Fairytale Love - Becca & Brian (2 page)

“Is Chase going to be picking you up from the airport?” Stella asked, hope brimming from her eyes.

“No, Brian is,” Becca explained, pointing to his picture once again.

“Oh, right.” Stella nodded and patted the back of Becca’s hand again. “That makes sense as to why you’re not dressed for paparazzi pictures, sweetie pie.”

Becca looked down. She was wearing jeans, a white V-neck T-shirt and Converse tennis shoes. Stella was right—she was definitely not dressed to have her picture taken. Now that she really looked at herself, she started to question whether or not she was dressed to see Brian for the first time in six months.

Why hadn’t she put more thought into her appearance before leaving this morning? It wasn’t like she hadn’t put thought into the fact that she’d be seeing Brian again. That’s
all
she’d thought about for months.

Shoot
. She couldn’t even apply some makeup to sexy herself up a bit. All of her beauty products were in her suitcase.

Nerves bubbled up inside of her like a volcano ready to erupt at the prospect of Brian seeing her like
this
. For the last two weeks, she’d been lucky if she’d even gotten three hours of sleep a night. She hadn’t plucked her eyebrows since…since…crap, since
Christmas
, which was the last time she’d seen Brian.

It doesn’t matter,
Becca reminded herself. They were just friends.

“Are you okay, dear?” Stella asked, looking genuinely concerned. “You’ve gone as white as a ghost.”

Becca had always had extremely fair skin, but whenever she got nervous, upset, or scared, it was as if any skin pigmentation she did possess drained out of her completely.

“I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” Becca wasn’t sure if she was assuring herself or Stella. Probably both.

“So, who are all of these other lovely people?” Stella asked, her voice sounding a little high in forced interest.

Becca appreciated the woman’s not-so-subtle attempt to distract her, even though she knew that Stella had no idea what was weighing on her mind. “These are my sisters. The bride is Haley. She’s the oldest, and behind her is her husband Eddie. Then the redhead is Krista. She’s the second oldest. And you know her fiancé Chase. Next up is Jessie, and that’s Zach, who is her husband now, but at the time this pic was taken, they were just ‘pretending’ to be a couple.”

“
Ooooh,
that sounds like fun.” Stella’s eyes sparked with excitement as she rubbed her hands together conspiratorially.

“It was certainly fun to watch.” Becca smiled, thinking back on watching her
extremely
private sister have to ‘pretend’ to have a very public relationship. “So that’s all my sisters. Then these guys”—she pointed to the back row of Sloan men—“are my cousins.”

“My, what a good-looking family you have,” Stella said with appreciation.

“Thanks.” Becca hadn’t really given it much thought before now, but looking down at them all together, she guessed Stella had a point. They weren’t a bad-looking group. “This is Seth. He’s the oldest of the five boys. And that’s his wife Amber.”

“She is stunning,” Stella breathed.

“She is,” Becca agreed. She remembered the first time she’d met Amber. She’d thought that she was the most beautiful person Becca had ever seen in real life. That was ten years ago and she was
still
the most beautiful person Becca had ever seen.

“And who is that?” Stella asked, pointing to Riley. He stood out among her cousins as being the only blond. Also, all of her cousins were in amazing shape, but Riley looked like he could be on the cover of a fitness magazine.

“That’s Riley. He’s the second oldest, and next to him is his wife Chelle, who is Haley’s husband Eddie’s little sister. Also, fun fact, Riley and Eddie have been best friends since grade school—”

“Oh boy,” Stella interrupted. “How did Eddie take it when Riley started making moves on his little sister?”

Becca laughed that Stella had picked up on that. This woman might be up there in years, but she was still sharp as a tack. “From what I heard, not well. But they worked it out.” Then Becca continued. “Next up is Jason, and that is his wife Katie. Then there’s Alex and his wife Jamie, and the baby of the family is Bobby, and that’s his wife Sophie.”

“And then you and Brian,” Stella said, her eyes glimmering with affection.

Yep. And then me and Brian.

* * *

“Oh come on!” Brian hit his palm against the steering wheel. He could not believe that traffic was
this
bad. It also didn’t help that people were driving like idiots because of it. He’d just been cut off for the fifth time in less than twenty minutes.

Normally, he was not a road-rage guy, but he
hated
being late under normal circumstances and today was
not
normal circumstances. He would be seeing Becca for the first time in six months. His nerves had been shot for the last couple of weeks leading up to this day, and they weren’t improving while he was sitting here, trapped, in bumper-to-bumper gridlock.

He’d even left for the airport an hour earlier than necessary to give himself some extra time to arrive and then prepare himself before he laid eyes on her again. He wanted to have time to try to set the scene of their meeting in his head so he could mentally rehearse acting like the guy he’d always been to her, like the guy she depended on, like the guy he
was
—her best friend. Nothing more. He had to make absolutely sure that Brian—the man who’d realized that, sometime over the last decade, he’d fallen madly, totally, completely in love with Becca—did not make an appearance.

