smiled as her gaze travelled up his arm, past the lock of errantly curled hair below his ear to the sparkling green of his eyes. Then she shook her head and swallowed down the need to giggle like a shy schoolgirl. ‘Cassidy Malone. Known to be the woman with a natural knack for public humiliation. Tendency to over-think things to the point of complete randomness. Strong belief that peanut butter and jelly anywhere in the vicinity of a slice of bread is just wrong…’
‘Hello, Cassidy Malone—can I call you Cass?’
‘Somehow I doubt I’ll be able to stop you.’
Will smiled that smile, then cocked his head as he ran the pad of his thumb back and forth over her knuckles. ‘We could use this for Nick and Rachel, you know…’
Cassidy rolled her eyes and attempted to quietly extricate her hand from his. ‘Just no escaping those two, is there?’
‘You want to?’ He held onto her hand.
‘Do I want to what?’
‘Escape them for a while?’ The thumb kept brushing over her skin, distracting her from looking away from his mesmerising eyes.
It meant it took a second or two longer than normal for her to focus on what he’d said. ‘Will, we can’t keep taking breaks if you want to get this thing done. It’s counter-productive. You know that.’
He studied her intently. ‘You’re hating every minute of this, aren’t you?’
Not every minute, no. She loved rediscovering her muse, she loved it when their scenes started coming together, she loved staying in Will’s beautiful house by the ocean, she’d even loved spending time with Angie and Lily on the beach—and she agreed that, given the chance, she probably could end up good friends with a world-famous actress…
But she couldn’t allow herself to enjoy those moments. Not properly. Not when she was living in a fantasy world on borrowed time. One day soon she would have to walk away from Will’s life and try to find one of her own. One more fulfilling than the one she’d been living. Because if she’d been happy in the life she had she wouldn’t have been so quick to leave it behind, would she?
‘Cass?’ The thumb stilled, and the impossibly gentle use of her name made her realise she’d dropped her gaze to the beating pulse at the base of his neck.
She looked back up. ‘Sorry. Drifted off for a minute. I’ve got a tendency to do that too.’
‘I remember.’ He said it with just enough softness in his voice to suggest he remembered it with a degree of affection. Darn it.
When she made another attempt at freeing her hand he let her. So she folded her fingers into her palm and let her arm drop to her side as he leaned back, his expression changing to the unreadable blankness she hated so much,
‘It’s okay, I’ve got my answer.’ Lifting a glass of juice, he pushed to his feet and turned towards the open door. ‘We’d better get back to it then.’
WITHOUT any idea why she felt compelled to correct his assumption, Cassidy found herself on her feet, matching glass in hand, and following him into the kitchen. ‘Wait, Will. You’re wrong. You didn’t get an answer.’
Turning in the middle of the room, he lifted his chin and looked at her with hooded eyes.
Which left her squirming inwardly as she tried to find the words to explain it to him without giving too much away.
‘I’ m not…That is it’s not that I’m not…’ She puffed her cheeks out in exasperation, and avoided his gaze by glancing at random points around the room. ‘I guess I just—’ A deep breath and a grimace, and then she silently said to heck with it and took a run at it. ‘I feel a bit—lost, I suppose. You and me? We’re not the same. This living together under the same roof—’ One of her hands flailed in the air in front of her body, towards him. ‘Well, we’re not the same…’
‘You already said that.’
Cassidy scowled at his calm tone, and the fact that her gaze shifted to meet his and discovered what looked like a glint of amusement only made her feel more stupid than she already did.
She sighed heavily. ‘This is your life, Will, not mine. I’m just a visitor here. But this script…it’s important…it means a lot. I don’t want to mess it up.’
When there was silence it drew her gaze back to him again, then he took a shallow breath and asked, ‘Why is it so important?’
Now, there was a question with a loaded answer.
Her hesitation brought him a step closer, his hand reaching out to set his glass on the nearest counter top. ‘I get the not wanting to mess up part. Everyone feels that way when they work on a script. Or on any kind of a project that means something to them. There was a time you wanted to succeed in this business as much as I did…’
Cassidy smiled wryly. ‘Apparently not quite as much as you did…’
The low words were enough to tug on the edges of his mouth. ‘Okay. Fair enough. We had different motivations but the same goal—at least I thought we did. Maybe I was wrong about that?’
If she had, she’d have left everything behind to go with him to California. That was what he was intimating, wasn’t it? Yes, Will had been driven for different reasons from Cassidy. But the goal had been a dream they’d shared. What had broken them apart had been Cassidy’s starry-eyed romanticism over the life they would have together weighed against Will’s need to be successful enough to prove to all those people who had thought him worthless that they’d been spectacularly wrong in their assessment. Cassidy had believed they would achieve their dreams together. Will had left her behind and done it on his own. But she’d let him go, hadn’t she?
Will took another step closer. ‘Why is it so important, Cass?’
She took a deep breath, while warily watching to see how close he planned on getting. ‘We bombed last time, Will. You remember how bad that felt as well as I do…’
‘Oh, sweetheart, I’ve bombed a few times since then—trust me. It’s par for the course out here.’
The use of the drawled ‘sweetheart’ made her cock a recriminating brow at him, but she let it slide when she saw the light in his eyes. ‘But you’re a success, Will. Look around you—this house, your company, the awards you’ve won—you’ve made it. I’m a schoolteacher. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—it’s one of the most honourable professions on the planet—but it wasn’t something I’d planned on doing for the rest of my life.’ Any more than living on her own had been. ‘The last script I cowrote with you is the only thing I have on my movie-writing CV. The script for a movie that bombed at the box office and gave movie reviewers globally the excuse to ramp the venom volume up to high—remember? I ended on a failure. A very public failure. I don’t want another one. Seriously, I don’t think I could take it…and…And I’m babbling again, aren’t I?’
‘Like a brook.’ He smiled indulgently.
