He's So Fine (18 page)

C
ole couldn’t remember walking out of Unique Boutique, but when he blinked, he was standing outside in a very light mist. He actually had to look down at himself and make sure he was still upright, he’d gone that numb.

Reeling, he shook his head. She wasn’t Olivia Bentley. That was just someone she’d made up. Her entire life was a lie. No, scratch that. She hadn’t told him enough about herself to equal an entire life. Just bits and pieces.

But those bits and pieces had all been lies.

His brain was stuck on that. He’d opened himself up and revealed himself to her. And she’d lied about…everything.

“Cole.”

As if from a distance, he saw himself shoving his hand into his pocket for his keys and heading for his truck. He was on autopilot, which worked for him. Numb.

“Cole, please stop.”

He didn’t until he was at his truck and she put a hand on his arm.

“How much did you hear?” Olivia asked.

He stared at her. “Seriously? Is that the concern here?”

“I can explain,” she said.

Yeah, he’d heard that one before. From Susan’s lips on the day of Gil’s funeral. And hell if he was going to be made a fool of for a second time in a row.

Too late, asshole
.

Shrugging her off, he hauled open the door of his truck and slid behind the wheel.

Olivia stepped into the space between the cab of the truck and the door so that he couldn’t close it.

“We need to talk,” she said.

He let out a harsh laugh and tilted his head back to stare up at the roof of the truck. “Now she wants to talk.”

“Please,” she whispered.

He closed his eyes and his heart to the pain in her voice. “It’s too late for that.”

“No,” she said. “When I walked out last night, you said it was okay, that I was just mad. That’s what this is, right? It’s your turn to walk out mad, and later it will be okay. Right?”

“Wrong.” So very wrong. “Olivia, you let me think you didn’t have any family. You stood in my mother’s house, moved by my relationship with my family, and let me console you because you were alone. I wanted to make things better for you.”

She was pale and wide-eyed. “It’s…hard to explain.”

“No,” he said. “It’s one word. Lies.” He turned the key. His truck engine roared to life, which was a relief. Something was working.

She reached for him but he caught her hand in his, and put his other hand to her stomach to hold her back.

But touching her was a mistake, a big one. His brain hadn’t yet gotten the message that he’d been screwed over yet again. And plus she was shaking.

Apparently he could feel something after all.

“You don’t understand,” Olivia said softly, hoping to reach him. Desperate to reach him. “All my life, it’s been me playing someone else, so that I didn’t even know who I really was. I stopped being honest with people a long time ago.”

“That was your choice,” he said.

“Yeah, a hard-learned choice. The last person I told the truth to was my college boyfriend. He had a film fest and charged admission to the party without warning me. I showed up and it was…” She shook her head. “Humiliating, to say the least.”

“Jesus.” He scrubbed a hand down his face. “That was a real asshole move, but I’d never have done that to you, and you damn well knew it.”

“I just wanted to start over,” she said. “So I came here and erased my past.”

“You can’t erase your past,” he said. “It’s a part of you. You have to accept it before you can move on.”

She met his gaze. “Is that what you did after Gil and Susan? You accepted it and moved on?”

He stared back for a long beat. “I actually thought I was doing just that. And I thought I was doing it with you.”

She searched desperately for some softening in him and saw nothing but cool, calm resolve. He’d made up his mind about her. She hadn’t met his expectations, and it was over. Done. The thought made her shiver.

“Go inside,” he said, sounding as weary as she’d ever heard him. “It’s too cold and wet out here.”

“No. I—”

“I don’t want to hear it, Sharlyn.”

“Olivia,” she whispered. “I’m Olivia now.”

He just looked at her like she was a stranger.

Yeah, she was cold. Cold to the bone, and it had nothing to do with the mist. Staring into his closed-off face, she slowly shook her head. “I knew it’d come to this. I’ve been counting down.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we had a shelf life, and we’re expired. It was only a matter of time, and I knew it going in.”

His jaw tightened. “Fuck that, Olivia. You can’t hold me accountable for the way this has gone down.” He shoved his fingers through his hair. “You kept secrets. You can’t build a relationship on secrets.”

“I didn’t keep anything from you that mattered to the here and now.”

