course he knew he was a hypocrite. He’d known it for months. Why else would he have stayed away so long, when he knew in his heart what this woman meant to him, could mean to him?
 

He didn’t deserve her, he told himself, and not because he was a masochist. No, he didn’t deserve Sadie Bower because it was only recently that he’d figured out she wasn’t some sort of one-dimensional fantasy ideal, but an actual person with depth and layers and feelings.
 

In London, she’d been a dream, his rescuer from a night of misery. Then, when he had gone to see her first feature film a year later, knowing that he’d been with her once—kissed, touched, loved by her—was a point of masculine pride, though he had never said a word to anyone about it, not even Jon. Eventually, as her name appeared more and more often on marquees and magazine covers, that chest-puffing pride shifted into an impossible sort of longing because she had become the bona-fide movie star he’d predicted she would be, meaning she belonged to everyone.
 

Sadie Bower was public domain.
 

He’d stopped thinking of her as an individual. Without meaning to, he had made her a Thing in his mind. Their night together still felt unreal, terrifyingly so. Seeing her again, live and in person, had made him…uncomfortable. Repeated exposure to his fantasy made it more and more tangible, and also less, because she had turned out to be both nothing and everything like he remembered.
 

The sunshine was there. The smile, the softness, the brilliant laugh that sizzled and popped along his nerve endings. But she had sometimes appeared sad on set, usually when she looked at him. He’d seen her mad, too, going toe-to-toe with Wes Jackson, the director, when the Texan had demanded she step aside and let her stunt double do the forty-foot drop off the wall of an Italian palace into a murky moat. Jackson had quoted some gibberish about rules and contracts and hospital bills, and Sadie had stormed off the soundstage for thirteen minutes, a tiny tornado of righteous fury, before storming right back in, punching Jackson in one brawny arm, and allowing the stuntwoman to do her job.
 

Ryan had spent those months working on
Vendetta
and witnessing his preconceived notions of who Sadie Bower was fall away to reveal the real woman underneath. The one who was neither perfect nor polished.
 

It was that woman who scared Ryan the most. That woman didn’t live on a pedestal or in his dreams, or even in a palatial old house with servants and a bloodline that traced back to royalty, both British and Japanese. Instead, she was a woman he had suddenly been able to imagine offering a back rub at the end of a long day of filming. A woman who grumbled at the prospect of taking her car in for an oil change, and who bargained chore duty, preferring grocery shopping to folding laundry. He could imagine family holidays, him and Sadie and Jon and her parents and maybe the mysterious older brother Kai he hadn’t met, and, when he had seen her holding hands with a five-year-old extra on set, someday having their very own family.

The moment that tenuous hope had popped into his head, he’d squashed it. Because he had no right to force his fantasies on her without either her knowledge or consent, as he already had done for a decade.
 

“Did you love her?”

It took him a moment to parse out that she was asking about his former fiancée. He thought of Cass, the tall, blond accountant from Minneapolis he hadn’t seen in over five years. “Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you marry her?”

“Because I didn’t love her enough.” His ex’s wholesome features were slightly blurred in his mind’s eye, no clear snapshot, but he could remember very well how she hadn’t cried when he broke their engagement. How she’d been out of their shared apartment the very next day. He had no idea where she was or what she was up to, and, though it probably made him a jerk, he really didn’t care. Their lives were their own, and he hoped Cass didn’t wonder about him, either. “Why does it—”

Sadie cut him off with a slashing motion of one hand, her brow sharply furrowed. “Don’t ask me that. You already know why it matters.”

Yeah, he knew, because it mattered to him, too. Cass had never been right for him. He’d met her while visiting his brother at his Chicago law firm, liked her smile and her laugh, even if neither had lit him up inside quite like Sadie’s. They had been together six months when they moved in together, a year when he proposed. And three months after that, when Cass had been seated at the kitchen table putting cheerful stamps on save-the-date postcards, he’d sat down across from her, put his hand over the stack of cards, and said, “This isn’t going to work.”

He was thankful that he’d listened to that inner voice, telling him he was heading down the wrong path. It was the same inner voice that had shortly thereafter grabbed him by the balls and told him to get the heck out of Boston and the corporate world before he grew any more miserable than he already was, the same voice that had him e-mailing an old college pal who worked as a sound engineer in the film industry and asking how to break into that business.

Move to Los Angeles
, had been his friend’s response.

So Ryan had moved to Los Angeles, and here he was in a projection booth, a movie he’d helped create about to play for public audiences for the first time on the screen below, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care one bit about the movie or the journey or Boston or Cass or Jon or any of it, not when he could feel himself messing up what—who—he’d always prayed would be his final destination: Sadie.
 

Why could he never seem to get this right?

Clouds shadowed more and more of her sunlight with each passing moment, and he watched her eyes on him grow colder. Her voice carried a distinct chill when she finally spoke. “I want to say that I don’t want to hear from you again. I want to say that I’m done holding back a piece of my heart for you. I want to say that I hope this is the last time we see each other.”

He felt his own face grow pale. “Are you saying those things, Sadie?”

“No.” She smoothed a hand over her elegant sweep of ebony hair before straightening. With her shoulders back and her chin lifted, she commanded the space, charging every molecule in the projection booth with her power.