Pizza My Heart(A Billionaire Romance, Part 2)(23)

Finally, I got dressed into my own clothes, towel-dried my hair, and padded downstairs to go explore.

I should’ve been doing something—anything—else, but I was finding it nearly impossible to leave the comfort and confines of Devon’s palace. I was unsure of myself, of my place in his life. I didn’t want to get in the way of his life any more than I already had. I was well aware, thanks to Chaz, that I was a distraction—something that kept Devon from realizing his full potential.

But every time I tried to move on, tried to go back to Dallas or get away from Devon, he protested. He wanted me with him. He wanted to take care of me in spite of what Chaz was saying.

So I tried to stay out of the way. Tried to keep quiet. Hung back every time Devon asked me to go do something with him, to go make an appearance with him. I didn’t understand it. If I really was as much trouble for Devon as Chaz told me I was, I didn’t understand why Devon kept on asking me to go places with him. I thought he would’ve wanted me swept under a rug somewhere, so that’s what I tried to do to myself.

Hide.

But with the giant house empty and me with nothing but the remnants of my grief and my temerity over my newfound infamy, I had to keep myself distracted. It was probably ungrateful of me. Devon had done so much—was doing so much. It was a terrible way to pay back his kindness, by creeping through his house.

It made me feel bad, but it was something of an obsession. Devon was open enough that I was certain he’d answer anything about himself that I asked, but I didn’t want to ask. I preferred to explore, alone, gleaning clues about him from the things he kept in the place where he spent most of his time. He might travel a lot for promotions and filming, but something kept him coming back to this remote palace, perched on a bluff overlooking the coast. What secrets did his home contain?

He watched a lot of movies. That much was evident from both his career and the theater room in the house. We hadn’t had a chance to enjoy the deep burgundy leather seats that reclined completely, munching on a bag of popcorn from the machine in the corner.

He also took care of himself, judging from his rock-hard body and the gym room, bristling with the latest models of exercise machines and equipment. This room was lined with mirrors so he could check on the development of his muscles, I was sure. In them, I appeared exactly as I was—an imposter, an intruder, slipping through his life, not belonging for one second.

The door to what I could only label as a study creaked open, and I wondered how often he came in here, sat at the fine chair behind the mahogany desk, poring over the books that lined the shelves around the room. I cocked my head at a thick stack of bright white pages on the desk—the only thing marring an otherwise clean surface. Was he working on something now? I didn’t think I’d so much as seen him pass by this room in the time I’d been living here.

Feeling extra guilty and sneaky, I rounded the desk to discover that it was a script. For some reason, I was intrigued. This was part of Devon’s job, perhaps the part of him I knew least about. I’d seen his teeth gleam as he grinned in promotional photoshoots and during appearances, but I’d never really witnessed the work that went on behind the scenes of his success. Scripts were are a part of that, a blueprint for a blockbuster hit.

I thumbed through this one, flipping through the pages, hefting it, trying to judge the nature of it by its weight. Were all of them this thick? This one seemed to be pretty thorough.

I paused on one of the first pages, reading through the character descriptions, attempting to get a feel for what the story was about.

Then, I sat heavily in the chair, my legs unable to support my weight.

This was a story about a girl and her grandmother, aptly named Nana, I read in the notes. The girl was average in every way, but could perhaps be a beauty given the right clothes and makeup and direction, it continued. The girl was miserable taking care of her Nana, but couldn’t get out of it, as Nana had taken care of the girl when she was younger. She leads a life of mediocrity until, by some chance, she meets a handsome movie star. The script indicated that this meeting and the details of it were to be determined. There was a handwritten note in the margin, saying that delivering pizza conveyed a sense of grunginess in the girl that would make the audience dislike her.

I read as fast as I could, rage rising in me with each page I flipped. It was all here, all of it—my encounter with Devon in the Dallas hotel room, only this character seemed to come out of it a lot better than he had. There was the sweet fangirl of a nana, even the trip to Hawaii. My eyes filling with furious tears, I scanned over her death scene, alone on a beach, her oxygen tank nowhere to be found.