Usually, Brian was a ‘what you see is what you get’ type of guy. He’d never tried to be something he wasn’t. In grade school, when kids would tease him about his best friend being a girl, Brian hadn’t cared. His best friend
was
a girl. In middle school, when the guys from his baseball team had given him crap about being in the school play, Brian had shrugged it off. In high school, when he’d had to break the news to his parents that he, their eldest son, didn’t want to stay in his hometown of Harper’s Crossing and take over the family business
or
accept his full-ride scholarship to play baseball at Ball State, but instead was headed to New York because he had been accepted into NYU’s film and television program, it had been hard but he’d done it because he knew he had to be true to himself.

Brian had known that he would have been miserable staying home and running Scott Automotive Repair Shop. Unfortunately, his younger brother Brenden had had no interest in it either and had accepted his baseball scholarship. The kid had been doing well too, up until he’d torn his Achilles’ tendon. Brian didn’t know what his brother’s plans were now.

His cousin Josh, however, had always been a grease monkey, and he wanted to step in when Brian’s dad finally announced his impending retirement. Since Brian had been back home, taking an undetermined hiatus from NYU to help his parents after his dad’s heart attack, he’d spent quite a lot of time in the garages of Scott Auto and Josh had been indispensable.

Growing up, Josh had always been the one to do things like trick out their ten speeds or switch out the wheels on their skateboards to make them go faster. In high school, he’d spent two summers rebuilding the engine on a ’67 Chevy Camaro the boys had inherited from their grandfather. Gears, engines, cars—that was his cousin’s passion. In Brian’s mind, even though he had unexpectedly ended up back in Harper’s Crossing, everything had worked out exactly how it was supposed to.

As a kid, he’d always loved movies and been fascinated by
everything
it took to make them. In his teens, he’d studied films by Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and Clint Eastwood. Brian had read everything he could about film production, from lighting and cinematography, to wardrobe and location scouting. Film, movies, production—that had always been
his
passion.

The alarm on his phone buzzed loudly, interrupting Brian’s short mental reprieve from obsessing about Becca. He reached down to turn off the alert. He’d set it to go off when Becca’s plane landed.

She was here. Back in Illinois. He was going to be seeing her face to face for the first time since her sister’s wedding back in December.

The thumping of his heart was pounding loudly between Brian’s ears. As he took a deep breath, his head fell back against the headrest. His palms were beginning to grow damp. He opened his fingers, stretching them out before closing them again, gripping the steering wheel.

Looking up, he saw that his exit was in one and a half miles. At the rate traffic was moving, it’d probably take him ten minutes to reach it. He tried to calculate parking and then how long it would take him to make it to baggage claim. He probably had a good forty-five minutes before he saw her. Before his acting skills would really be tested.

Brian started gauging roughly how much time they would be spending together this summer. How much time he would have to pretend that
nothing
had changed between them. Pretend that his feelings hadn’t decided to take on a life of their own. Pretend that he didn’t know how her soft lips felt. Pretend that he didn’t think about—on a nearly constant basis—what her tongue brushing against his had done to him. Pretend his thoughts weren’t consumed with the visceral reaction his body had had when her soft curves had been pressed up against him.

Basically, he needed to know how much time he would have to disguise, suppress, and hide his true feelings about the most important person in his life.

He guessed it all really depended on the outcome of the open call today. If it went well, then Brian would be gone for half the summer shooting and then promoting the reality show. If he didn’t book it, then he was going to have to find some other way to keep his distance from her—without drawing any attention to the fact that that was what he was doing.

Frustration flooded through him.
Never
in his life would Brian have guessed that he would be trying to come up with reasons, situations, and excuses to avoid Becca. She was his favorite person in the entire world. The yin to his yang. The Scrappy Doo to his Scooby Doo. The Robin to his Batman. His partner in crime. Becca was his heart.

Which was exactly the reason that she absolutely could not know that anything had changed between them.

As he turned the wheel to pull off the freeway, he tried to think about what the fallout would be if Becca found out, somehow, that his feelings had changed. Just the thought made his entire body tense. She was the sweetest, most understanding girl in the world. There was no doubt in Brian’s mind that, if she knew what was going on, she would be kind and gracious, but there was also no doubt in his mind that things would change between them. Forever.

Brian hated pretending or acting with the most important person in the world to him, but he would never forgive himself if he did something that damaged their relationship. Also, he never wanted to put Becca in the position of having to let him down easy or ever feeling like she couldn’t go to him because things were weird. As much as she meant to him, he also knew what he meant to her. She depended on Brian. She told Brian everything. She trusted Brian completely. When good or bad things happened in either of their lives, the first call they made was to each other.

Their relationship was like those old MasterCard commercials a few years ago—priceless. It was irreplaceable. It was everything.

Brian’s thoughts continued to turn over scenario after scenario of what if or worst case until he rolled down the window to his Jeep and pressed the square button on the ticket dispenser at the entry of the parking structure. As he pulled the ticket from the silver box, the bar rose and Brian pressed on the gas pedal. He drove up and down the rows of parked cars looking for an open space and thinking about the one question that had been eating him up for the past year.

Was it better to just be best friends with your soul mate—knowing the agony you felt from the fact that “friends” was all you would ever be—but still have them in your life? Every time he battled with that question, he came up with the same answer. Yes. Yes, it was. The risk reward was just not worth it. Because the risk meant losing what he and Becca had.

So, after he pulled into a spot, he turned the ignition off and looked into the rearview mirror with determination burning brightly in his brown eyes. It was showtime.