To their credit, both were polite enough to ignore this and moved forward to greet me.
His mother smiled warmly, her gaze on Duke and his arm. “It’s so nice to meet you, Anastasia. I love you already since you brought my son home to me.”
And somehow, as quickly as I had been in Duke’s embrace, I was in his mother’s. She smelled like Chanel and the outdoors. She was warm, and a hugger, and I hated it.
I was not a hugger. I did not know how to give casual, genuine human affection. Nor did I know how to receive it.
I could fake it all day long. I could portray intimacy and love so well I’d made a fortune off it. Won awards for it. But that’s the only thing I could do—fake things. In LA, it served me well, because even when the cameras were turned off, no one wanted real.
This place, these people—even though they were strangers to me—were not fake. This was the furthest thing from it. It was impossible to be fake in the face of this kind of real.
So I stood awkwardly and stiffly in the hug until she let go. But she didn’t let all the way go; she held on to my upper arms in a strong grip and regarded me. “Now I could pretend I don’t know you from your movies, but I’m no bullshitter and I love them, so I’m not going to pretend. I am going to say, you are just as stunning in real life, if not more.” She paused. “Then again, it could be that beautiful blush you seem to still have for my Duke. And I’ll tell you, I like that too.” She let me go then. “I’m Anna, by the way.”
I gaped at the woman, unsure of what to say. The blush that she mentioned was not something I was putting on. Duke’s touch, his nearness had triggered it. I smiled my movie star smile. I prepared to go with my movie star script for being introduced to people. But instead, I blurted, “I can’t believe his name is really Duke. I thought he moved to LA, decided to go on the badass track and changed his name to something to suit his badass life.”
My blush that I hadn’t known I’d gotten from Duke turned into a full-face flush once I realized what I’d said, how I’d inadvertently insulted their choice of name for their son and potentially blown my cover for being Duke’s girlfriend. Surely if I knew him well enough to travel to meet his parents across the country I’d know his fucking birth name.
Instead of looking insulted or disbelieving, his mother looked at me straight-faced for about a second then burst out laughing.
It was a nice sound. Throaty. Not delicate and feminine. Strong, but easy at the same time.
His father looked similarly amused, but he just shook his head and let out a low chuckle. “My wife does like to think she had the powers to look into the future and see that her son would actually grow up to suit a name like Duke, but more accurately, it’s due to the drugs coursing through her system after giving birth and me being the schmuck who let her choose the name of the second-born son since I got to name the first.”
Duke had a brother? An older brother?
Interesting, since he definitely had an older brother vibe about him. If this was the youngest of the clan, I was interested to see just how macho his brother was. Could the world handle two men with that degree of machoness? His father surely had it, but it wasn’t as prominent, the years not so much shaving it off him but subduing it. I had no doubt Duke’s father was a badass in his day.
I didn’t dare glance to my side to see what shade of pissed off Duke was at me for this outburst, so I focused on his parents. The attractive couple that laughed easily, and obviously loved their son and each other. There was an easy happiness to them, but a sadness too. I saw something in their eyes that told me that Duke was a source of this. He didn’t come home often, that much was apparent. For what reason, I couldn’t understand, seeing the surface, but everything was always so much more than surface. The more beautiful, usually the uglier it was below.
“I stand by my choice,” Anna said, looking to her son fondly. “And my ability to see the future.”
Her husband rolled his eyes in what seemed to be a practiced way. “I’m Andrew, by the way,” he said with that same ease. There was no hesitancy in Duke bringing me here. They weren’t bracing for me to be a bitch. They weren’t expecting to disapprove of me. Weren’t reserving judgement. They loved their son and the mere fact he brought me here seemed to show them that I was worth…something.