He's So Fine (8 page)

“Do you do this a lot?” she asked.

“Always have,” he said. “Started when I was young. I told you I was the runt of the house, right? I’d escape and come here.”

The idea that he’d had anything to escape from caught at her, even more than the night air in her face, ocean-scented and chilly. “What was wrong at your house?”

“Estrogen overload in the form of three bossy older sisters,” he said. “Ever been held down and had your hair curled, makeup put on, and your toenails painted?”

Actually, yes. It was called the makeup trailer. She took in his long, leanly muscled build. He was strong as hell, and she knew it. “You were the runt?” she asked in disbelief.

“Yep,” he said. “Small and puny. I weighed about eighty-five pounds soaking wet until high school.”

“What happened in high school?” she asked, unable to help herself.

“I caught up.” He met her gaze, his smile fading. “So we both came looking for comfort tonight.”

“I hardly call being a million feet in the air comfort,” she said. And though she hadn’t looked out, she could feel her stomach drop, signaling that they were getting higher. And higher. She closed her eyes.

“What were you seeking comfort from?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “Not going there. Not in space.” Or ever.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll go first.” She felt him shift slightly and risked a quick peek. He was leaning back now, long legs stretched out in front of him as if he didn’t have a care. He was staring out into the admittedly glorious night, and still they were rising, rising, rising, and she slammed her eyes closed again.

“I just left a meeting with Sam and Tanner,” he said casually. “It was a good meeting. Our business is solid, we’re solid. But it’s a lot of pressure to keep up with our expectations. Open your eyes, Olivia.”

She squeezed them tighter. “Hell no.”

She felt him shift again, felt his arm settle along the back of the bench, brushing her shoulders comfortingly, his fingers lightly stroking the nape of her neck.

She shivered. “Still no.”

Something brushed her jaw. His mouth? Her entire body tightened at the thought and her eyes flew involuntarily open.

And met his.

It wasn’t his mouth touching her, it was his thumb, though he was close enough that they could—and did—share their next breath. He stroked her jaw again. “We’re at the top.”

W
e’re at the top…

That’s what Olivia used to hear every week when the ratings would come in. And then the network would shower her with love and appreciation, and life would go on.

Until it’d come to a crashing halt.

She opened her eyes, going stock still. Behind Cole, the sky was purple, with only a hint of the stars that would light it up when full darkness hit. The ocean swells stretched out as far as the eye could see, meeting the horizon. Far below them were the twinkling lights of Lucky Harbor.

He was right. She could see everything, the whole world in a glance.

“Breathe,” he said quietly, entwining their hands and bringing them up to his torso, letting her feel his chest rise and fall steadily. “Just breathe.”

She sucked in some air, suitably distracted by the feel of the hard pecs beneath her hand. He looked so deceptively normal in his clothes that she forgot that beneath he was anything but. She’d seen that for herself, every single perfectly sculpted inch.

And a certain number of those inches? Mouthwatering.

She’d been wondering about him over the past few days. The town had gotten it in its collective head that they were seeing each other, and she’d been fending off the “So you and Cole?” question at least once a day.

At night she had only her own questions to fend off…

“Better?” he asked, still holding her hand to his chest.

She thought of his reaction to her peeking beneath the blankets at him and smiled in spite of herself.

“Yeah,” he said, watching her face carefully. “Better.”

Good thing he didn’t know why.

His gaze never left hers, and his mouth twitched. “Care to share?” he asked.

“Expectations.” She breathed some more and stared out as they—finally!—began their slow descent back to earth, the cool, salty ocean air blowing in her face. “You said it was hard to live up to the expectations you had of your business.” Her entire life had been nothing but one long expectation. ”I know how that feels.”

“You don’t say much about yourself,” he said after a moment. “When did you leave home?”

“You never really leave, do you?” she said.

“You mean you can take the girl out of Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the girl?”

She laughed. “Something like that.”

“You said you didn’t miss it, but I’m getting the feeling you do. At least on some level.”

She stared out at the black sea. Did she miss Hollywood? That was the place she really considered home. Not Kentucky.

Never Kentucky.

“I miss the people,” she finally said. God’s honest truth. She missed her director, and the producer. She missed the caterer, the wardrobe people…her agent. He’d been like a father to her. In fact, she’d often pretended he was her father, which was better than the truth—that she’d been conceived during a one-night stand at a party and Tamilyn had never named the guy.

Olivia had found her real family on set. The wardrobe lady had been the grandma she’d never had, since her mother had been estranged from her own family for decades. The set director had been like an uncle. The other kids on the set were her siblings. It’d been a dysfunctional family, but still a family, and she missed the close camaraderie. “I miss the people a lot.”

