“Uh, yeah. I’m sorry. I don’t remember your name.”
“Harrison. Hughes. I moved away from California the summer after my tenth birthday.”
My body jolts like a surge of electricity has been sent coursing through it. Harrison Hughes. God.
“Your brother…” he continues.
But before he can finish, I do it for him. “Hated your fucking guts.”
His answering smile is alarmingly brilliant. Truly. I’ve never seen someone be so excited to be hated before.
A soft chuckle leaves his lips. “So, you do remember me.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. It’s hard to forget the actual living, breathing bane of your brother’s existence. Sure, I’ve done it for more than two decades, but that’s because it’s so much easier to be out of mind when you’re out of sight. Now that he’s here, in the flesh, all the memories feel omnipresent.
The bloody noses. The pranks. The endless nights with a broody, distressed brother making family dinners a living hell.
Harrison Hughes was a thorn in the Weaver family’s side more times than I can count.
Until…he wasn’t.
The day he moved away, my brother burned all the things he’d stolen from him in effigy—except Harrison’s Dallas Cowboys hat.
I pilfered it for my, um…cough…collectibles. Even at five, I wasn’t immune to the fact that my brother’s archnemesis was crush-worthy. I suppose, back then, I had some kind of organic sense of what a hot, older guy was. At least, I thought I did. My sense of it now, sitting across from the version of him that’s all grown-up, would argue otherwise.
My throat thickens, and the air around us warms.
My God, he is a good-looking man. Strong jaw, sharp, green eyes, and an award-winning smile, he too could be on the cover of magazines. Not to mention the way his rain-soaked clothes hug the taut lines of his powerful looking body.
I’m completely surprised when the bartender approaches, and he orders an iced tea. He must notice my interest because he turns to me with a small smile and a shrug.
“I’m not drinking today.”
I pick up my water and take a swig before replying, “Me either.”
He looks to my vodka and cranberry on the bar, and I shrug. “I thought I might, but I decided not to.”
His face is kind as the corner of his lip curls up, and he shakes his head.
“Jesus. What a great surprise. A really, really nice one to get today.” I blush a little as he leans into the bar counter with an elbow and turns his attention to me so that his body is squarely head on. “So, what have you been up to since then?” he asks casually, tucking his foot onto the rung of the barstool behind him.
I choke on my water as a laugh fights for real estate in my throat. “Are you asking me what’s happened in the last twenty-five years?” I question, and he nods enthusiastically with a grin.
“Pretty much.”
I smile sardonically. “A thing or two.”
The truth is, the last twenty-five years have been filled to the brim. Shortly after he left town, my parents enrolled my brother Luca and me in an acting class, and at the teacher’s praise, proceeded to run us through every audition in Hollywood.
The Weaver Siblings, they called us. As a brother and sister set, we did just about as much business as we could handle by the time I made it to my eleventh birthday. My parents pulled us out of school and enrolled us in an independent education course—better known as homeschooling—to accommodate the hours. It only took my brother about a year to get his GED, and my focus quickly became very inadequately pointed at school.
We worked hard and long, usually without any say in our own decisions, so by the time my brother’s eighteenth birthday rolled around, he was a master of self-destruction. Drinking, drugs, partying—you name it, he was into it.
After a few years of driving his own life into the ground, he left. Hollywood, fame, money—and me, unfortunately—Luca Weaver gave it all up. Some days, I really miss having someone to commiserate with.
And yet, giving up has never seemed like an option for me. I’ve invested too much time and work. And truthfully, I almost don’t even know who I am outside of the fame anymore. I haven’t even spoken to someone who didn’t recognize me as Raquel Weaver, the Virgin Sexpot from the Silver Screen, in more than a decade.
That’s probably why I’d forgotten how nice it is…
“A thing or two?” he questions.
“You know, a little of this, a little of that,” I add, and he just grins.
“I’m going to assume that’s a summarized version,” he says teasingly, and it’s all I can do to nod. “So, are you living here now or…?”
“Still in California.”
“What brought you to New York?”
What brought me to New York? Does he really not know who the persona Raquel Weaver is? No way I could be that fucking lucky…right?