got it for a steal when I moved here. It had been vacant for a year and a half, and the owner was anxious to get out from under two mortgages. I didn’t get a tree up before I went to Texas.”
He groaned as he pulled in beside a red-and-white Mini Cooper. “My mother’s here.” He turned off the car and gave Cassie a rueful smile. “I was hoping she’d still be in Reno. She’ll want to know all about you.”
Cassie smiled. “That’s okay. I have nothing to hide.” Mostly. She unbuckled her belt with a philosophical shrug. “While my father is kind and caring, he’s made poor choices in women in the past. I imagine that’s how I was born. It’ll be nice to meet a real mother.”
“Yeah.” His tone was doubtful. “You’re such an innocent, Cassie,” he teased, then frowned at the simple dress she wore. “I don’t suppose you have rain gear in your luggage?”
“I don’t. I was expecting to stay in sunny Texas. But I’ll be fine. It’s not that far to the front door, is it?” She peered through the windshield. “Where is the front door?”
“Halfway back on the left side. Just run for the shelter of the deck overhang. Here.” He yanked off the white cotton sweater he wore and held it over her head. She put her arms into the sleeves and he pulled it down. “It isn’t too much protection, but better than nothing.”
She was surrounded by the scent of male and something dry and spicy with a suggestion of pine. The cotton was warm from his body. “Thank you,” she said. He let himself out of the truck.
The rain was torrential—and cold. It struck her face and bare legs when she hesitated to get her bearings. Grady caught her hand and pulled her with him as he ran for the shelter of the overhang. She blinked against raindrops and followed, slowing as he did halfway up the walkway at the side of the house. A door flew open.
Cassie caught a glimpse of a woman in the doorway who was probably in her late fifties. She was wearing a beige turtleneck sweater and dark blue pants. She held the door open as Grady passed her in a rain-soaked T-shirt.
“Hi, Mom,” he said, pulling Cassie inside.
“Hi, Mrs. Nelson.” Cassie smiled into the woman’s suspicious expression as she tripped in after Grady.
Grady’s mother had permed gray hair without much style, brown eyes and a slightly pointy nose and chin. Her skin was beautiful and only lightly lined around her eyes.
“Hello,” she replied, frowning at the large sweater she must know to be her son’s. Then her eyes went to Cassie’s face—and stopped—and widened. She finally said in a stricken whisper, “Oh! My! God!”
They were in a sort of foyer. Cassie looked worriedly at Grady.
“You’re not, are you?” his mother asked Cassie. She stepped a little closer, staring at her, closed her eyes and then opened them again.
Cassie wasn’t as used to this kind of reaction as someone might think. In most situations, she was surrounded by other celebrities, famous—or notorious. She refused to shrink away.
“You are!” Grady’s mother answered her own question.
Grady kissed his mother’s cheek. “Mom, this is Cassidy Chapman. Her sister, Corie, is marrying Ben on New Year’s Day, so she’s come to the wedding. Cassie, this is my mother, Diane Nelson.” Then he took Cassie’s arm and led her through a doorway into a bright kitchen decorated in blue and white.
Grady’s mother followed. “Thank God you made coffee, Mom,” Grady said as he went to the coffeepot on the counter. Cassie turned to face his mother, guessing by her grim expression that something bad was coming. She braced herself.
“You’ve recovered quickly from your nervous breakdown,” Diane said. As Cassie stared at her in disbelief, she added, “The screaming scene you made at that Irish mansion was on SAN—Stars at Night—just a few hours ago. Somebody took a cell phone video.”
“MOM!” GRADY CAME back to Cassie as she struggled to find a sense of equilibrium.
Come on, she told herself. You do it for the camera all the time. What’s happened to you personally is hidden behind whatever the camera needs from you. And you had to know this was coming. Just not so soon.
“I...I had a bad moment there,” she said, simplifying an explanation. “It’s a long story.”
“The reporter speculated that you were upset because Fabiana Capri got the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition and you didn’t. She thought maybe it was just a temper tantrum.”
Cassie was speechless.
“I’m a celebrity news junkie,” Diane said a little smugly. “SAN had the whole story.”
Sure. Entertainment news paid a lot of money for the inside skinny about celebrities. There’d been enough technical people and assistants at the shoot that one of them was bound to find the money appealing.
Unused to being so disliked so quickly, Cassie fought for composure. She met Diane’s condemning brown eyes calmly. “They may have had the story, but it wasn’t accurate. I guess that comes from speculating instead of getting the facts.”
“What are the facts?”
Grady came to stand between them and handed Cassie the cup of coffee. He frowned at his mother. “Cassie is a guest here for a few days, and I’d appreciate it if you would be polite. You know, like you taught me to be?” He added that last with emphasis.
“It’s all right,” Cassie insisted, transferring the cup to her left hand and offering her right to Diane. The woman did look like a grassroots sort of mother, the kind who would see that you ate from the food pyramid, got your eight hours of sleep and were polite to your elders. And would kill any predators that came near you. Cassie had dreamed her entire life of having such a mother.
“If she saw me acting like a crazy woman on television, she probably fears for your safety.” She sent Grady a wry grin then smiled at his mother, who looked a little surprised but still suspicious. “I assure you I’m a very sane, ordinary woman who’s been working too hard for too long. I snapped.” Everything inside her shuddered as she remembered that moment, but she struggled to look like the normal woman she insisted she was. “I had just learned my brother and sister, whom I hadn’t seen since I was a toddler, were in Texas, and I sort of lost it while trying to finish the shoot before I could join them.”
His mother shook her head. “Shouldn’t you have gone to be with them instead of agreeing to work?”
“I agreed to work just hours before my father called me with the news. That shoot was expensive, and all those people were away from their families during the holidays to get it done. It would have been selfish of me to leave them all there and ask them to come back again later. To incur all that expense a second time.”
Diane granted her that with a reluctant “True.”
“So I was anxious to get it done quickly while still doing a good job, but the designer had insisted on false eyelashes and the