“Are you kidding?” he asked incredulously. “You kept
everything
from me, including the fact that you do have family, and your real name. Jesus.”

“It wasn’t like that—”

“What was real?” he asked. “Any of it?”

Her throat got so tight that she couldn’t talk, which was just as well, really. Because the one thing that had been unequivocally true had been her feelings for him.

Which she wasn’t about to admit now.

And besides, maybe after acting and faking emotions all her life, she couldn’t trust those feelings anyway. “You’re not listening,” she said.

He shook his head slowly. “Actually, I’m listening to every word, especially the ones you’re not saying.”

When she didn’t respond, didn’t know how to respond, Cole nudged her back, shut the driver’s door, and hit the gas.

She was still standing on the sidewalk trying to figure out how her life had just imploded when she heard someone come up behind her.

“Do I even want to know?” Jolyn asked.

Olivia drew in a deep breath, doing her best not to completely lose it.

“Let me guess,” her sister said, propping an elbow on Olivia’s shoulder as she gazed down the street after Cole. “You messed something up.”

“I messed everything up.”

“It’s a Peterson trait,” Jolyn said. “How did you land him anyway? ’Cause nothing personal, but that guy? Out of your league.”

Wasn’t that the bleak truth.

And worse, she realized she had an audience of more than just her sister. Lucille was standing under the bakery’s awning kitty-corner from her shop, eating some sort of pastry out of a white bag.

“Hi honey,” she called out, waving. “You want me to post to Twitter, ask him to come back?”

Olivia blinked and tried to change gears, but couldn’t.

I’m listening to every word, especially the ones you’re not saying
…

“Because I can do that,” Lucille said. “People love it when I tweet.”

A few more elderly ladies came out of the bakery, each with her own small white bag.

“Honey, are you listening to me?” Lucille asked.

This wasn’t happening. This really wasn’t—

“What’s doing?” one of the bluehairs asked.

“She chased off Cole Donovan,” Lucille told her. “Right before my very eyes.”

“That charter captain hottie?” another one of them asked, and then tsked, like maybe Olivia wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. “How did she do that?”

“I’m not sure, I turned my hearing aid all the way up and still missed some of it. Something about her not being Olivia but Sharlyn,” Lucille said. “But I don’t know what that means.”

“It means she’s Sharlyn Peterson, that little girl TV star who put the crazy in crazy. Went off the deep end about a decade ago and vanished.”

“Get out,” Lucille said. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called out to Olivia again. “Honey, is that true?”

“Well, of course it’s true,” the other bluehair said. “I watch episodes of
Not Again, Hailey!
when my Xanax wears off. It reruns at two in the morning on Nick at Night. Cheaper than watching the shopping network. I had to cut up my credit cards after I realized I’d ordered twelve sets of paring knives. And I don’t even like to cook.”

Next to Olivia, Jolyn snorted. “This place isn’t so bad after all,” she murmured.

“So is that it?” Lucille asked. “You lied to us? Because if that’s what happened, well then shame on you, honey. Unless you had a really good reason. Did you? Why don’t you run it by us, and we’ll vote on it.”

Olivia turned on her heel and walked back into her shop.

Of course, Jolyn followed.

“I should’ve locked the door,” Olivia muttered.

Jolyn was grinning. “Shame on you,” she said, imitating Lucille’s ancient, smoked-three-packs-a-day voice.

Olivia ground her back teeth. “You enjoying the show?”

“Oh, yeah. This is better than anything you ever acted on.”

Olivia wanted to scream, she wanted to throw something. She wanted…

To figure out how to go back in time and strangle Jolyn before she’d come to Lucky Harbor.

God, she was tired. Tired of pretending to have it all together. Tired of the fiction. She just wanted to be herself.

Whoever that was.

“So do tell about the charter captain hottie,” Jolyn said. “He loaded?”

She could feel her blood pressure rising. “Out,” she said, pointing to the door. “Go.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere other than Lucky Harbor.”

Jolyn got the same look that a pit bull did just before he sank his teeth into you. “I like Lucky Harbor.”

Great. Frigging great. “You don’t belong here,” Olivia told her.

