Love Me by Rachel Shukert

Author:Rachel Shukert [Shukert, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-98426-6
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2014-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

When Leo Karp told Margo she’d better start sleeping at her studio bungalow from now on, Dane Forrest had to summon every last bit of his acting prowess to hide his relief.

It wasn’t that he wouldn’t miss her while she was playing the role of a lifetime as Olympus’s virgin bride. But Leo Karp had just thrown him a curveball that would make Lefty Grove weep with envy, and he needed some time on his own.

To think. I just need to think.

His first impulse was to go straight to Diana’s house and pour his heart out to her, but he quickly thought better of it. It might be late at night, but the photographers surrounding his sister’s very slightly decrepit Beverly Hills mansion observed no division between night and day. Even now, they were probably out there, huddled in the bushes out back by the pool, hanging from the treetops in the pitch-darkness like a pack of bats. Vampires, more like. All he needed was a single blurry photograph of him, a newly engaged man, entering or leaving the home of his “former paramour” at a suspicious hour to leak to the press and they’d be on him like flies on a carcass.

Poor Margo. She’d looked so hopeful, so pathetically happy when Mr. Karp had started talking about wedding gowns and diamond rings. Did she have any idea what she was getting into? Their marriage would be one long nightmare of damage control, scarcely begun before people started waiting for it to end. It wasn’t a shotgun wedding, it was a snapshot one. Was that what Margo wanted? If it wasn’t, he ought to save her by breaking her heart. Be cruel to be kind. Send her back to Pasadena to lick her wounds, find a nice boy to marry, have a family and a real life.

And if it is what she wants? Then she wasn’t the girl Dane thought he might love. She was a girl he didn’t know at all—and yet knew all too well. Just like every girl in this godforsaken desert town.

What he needed was a good, stiff drink. Schwab’s was too crowded with lower-level studio types, the kind who, having heard whispers around the lot, would be full of questions he’d rather not answer, and he wasn’t dressed for any of his regular haunts on the strip.

Instead, he found himself pulling over outside at Barney’s Beanery. Even a coffee shop had to keep a bottle of something stronger behind the counter, he reasoned, and it was so near to closing time, the place had to be almost empty. Safe.

The only car in the parking lot was a little dove-gray coupe with a black silk scarf draped over the dashboard, a trace of familiar perfume wafting out the open window.

Why not? Dane thought. He had to be with someone tonight.

She was sitting in a booth in the back, an untouched pot of coffee in front of her. Her hair was copper; her face was white.

“Amanda.” Dane felt alive with possibility.

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