Page 12 of Love on the Tracks
The color on her cheeks darkens once again, but she taps her glass with her fingertips and looks toward the ceiling. “Let’s see . . . I love chocolate and coconut, I like chocolate and mint, but chocolate and peanut butter makes me want to barf.”
“I guess a sponsorship from Reese’s is out then.”
Rowan smiles, and gets a goofy look on her face. “Yeah, that would not go well. It’s not like I eat chocolate a whole lot anyway. But when I do, there’s this artisanal chocolate place about two hours from Lake Placid . . .”
She gets this dreamy, faraway look on her face.
“What kind of car do you drive to go to this chocolate shop?”
Rowan covers her face again. I nudge her foot under the table. “You totally do that, don’t you? Drive four hours round trip to get your favorite chocolate?”
Her answer comes from between her fingers, a plaintive “yes.”
“Why don’t you keep some in your . . . apartment?”
“House,” she mutters. “I still live with my dad. Oh my god, this is embarrassing.”
I nudge her foot one more time and lean over the table. “If you let me see your face, I’ll tell you a secret.”
Slowly, so slowly, she draws her fingers down her face and anchors her hands on her water glass again. “Something the fan boards don’t know? Because I already know all that stuff.”
I bite back a laugh. “Yeah, I try to keep this one under wraps. I actually spend very little time at my house in LA. Whenever I can, I go back to Texas. When I can’t, I go to my sister’s in Las Flores.”
“Why?” Now I’ve got her.
“It’s a big-ass house and I live there all by myself. It gets lonely.”
It’s the truth, and not something I admit to a lot of people. It’s supposed to be glamorous, right? Having everything a person could possibly want. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels cold, and empty, and I don’t like it. I’d rather have the noise of my nephews and nieces, and the smells of my mom’s cooking. Even my sisters’ teasing.
“I guess that’s what happens when you grow up in a big family, huh?”
We spend the rest of lunch trading small secrets and funny stories, and I have to say, once she turns the fangirl flail down from eleven, Rowan’s a pretty cool girl. Funny, and charming, and I see how she can put on that act in front of the press. She puts her own self on as an act. It’s confusing, but impressive at the same time.
When we’re leaving the restaurant, I help her back into her parka, and as we walk out the door I rest my hand at the small of her back. There’s a stutter in her step, and I lean down to talk into her ear.
“Here’s the part where you’re supposed to look like you’re having a good time, okay? Think you can do that?”
I’m almost hoping she’ll take my hand, but she turns her face to the side to look at me. Her eyes are green tinged with blue, like the spruce around here, and her cheeks are a light pink—not the bright embarrassed flush of earlier, but a light blush of fun being had. Yes, I can spend a few weeks fake-dating Rowan Andrews.
“Yes.” She smiles, white teeth showing, the bottom row slightly crooked. Then a bunch of flashes go off.
Chapter Six
Zane
“Couldn’t you do any better than that?”
“What’s your problem, Stan?”
It’s too fucking early for Stan to be giving me this hard of a time. Really.
“The pictures are up.”
I scrub a hand over my face and into my hair. The clock says eight o’clock. In the morning. What the fuck? “I thought you’d be happy. Me, Rowan, out and about, flirting, having fun. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Look, Zane. You know as well as I do, if you want to keep their interest, you’ve got to keep upping the ante. A polite hand at the small of her back while leaving a trendy restaurant might’ve been okay yesterday, but today you’ve got to step it up. I want a kiss today. A real kiss. Not a peck on the cheek—on the lips. Some tongue if she’ll let you.”
Sometimes I wonder why Stanley’s on his third wife. Then he says shit like that, and I don’t wonder anymore. “At that rate, we’ll be fucking in front of the SIG ice tower by the end of the week.”
