LITMIR.BIZ

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try, I had to know if I was good enough. If I hadn’t…”

      “It would have come back to bite me in the ass, I know. The road not taken, the wondering what might have been. You’d have grown to hate me, or at least resent the hell out of me. You left, you did what you had to do and now you know.You’re wonderful, Jolie. Looks, talent, the camera loves you—the whole package, I think it’s called. For a while there,” he added, grinning, “I was wishing you’d been born with a big wart on the end of your nose.”

      Jolie laughed and the tension was broken. “My first agent wanted me to get my nose fixed—shorten it, thin it out a bit. And get implants, teeth caps, liposuction. I look back on that now and wonder if I would have done what he said, if I’d had the money. Now I’m the sexy but wholesome girl next door, so it’s a good thing I didn’t have that money.”

      Sam reached out to run his index finger down the side of her nose. “I’m crazy about that nose. And what you’re saying is that if you’d agreed to let me bankroll you, that nose might be only a fond memory?”

      “Yeah, but think about this one, Sam—the boobs would have been spectacular,” she teased, grinning at him before filling her mouth with a big bite of rolled-up boiled ham.

      “Have I ever complained about that area?”

      Jolie coughed, and a bit of ham stuck in her throat. She grabbed the glass he’d brought with him into the kitchen, taking a huge gulp. She shivered, a full-body shiver, and quickly put down the glass. “Eeww, how can you drink this stuff?”

      “You have the palate of a plebeian, Jolie Sunshine,” he told her, pulling a glass from the cabinet beside the sink and filling it with tap water. “Real wine isn’t supposed to taste like some sweet, fizzy kids’ drink.”

      “It does when somebody turns his back and somebody else slips a teaspoon of sugar into the glass,” Jolie reminded him, grinning at the memory. “How old was that wine I did that to?”

      “Old enough to have been treated with more respect.” Sam turned his back to the sink and leaned against the edge of the counter.

      Jolie caught her breath. Movie stars were handsome, granted. Although she’d often wondered about the offspring of all those gorgeous faces born with Mommy’s original nose and inheriting daddy’s original receding chin. But Sam? Sam was just Sam, and he was the real McCoy. He also didn’t throw a hissy fit if she accidentally moved into his camera line during the filming of a love scene.

      “Are we good now, Sam? There was hurt on both sides when I left, I know that, and I caused most of it. But have we agreed that what happened is in the past and at least now we can be friends? Can we move on now?”

      “Friends? Maybe you could clarify that.” He looked at her for a long moment, slowly measuring her from head to toe and back again with his gaze before seeming to concentrate on her mouth. “What level of friends are we talking here? Good friends? Very good friends?”

      Her bare toes were trying to curl themselves into the coolness of the tile floor. “Good friends. Older. Wiser. Less inclined to be selfish, self-centered—and I’m speaking of myself, mostly. How’s that?”

      “It’ll do. For now. And I take full blame for my part in what happened back then—even more than you know. Shall we seal the bargain?”

      “You never give up, do you?” Jolie said, laughing. And then she held out her right hand just to see what he’d do.

      He did what she’d wanted him to do. He ignored her hand to slide his arms around her and lowered his mouth to her own.

      For the first time since Jade’s call at midnight four days earlier, Jolie let herself feel. Really feel, react, instead of just acting and hoping for something to fill the sudden hole in her heart. But what she felt when Sam kissed her wasn’t passion. Nor was it the momentary escape she’d insanely hoped to find in their desperate coupling of only a few hours ago. Not lust, not even love. What she felt was this enormous sorrow welling up inside her. Filling her, crushing her, yet leaving her unbearably empty.

      So many chances lost. So many missed moments that could never be recaptured. Choices made. Paths taken…and those not taken. But there was time; there had always been time—that’s what she’d told herself.

      And now she was out of time.

      She couldn’t go back, change anything.

      Even Sam’s strong arms around her couldn’t change anything…

      When she broke the kiss, it was to press her face into Sam’s neck, her voice catching on a sob. “He’s gone, Sam. Teddy’s gone.”

      Sam held her tight, mumbling words she couldn’t quite make out because the hurt was swallowing her now, pulling her down into that black hole of misery and loss she’d been fighting any way she could, calling on every acting skill she might possess in order to hide her tearing grief. Her guilt.

      “I phoned him once a week, Sam, faithfully. I invited him out to the coast a million times, but he always said he was too busy. And so was I. First working three part-time jobs to feed myself and then I always seemed to be shooting somewhere in the world. Six movies in three years. Once…once he visited me on location in South Dakota, but we were behind schedule, and I was almost always on the set and…”

      She swallowed down hard. “A year, Sam. I hadn’t seen Teddy in an entire year, not even on Christmas. The big movie star, always too busy even to come home to see her own father. And now I’ll never see him again. We couldn’t…we couldn’t even have an open casket, not the way the bullet tore through…oh, Sam, this hurts. Just hold me, please. I hurt so bad.”

       Chapter Four

      SAM WALKED INTO THE living room after an hour spent holding Jolie in the privacy of his bedroom suite. He’d taken her up the back staircase from the kitchen to avoid the living room and her sisters. She’d cried and apologized for crying and then cried some more. When he’d left her, she was in the bathroom, washing her face and applying makeup. He believed she was putting her mask back on but didn’t think he should point that out to her, poor kid.

      “She was crying about Teddy, not you. Right?”

      He looked at Jade, one eyebrow raised at her sharp tone. “I beg your pardon?”

      “Jade sneaked upstairs and listened at the bedroom door,” Jessica informed him. “We wondered if we should knock, come in and check on her, make sure she was all right. We took a vote and it was a draw. I voted to leave the two of you alone, and Jade…well, you know how she voted. But that’s to be expected. Jade’s off men right now, especially Becket men.”

      “I think the day finally hit her,” Sam explained as he retrieved his car keys from a small table just inside the door. “The finality of it.”

      “Exactly what I told Jade. Is she all right now? She probably needed a good cry, Sam. Me, I think I’m all cried out for now, but I cried buckets. God only knows what Jade did until we got here. Jade doesn’t share easily, do you, Jade?”

      Jade pointedly turned her back to both of them, picking up a small silver bowl and turning it over, examining the maker’s mark—or pretending to so that she could hide her face.

      Leaving Sam to wonder why women always said things like that, that someone needed a good cry. The statement had never made any sense to him, but Sam only nodded, sure it was a female thing men weren’t meant to understand. “Jolie will be downstairs in a couple of minutes. We’re going to go over to the house to pick up her clothes. She can’t stay there anymore, at least not yet. She hates that she can’t, but I think I convinced her that people handle things differently. There is no right or wrong way to grieve.”

      Jessica, who had gone back to reading one of the files, looked up at him, a pencil caught lengthwise between her teeth. “I erk,” she said, nodding. “Alwus id.”

      “She

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