Page 64 of Let’s Make a Scene

“I’m not going to complain about a home-cooked meal,” Jack replies gently. “Mind if I stay in here and keep you company?”

He’s looking at me the way you might look at a nervy animal, and I realize I’m not doing a great job of covering up my anxiety.

“No,” I reply more firmly. “Of course not. You can stay if you want. Is vegetable curry okay?”

“Sounds great.” Jack slips onto one of the stools at the breakfast bar and takes off his sunglasses and hat, running a hand through his hair. “Can I do anything to help?”

“No, no.” I move to the fridge and start gathering ingredients. “I like to cook when I get the chance.” I don’t say that I also thought it would give me something to do with my hands, something to concentrate on other than the fact Jack Turner-Jones is in my house.

“Do you have a corkscrew?” Jack asks. “I could open this wine? The ice cream kept it cold.”

“Good idea.” I pull one from the drawer and hand it to him.

While he pours the wine and I chop vegetables, I can’t help but notice this scene feels incredibly domestic. And weirdly not-weird. Especially because Jack keeps up a stream of idle conversation as I work, almost like he’s deliberately trying to put me at ease.

“It was good to see everyone last weekend,” he says, pushing my glass toward me. “I didn’t realize you guys were all still so close.”

I nod. “It took a couple of years, but I was able to hire Patty and Liam as my hair and makeup team, and they moved out here full-time. Obviously Arjun came too, which ended up being great for his career. Then he and Patty had Priya, and Liam married David. We all live within a couple of miles of each other.”

“So Patty and Liam work for you?” he asks.

I laugh. “No. As they’d be the first to tell you, they work for themselves. They have other clients too, but they’re with me whenever I need to be presentable for something, and I usually have them written into my contracts, so we’ve done almost all my films together. It’s perfect, like having family around. We have a lot of fun together.”

“And Liam’s husband wasn’t at the brunch, but you all get on?”

“David.” I nod my head fondly. “Yes, he’s great. He’s actually Theo’s assistant and he travels a lot. He’s very uptight, super fastidious, secretly big-hearted, and he adores Liam. The two of them balance each other out.” I take a sip of my wine, thinking about it. “Liam needs someone with a little bite, you know?”

Jack makes a sound of agreement and then very casually says, “Theo is Theo Eliott, right? You guys used to date?”

“Years ago,” I agree. “Now he’s one of my closest friends. Our real legacy as a couple is that we set up Liam and David. They’re much better suited than Theo and I ever were.” I laugh. “A lot of the time now it seems wild that we were together for so long.”

“How long was it?”

“About five years.” I move to the cooktop, heating the ghee in a pan. “But honestly, given our respective schedules I’d be surprised if we spent as much as a single year in each other’s company, all told. It wasn’t the right time for either of us… or the right person.”

“Yeah, I know what that’s like,” Jack says, his expression rueful.

“I heard something about you and one of your costars on the show…” I say, adding ingredients to the pan so I don’t have to look at him. No need for him to know that I googled his love life, or that I had weirdly hostile feelings toward the series of perfectly nice, attractive women he’d dated over the years.

Jack groans, tops up the wineglasses. “No, that was total fabrication. Not even a publicity thing, just wishful thinking on the part of the fans. Em’s just a friend. It’s a pretty hard line for me, actually. I don’t date people I work with. It’s always a bad idea.”

He adds this last part absently, but as the words settle in the air, both of us tense.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” Jack manages after several seconds tick by where it’s not just my disastrous relationship with Shawn that fills the space between us, but a whole lot of unspoken history. “I only meant—”

I wave my hand airily to cut him off, which would probably be more convincingly casual if I weren’t holding a glass and sloshing wine down my front. “Don’t worry about it,” I say, rubbing at the stain. “I can’t exactly disagree with you given my current situation. It’s a good thing you and I are only pretending to date.” I’m very careful not to make any reference to anything that might have happened between us in the past. What we did could hardly be called dating, anyway.

Jack slides from his stool and moves around to the sink. After a moment he hands me a warm, damp washcloth for my wine-stained sweater. While this is perfectly nice of him, it does bring him into my personal space, which I could live without. I don’t trust myself around him. The urge to rub myself against him like a cat is alarmingly strong.

He leans back against the kitchen counter, and I can’t stop my brain from leaping to another kitchen, to another time when Jack and I were alone together. My gaze moves to his mouth and my fingers tighten around my wineglass. I set it down and turn my attention to dabbing at my clothes.

“It’s actually a rule I learned from my dad,” Jack says, and despite his conversational tone, my eyes fly back up to meet his. I thought we would be shutting down this line of conversation, but it seems not. “He kind of drummed it into me when I was starting out.”

“Oh?” I give up on my sweater, turn back to the curry, which is simmering now on a gentle heat, filling the air with the warm scent of spices. “Didn’t he and your mum meet when they were starring in a film together?”

Jack chuckles wryly. “They did, but I’m not sure he sees the irony. He’s not the most self-aware person you’ll ever meet. Their relationship is one of the reasons I’ve stuck to that particular rule, though.”

I wince. “That doesn’t sound great.”