“Neither do you. But hey, if you want to implode your life the way you always do, who am I to stop you?” Jolyn said.

“What will get you to leave?” Olivia asked.

“Do the show and get Mom off both our backs.”

Olivia turned to face her sister. “The doctors said she was fine, you know. I talked to them myself.”

“Fine is relative. The accident took a lot out of her.”

Yes, that’s what happened when one got drunk off one’s ass and drove into a pole.

“She gave up doing hair,” Jolyn said. “She says it hurt to stand on her feet all day.”

“She owns the hair salon,” Olivia said. Which she ought to know, as Olivia had purchased it for her. “When it’s managed properly, she doesn’t have to work a day in her life if she doesn’t want.”

“Define managed properly,” Jolyn said.

Olivia stared at her. “You are kidding me.”

“You made a tactical error by believing she could manage anything properly. Which is your own fault, seeing as she handled your career. You should’ve known better.”

This was undoubtedly true, but at the time, Olivia had been thinking only of how to be free. Buying her mother her own salon and walking away seemed like the best thing.

For Olivia.

Which made her selfish. A new and unsettling thought.

“She’s in trouble, and I need your damn help,” Jolyn said. “We’re in this together, you and I. We’re all she has.”

“Contrary to what you think, I don’t have any hidden pockets of money,” Olivia said. “We spent my royalties, all of them.”

“Which, hello, is why you need to green-light this TV Land special. They’re going to pay you out the ass to sit there and look pretty. I don’t see what the BFD is.”

“The big effing deal is that I don’t belong in that world anymore,” Olivia said.

“One day,” Jolyn said. “You smile and make nice for the camera, and then hold out your hand for a big, fat paycheck like in the old days.”

“And then?” Olivia asked tightly. “I suppose I sign it all over to you and Mom?”

“Well, why not?” Jolyn asked. “This was never about just you. Mom moved all three of us across the country to Los Angeles. We gave up everything for you, everything. We earned your paycheck every bit as much as you did.”

The only thing she’d ever really done of worth was make money for her family. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll do the show.” But she’d do it her way. “Now you’ve got to go, and so do I. I’ve got somewhere to be.”

“Now? Captain Hottie must’ve been pretty important, huh?”

“Yeah.” Heartsick, Olivia pulled out her keys. She needed to find Cole and make him understand that the past didn’t matter.

Jolyn stared at her for a long beat. “I’ll watch the shop for you.”

“What? Why would you do that?”

“Because you look like a puppy who’s just been kicked. Consider it my good deed for the month.”

“I’m not leaving you in charge of my livelihood,” Olivia said.

“Hey,” Jolyn said. “My petty thieving days are long over. I’m auditioning and shit. If I get arrested now, I’ll blow my chances when you do this show.”

Olivia blew out a breath. “Ironic, isn’t it?” she asked. “Last time you wanted my show to fail. Now you want me to succeed.”

“It’s not exactly a bad deal for you, either,” Jolyn said. “I’m getting you closure, a reunion with your beloved
Not Again, Hailey!
community, not to mention the undying love of your family.”

That love was pretty damn expensive. She’d always just accepted that was how it worked, but now she’d seen the Donovans. She’d seen Cole do whatever was in his power to be there for his family, no matter what. No price. Their love didn’t cost a damn thing except unconditional acceptance. And the only way to get that was with complete honesty.

The exact thing she’d withheld from Cole.

Maybe instead of wishing she could go back in time to strangle Jolyn before she could spill the beans, Olivia should go back in time and…never have lied in the first place.

The phone rang, and she picked up. “Unique Boutique.”

“Honey, it’s Lucille. Listen, I’m getting ready to announce what you did at our weekly tea, but it occurs to me that you might want to speak out on your behalf about why you lied to our very own Cole Donovan.”

Olivia pulled the phone away, stared at it, and then brought it back to her ear. “You only heard this about five minutes ago, and you’ve already got a tea organized?”

“Oh, lucky for us, this tea was a preplanned event. So…your reason?”

“No comment,” Olivia said, and hung up. “Good Lord. And I used to think the paparazzi were bad.”

Jolyn walked over to the cash register. “Okay, so how do you work this baby?”