“You’ve been seen around town with your leading lady.”
No use in denying it. They were actors, for Christ’s sake, and the occasional paparazzi dash into a see-and-be-seen restaurant was part of the job.
Yeah, he’d taken Joann out. Assuming that she learned her lesson and wouldn’t try to be a bitch around him or Paige again, he’d made nice and given her a media circus worthy of the woman’s legendary status. The press had gone wild when they showed up at The Ivy—something she’d endlessly milked.
So, what the fuck was she up to now?
He could have shrugged as if it was no big deal, but he knew when he was being set up and simply waited him out.
“According to my sources, one of the TV outlets will be running a story that quotes your co-star.”
A stone wall couldn’t have been more immoveable—only instead of guarding against an awkward interview moment caught on film, Edward steeled himself from leaping up and rushing the little prick. He wouldn’t even have to get close enough to smack him before the dude shit himself.
“She inferred to a colleague of mine …”
He snorted derisively at the word. A colleague, my ass. The gotcha-paps would gleefully sell each other out for a buck.
“… that she was crossing do it with a tattooed guy off her bucket list.”
Edward began counting back from a hundred. Anything to control the surge of rage sparked by the mention of the damnable sex video.
It wasn’t him, goddammit, and he could fucking prove it.
Only, to do that, he’d have to reveal his birthday suit with the distinctive ink to the entire world. And that would never happen.
Fuck.
In the video that he’d studied along with his lawyer, it did appear the guy had a tattoo similar to Gideon’s. That alone was the extent of the evidence everyone was basing his participation in the tawdry tape on.
But the wartime tattoo covered his hip and part of a thigh with ink extending to his groin that for lack of a better way of putting it framed one side of his junk. He’d been drunk as shit and on leave with a couple of buddies when they’d stumbled into a tattoo parlor and tried to outdo each other on who could be the most daring.
Shit. He’d gotten damn close with that tribal bullshit, some of it now obscured by the hair surrounding his cock. In the end, he’d gone as far as some ink near his balls and then tapped out.
And that, my friends, was why he knew it wasn’t him in the damn video. That guy’s privates were pornstar shaved, and though some ink was visible, probably Photoshopped in, there certainly wasn’t any ball action going on.
He had no idea who the fuck was out there impersonating him, only sure that it wasn’t Marsh. And it wasn’t Tony Murtaugh because that crazy as fuck dude had inked his entire shaft while Edward and the rest of the guys on hand cracked jokes and covered their junk in horror. Sadly, the memory was burned in his mind along with the knowledge that he could pick out Tony’s dick ink in a faceless lineup. So of all the males on the planet around his age, those were the only two he was sure it wasn’t.
Gideon Shaw…meet a brick wall. Defending, denying, or threatening a lawsuit was only going to extend the life of the salacious gossip and put untold millions in the coffers of Fierce.
He needed Paige. Why did today have to be her day off?
Ah, fuck it. He was done with this shit.
Tearing off the microphone threaded through his shirt, he stood and glared down at the worthless excuse for a celebrity journalist.
“Interview over,” he growled with his back to the camera.
And it was.
Her fingers tapping absently on the steering wheel, Paige gritted her teeth with mounting frustration as the clusterfuck people called driving in L.A. made her slowly mental. In fifteen minutes, she’d managed to go three miles. At this rate, she’d get onto PCH sometime next week.
Living in Los Angeles and going to the beach shouldn’t require an itinerary. It was quite literally ridiculous. That it took ninety minutes on a good day to travel the twenty miles between WeHo and Malibu was insane.
Hoping a drive along the Pacific Coast Highway would be just what she needed, it had been an easy decision to head out to the beach house and check up on Edward. He’d been on his own all day, which was sometimes a recipe for damage control on her end. The truth was, she played the Hollywood game much better than he did. By regarding it as the business it was, she knew how to get it done. But him? He was clueless, probably because Gideon Shaw was a creation. And the man pulling the strings, Edward? He wasn’t the sort to give half a shit about ego and protocol and schmoozing and a dozen other little things in which she excelled.
Bottom line … sometimes the decent man inside didn’t play well with his swaggering and very public studly exterior. Checking up to see whether he’d wandered off the reservation seemed like an entirely reasonable thing to do. Even on her day off.
Liar, liar … was that your panties on fire?
Stupid librarian. Shut up!
Stabbing at the radio controls, she looked for Ozzy’s station because nothing drowned out the noise of one’s conscience going up in flames like some thundering rock. First tune? “Gypsy Road.” She laughed. Cinderella. Why the hell not?
Singing along with a vengeance, Paige rocked out as she crawled along aware with every passing second that she was getting closer to Edward.
Beyond glad that his latest project was completed, she was looking forward to some downtime before they had to be on location again. And because downtime was code for spending all her time with Edward, well … what wasn’t there to look forward to?
She glanced around at the other cars as if the drivers could hear her private thoughts. Not even the booming music could drown out the truth—that she was utterly and completely in love with Edward Banning.
Slogging through the hellish traffic just so she could hang out with him might seem awfully forward, but Paige knew he’d be thrilled. When she was around, he could leave Gideon Shaw at the door and just be Edward.
He needed that.
So did she.
A tremendous wave thundered ashore spreading along the stretch of beach where Edward had planted. The sucktacular day had destroyed his mood to the point that after pulling the plug on the interview from hell, he’d headed home. Once there, the displeasure over the day’s events had driven him down to the water’s edge. There was practically a chemical reaction inside him when he was near the ocean. Or a lake. Or a stream … or fuck, anything that contained water. But today—today he needed the expanse of an endless ocean to blunt the angry firestorm raging inside.
It was times like these that made him rethink his career plan. Maybe six years was enough. Well, actually seven, he admitted wryly. Seven—because he already had work obligations next year, and he wasn’t the type to walk away from his commitments.
Digging into the sand, he gathered big handfuls that sifted through his fingers. Watching the stream of loose grains cascade into a pile reminded him of other times when his hands had been covered in sand. Maybe the thought wouldn’t have been such a burn if those other times had involved a beach instead of an unforgiving landscape.
At least here, the air had a soft, ocean-misty quality while that other? Even after all this time, he remembered the smell of fear, rage, and danger that marked those violent days—something he had tried hard to forget. Dragging that shit into his life after the Army was a big, fat NO. Not if he wanted to keep his sanity.
He’d been a sophomore at the university when, in a moment of extreme patriotism, he’d quite boldly put his comfortable life on hold and had enlisted. At the time, plenty of people had thought he was out of his mind, but his motivations had been rock solid. It might seem like an overused expression these days, but for him it really had been … For God and Country.