Confusion clouded his expression. “This isn’t how I expected this conversation to go.”
“Why? Because I fell for you a little?” She shrugged, feigning a nonchalance she could never, ever feel. He was going to lose his career over her unless she let him go, and she loved him too much to be that selfish. “Who wouldn’t? This has been the most amazing fairy tale. But fairy tales aren’t real. Our clock just struck midnight. I understand that, Kris. Ball’s over. It’s time to get back to reality.”
The confusion melted from Kris’s eyes and twisted the knife a little farther into her heart. He was a sucker for honesty, and she’d spoken nothing but cold hard truth. But now she had to lie to him about the most important thing.
“Reality is, I’ve got a bruise or two but I feel the same way when the Cowboys lose to the Redskins in overtime. I’ll get over it. We’ve only known each other a few days.”
Her voice broke. They weren’t and never could be strangers.
“If that’s how you feel,” he said.
Maybe she should call Kyla’s agent if he believed that. His expression was marble hard and unapproachable and she couldn’t look at him anymore. “Pack, or you’ll miss your plane. Check out when you leave, and I’ll be right behind you.”
“Where will you go?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. It’s time I figured out how to rescue myself.”
He stood and helped her up, but didn’t release her hand. He hauled her into a fierce embrace, and she almost lost her flimsy grip on sanity as his familiar arms came around her, sliding her into the groove of his body no other woman could possibly fit as well. Greek whispered through her hair, and he kissed the spot where his words had branded her scalp.
“What did you say?” She pulled back and searched his expression.
“Maybe in another life.” There was a glimmer in his eye, and it looked like sorrow. But it was probably only a reflection of what he saw in hers.
She fled into her room, the one she hadn’t used since the first night, and lay on the bed, hating the scratchy comforter against her raw skin. She stared at the clock with dry eyes until an hour and four minutes had passed. Then she picked up the phone on the bedside table and called Pamela Sue to wire her some money because she had no pride and no choices left.
“Thank God,” Pamela Sue said when VJ identified herself. “I’ve been calling every hotel in Dallas for hours. Beverly Porter said you’re not staying with her and no one had any idea where you went. I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but your daddy had a heart attack.”
Kris couldn’t sleep. His condo was too hushed. Too cold. Too L.A. and impersonal with its mix of dark natural stone surfaces, concrete floor stained black and masculine furnishings he’d never thought twice about. It was all too...not where he wanted to be.
He plunked onto the leather sofa near the rush of a river rock waterfall in the living room and ran through scenes in his head, the same place he’d sat a thousand times. It was not working.
It was 2:00 a.m. That was pretty standard. He wore lounging pants and no shirt. Also typical. The leather chilled his back, keeping him alert and honest, and the peaceful shush of the waterfall washed street noise from the atmosphere. Totally normal.
He kept listening for VJ to tiptoe into the room, wearing that virginal white robe with the loose collar. The one so easy to slip off her soft shoulders and bare her beautiful body, allowing him access to that butterfly she’d inked—permanently—into her skin.
Not at all normal.
Why couldn’t he shake her out of his system? She lingered in his mind in a persistence of memory tattooed across his consciousness. Impossible to eliminate. Impossible to embrace. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t feel. Never in his life had he been unable to create, to escape into the imaginary as a method to deal with reality.
That refuge was gone.
He should be storyboarding Visions of Black, if nothing else, but definitely working up proposals to bring in additional investors. Instead, he was obsessing over the pain and resignation on VJ’s face when he’d told her he was leaving.
There’d been a moment, back in the hotel room, when he thought she was going to fall in his arms and beg him to stay. Demand that he love her like she loved him. Verbalize on his behalf what was in his heart because she saw inside him so much more clearly than he did. He’d braced for it, uncertain how he’d respond. The moment passed, and it became painfully obvious the scene wasn’t going to end that way.
Instead, he’d thoroughly killed her belief in happily ever after because he couldn’t find the courage to reach for it. He’d hurt her, irreparably damaging something precious.