“How’s work, Mel?” Dad asks. “Booked anything lately?”
I shake my head, picking at the white peonies sitting in the vase in front of me. “No gigs, but I’ve been auditioning like crazy.”
“You, uh, you doing okay?” he asks, chin tucked and his concentrated attention gliding across the room toward my preoccupied mother. I know what he’s asking.
“Yes, Dad,” I say.
My family has never been big on handouts or free rides, and I love that about them. We’ve all worked our asses off to get to where we are—except maybe Mom … she just married well. But Gram is self-made. My grandfather was self-made. My father and my uncle are self-made. Maritza is starting up her own PR agency as soon as she graduates from college. And I refuse to buck tradition.
“I’ve got enough money saved from that Lifetime movie,” I say, half-lying. It’s running out quicker than I realized despite the fact that I’ve become disgustingly frugal. Going on dates with wealthy men who took me to fine restaurants was the only way I was ever going to see the inside of Koi or Spago, and when I’m not dining on someone else’s dime, I’m eating steel cut oatmeal and avocado toast at home on the cheap. “I’m fine.”
For now.
He reaches across the table and covers my hand with his, giving me a gentle smile that crinkles the sides of his blue eyes.
Mom and Gram bring the food to the table and I locate plates and silver in the china cabinet.
“You know, Melrose, I was going to tell you … my good friend Cher always said that men are a luxury and not a necessity,” Gram says as she waves a wooden serving spoon in the air. “And I couldn’t agree more.”
I laugh to myself. She’s so random sometimes.
Gram points the spoon to me, a single penciled brow arching.
“So don’t worry about how happy your cousin is or how in love she is or any of that, my love. You do you.” She smiles and takes a seat at the head of the table. “Bitsy, pass the pepper mill, would you?”
She winks at me because she gets me.
She’s truly the only one who ever has.
We’re spirit animals, she and I.
We share a love of the dramatic arts, iconic films, and anything old Hollywood.
A lot of people love their grandmas, but I love mine more.
Sutter’s pushing a mower across the yard when I get home from Gram’s.
And he’s shirtless.
So very shirtless.
I park my car in the driveway and watch his tanned body glisten in the afternoon sun, my eyes skimming over the rippled muscles that wrap his torso, the way they bulge and move with each step and push.
For an insane little minute, I wonder what it’d be like to run my hands along them, to taste his hot flesh, to feel his full mouth against mine as the weight of his muscled body pins me until I surrender.
Yanking the keys from my ignition, I snap myself out of it and head inside.
I’m going mad.
I’m truly going mad.
He was nice to me once. Once.
And now I’m going all soft.
Good God. I need to pull myself together.
I STEP OUT OF THE shower and wipe the fog off the mirror with my hand. Very few things in life feel as good as a cool shower after an hour of yard work and rinsing the scent of grass clippings off warm, sun-baked skin.
I have a date tonight—one I’ve been looking forward to all week. One that involves a six pack on ice, delivery pizza with an entire pig’s worth of meat toppings, the Golden State Warriors, and the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Cinching a towel around my waist, I head to my room to get changed before going downstairs where the one and only TV in the house—my seventy-inch baby—will be the star of the show for the next couple of hours.
Only there’s one problem.
Perched at one end of the sofa, mindlessly paging through a glossy tabloid while occasionally glancing up at some stupid reality TV show, is Melrose.
A flash of heat passes through me and my fists clench.
I’m not angry, per se … I just don’t want to be an absolute douche.
“Oh, hey.” She glances up from her magazine when she notices me lingering in the doorway.
“You, uh, watching this?” I point to the TV screen where a Botoxed woman with overinflated lips squeals with delight because her husband bought her a golden Bentley for her birthday.
Melrose smiles. “Yeah. It’s my little guilty pleasure. I know it’s horrible, but it’s the only show I watch religiously. There’s a marathon on today, so I’m getting caught up. I missed the last couple of weeks with moving and everything.”
She’s fixated by the bullshit on the screen, which now shows some blonde lady talking crap about some British lady who had a little too much to drink at her husband’s birthday party and knocked over his two-thousand-dollar birthday cake.