“You were close.”

They’d been lucky. Their cast had been a large, young, boisterous, happy one. After spending the first seven years of her life poorer than dirt, life on that set had been a dream come true. Food tables, constantly filled. Games, toys, books, whatever she’d wanted. “Extremely,” she said, knowing damn well that he thought they were talking about her real family. But these people had been her family, for all intents and purposes.

Until, of course, she’d hit puberty and the show had been canceled. Her identity had,
poof
, vanished, and the people she’d cared about had all moved on, leaving her alone, confused, and more than a little frightened at the easy abandonment.

As an adult, she’d come to realize it hadn’t been anything personal. It’d simply been the way of the industry. The way of the world, in fact.

Didn’t make it hurt any less.

“How about you?” she asked. “You’re close to your family.”

He laughed and rubbed his jaw. He had at least a day’s worth of growth there, and the scraping sound it made against his palm activated the butterfly colony living in her belly.

“My dad’s gone now,” he said, “but both he and my mom grew up here, and they never left. Raised all four of us here, and yeah, we’re close. Though I think
nosy
’s a better word. We’re all up in each other’s business a lot.”

“And you all stuck in Lucky Harbor?” she marveled, unable to fathom that. He’d said his sisters were crazy, but she could tell by the softness in his gaze that he was just joking, that he had the real deal in his family.

“All of us,” he said. “I left for a while after graduation. Worked on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for five years before coming back here.”

“Wow,” she breathed. “Five years. What did you do?”

“I was the chief positioning operator and navigator for the ship and in charge of the equipment and safety for all the guys. Eighty-five, to be exact.”

“I’m trying to imagine living with eighty-five guys on a rig for that long.”

“Three were women, actually.”

“Not the best of odds,” she said, fascinated by him, by his family, by everything.

He shrugged, but something in his gaze caught her interest. “You beat the odds,” she said, guessing. She laughed when he grimaced. “You did,” she said. “Eighty-two to three, and you caught one of them.”

He grimaced again and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Only because as a supervisor, I stuck out from the general population,” he said. “Authority tends to look good to some women.”

She studied him. Heart-stopping blue eyes. Silky brown hair that tended to fall over his forehead when he was wet from head to toe, and also when he was riding Ferris wheels.

He looked pretty damn good to her, and she wasn’t into authority figures. “You don’t think you’re hot?” she asked.

He actually squirmed, and she laughed again.

He met her gaze, his own rueful. “You know I love your laugh, but this is starting to remind me of when you were pointing and laughing at my naked ass on the boat last week.”

“I never pointed and laughed at your naked ass. I never saw your naked ass. I saw…other parts.” Oh boy, had she. “And I wasn’t laughing at…it.”

He arched a brow. “
It
?”

Now she squirmed. “You’ve got a better term?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “It’s called a co—”

She put her hand over his mouth. “We were talking about the rigs,” she said firmly, doing her damnedest not to blush—as if she had any control over that. “You had a girlfriend out there.”

He nodded, a little reluctantly she thought. She had no business wondering, being so curious about him, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She dropped her hand from his mouth. “You and One-of-Three go out for a long time?” she asked.

“Three years.”

“Three years…in the past tense?” she asked.

“You fishing?”

Hell yes. She just didn’t know why.

“Past tense,” he said, letting her off the hook. “I don’t still see Susan.”

There was something in his expression. No, scratch that. There was absolutely nothing in his expression at all. He was carefully…blank. “Real life wasn’t as romantic on the mainland as it had been on the rig?” she asked, trying to joke.

He laughed at that, drily. “You think things were romantic on the rig?”

“They must have been at least a little romantic,” she said, “if you and Susan did the deed there for three years.”

“The deed? We really need to work on your sexual vocabulary, Supergirl. ‘The deed’ could refer to any number of things—”

“I don’t need to know specifics!” she said quickly.
Yes, you do
, said the devil on her left shoulder. Olivia ignored her. “But three years together, that’s a long time. You must have really been in love.”

“Thought so at the time,” he said. “But it didn’t work out. It’s been over for a while.”

He looked a little sad, which was hard to take for some reason, but it suitably distracted her from panicking that they were still moving. “Over over?” she asked.

He looked at her for a long beat, and then a ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “You asking for any particular reason?”

She huffed out a forced laugh. “No. Of course not.”

“You’re interested in me.”

