“Let’s not make this any weirder than it already is,” he stated flatly.
* * *
After another couple hours on the road, he found himself glancing over at Gia’s hands again. She had a restless habit of moving her fingers on her thighs in little squeezing movements. He found her short fingernails scraping against the denim—and imagining her firm, supple thighs beneath the fabric—highly distracting.
He wished like hell he were one of those people in the diner who had been fooled by her skillful acting and his makeup. Having prior knowledge of what was under those slouchy jeans and the shapeless shirt was like a splinter under his skin. Something about covering up Gia rubbed him the wrong way. The idea of ripping through the disguise to the real woman kept creeping into his mind, unwelcome.
The fact was, the stupid fantasy of exposing the real Gia underneath the very disguise he’d engineered was turning him on, and that irritated him a lot.
“What do you suppose the weather will be like in—what did you say the name of the place where we’re going was?” she interrupted her own thought abruptly.
“Vulture’s Canyon.”
“Weird name for a town.”
“It’s a weird town, so it’s fitting,” he assured her. “And we probably won’t go into the town itself much. We’ll be pretty isolated at John and Jennifer’s house. It’ll probably still be warm. October stays warm there, although there might be some cool fall days.”
“You sound like you’ve been there a lot.”
“I have. Remember—”
He halted abruptly.
“What?” Gia asked, sitting forward. She’d caught his mistake. He’d been about to mention something they’d talked about during their first meeting. That, in turn, had reminded him of something else that annoyed him. He felt her gaze on his cheek. “Seth? Were you going to say something about that night?”
“Yeah,” he admitted gruffly after a tense pause, requiring no further clarification as to which night she meant.
“Do we really have to tiptoe around it?” she asked, sounding a little exacerbated. “We slept together. It’s not the end of the world.”
“Yeah. You’re right. Just forget it.”
“No,” she said. He exhaled irritably, tightening his hand on the wheel.
“I thought you just said it wasn’t the end of the world, and we should just forget it,” he said.
“You said we should forget it. I just asked if we had to walk on eggshells about it. What were you going to say?”
He frowned at the road. The sun was starting to dip behind them, giving the pavement and the surrounding desert a rosy tinge.
“Fine. I was going to say, ‘Do you remember when you asked me if I’d ever worked with the director Rill Pierce?’ I hadn’t then, but I have now. That’s who I visit a lot in Vulture’s Canyon. He’s married to Katie Hughes, who is the sister of Everett Hughes, who married—”
“Joy. Your niece,” Gia finished for him, her voice sounding thoughtful all of a sudden . . . tentative. “I knew you did Razor Pass and Keeping It Light with Pierce since we met a couple years ago,” she said, mentioning two of Rill’s recent films.
“And I know now that the person whom you mentioned knowing that had won the Pierce scholarship to UCLA was you,” he said.
Her hands moved on her thighs as if she was trying to dry them.
“You were a theater major at UCLA, not a history major. Why’d you have to lie about that, in addition to everything else?” He gave her a hard glance. She was watching him, but he couldn’t read her expression with her makeup and sunglasses. “Never mind,” he said when she didn’t respond immediately. “It doesn’t matter.”
She made a sound of disgust.
“What?” he asked sharply. What right did she have to be annoyed? He was the one lied to, not her.
“I was a double major in history and theater, for your information. I wasn’t lying about loving history. At the time I met you, I was doing an adaptation of Nine Days a Queen and was playing Lady Jane Grey.”
His annoyance swelled at her uptilted chin and regal manner. She was such a damn riddle box. Only Gia could suddenly make him bizarrely imagine Lady Jane Grey being portrayed by the beach-bum teenage boy sitting in the passenger seat.
“I often choose historical roles,” she continued. “As for Rill Pierce, his scholarships are for theater and film students. I didn’t want you to find out I was an actress back then. If I’d told you I was the one who had won a Pierce scholarship, you would’ve asked me which scholarship I’d won. And in case you’ve forgotten, we’ve already established that I knew at the time you possessed this unreasonable prejudice against actresses,” she finished with force.