“That’s absurd. That’s…ridiculous. I don’t even know you. I—”

He leaned into her so that she felt cradled between the arm along the back of the ride and the hand he’d set on the armrest at her far hip. “It’s over over,” he said, and held her gaze. “You know what this means, right?”

She shook her head.

“It means it’s your turn to share with the class.”

She stared at him, those butterflies in her belly fluttering to life again. Her longest relationship had been with her handheld shower massager.

“You ever love anyone, Olivia?”

Well, she loved her shower massager, but somehow she didn’t see herself admitting that. “Love?”

“Yeah. Love.”

She’d been with guys. She’d had crushes. She’d even really liked a few here and there…but she’d never been particularly successful at getting to the next stage and staying there.

Maybe because your first kiss happened on camera
.

Or maybe because your first boyfriend was a fellow actor, who’d been…acting.

But the real answer was even more revealing—she’d never figured out how to let anyone know the real her. Instead of answering, she risked another look around. They were on the upswing again. “Oh, good God. We’re going around another time.”

“Breathe,” he murmured. “Just keep breathing.”

Right. She gulped in air. “I’ve heard it’s a pretty rough existence out there on the rigs,” she said, desperate for a subject change.

“Yeah,” he said. “Rough. You could definitely say that.”

She met his gaze.

“We lost someone out there,” he told her. “My best friend, Gil. And nearly Tanner, too.”

“My God, how awful,” she breathed. “What happened?”

“We had a gas explosion, and a fire.”

She couldn’t even imagine. Here she’d been thinking about how hard she’d had it. Poor little Hollywood kid, abandoned by her people, boo hoo. “Were you hurt?”

“Minimally,” he said. “I don’t remember much of it, not the last few moments leading up to it, or right after. Opened my eyes in the water, and that was it.”

He looked angry at himself that he couldn’t remember. “Sometimes,” she said quietly, “remembering isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes we’re better off not remembering.”

He nodded and looked off into the night. “Sam, Tanner, and I left the gulf after that. We’d saved every penny we could during those five years to start a charter company together. We did it in Gil’s memory.”

“Pretty great way to honor him,” she said.

He gave her a small smile. “Gil would’ve been real pissed off if we hadn’t followed through with the plan because of him.”

So he’d come home with Sam and Tanner and started the charter company, she thought. And then his dad had died, leaving him as the man of the house for his mom and sisters.

Which she knew he most likely had taken on without complaint, because he had a backbone of steel.

She’d never met anyone like him. “You’ve had a rough few years,” she said.

“And also a pretty great few years.”

She stared at him, warmed by just looking at him and also by the realization that she liked him. The man he was. She liked him, and trusted him. And she was tempted by him in a way she’d not been tempted in…well, ever. She hadn’t let herself become attached to anyone because this way she was always prepared when they left.

But with Cole, she had the feeling it was already too late.

“What about you?” he asked. “What did you do before coming to Lucky Harbor?”

“I went to college.” Several times, in fact.

He smiled. “You’re going to make me work for this. That’s okay, I’m a patient sort. Where did you go?”

“NYU.” The first time.

“Impressive,” he said.

“And then San Francisco University.” She paused. “And New Mexico.”

“Ah,” he said. “You had the wanderlust bug.”

“More like the ADHD bug,” she admitted. She’d happily gone along collecting degrees like some women collect earrings, soaking up being in school for the first time in her life, loving the freedom.

She’d finally stopped when she’d had no choice, when the money had run out and both her mother and her sister were hounding her to go back to acting.

She’d refused. Still aimless, she’d gathered all the stuff she’d collected and had in storage and had done what no one would have ever expected of her, the one thing she’d been yearning to do since Mrs. Henderson had told her of the idyllic Lucky Harbor.

She’d moved here and opened up a shop and, for the first time, was living like a real person. Not off a script or her forged bio.

That had been a year ago, and though she was literally living paycheck to paycheck, she’d been happy—until the past month, when her mom had started making noises about needing money again.

But the night pushed that worry away for now. So did sitting so close to Cole, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his thigh pressed to hers, the easy strength of him, not to mention the fact that he smelled more delicious than chocolate fudge brownies—which was really saying something.

“I’d love to hear about your family sometime,” he said quietly, as if he didn’t want to spook her.

She’d been telling tales about her past for so long that they always slipped easily off her tongue. Naturally. And since she’d never really cared what anyone had thought of her, she’d never felt particularly guilty.

But she did now, because already Cole was different. She found she cared that she’d let him believe her family was gone, that she was alone, and she wished she could take it back and start again. But she couldn’t.