hate it if her loved ones didn’t need her. Still, it was nice to just be...
Stopping between his blue SUV and her Mustang convertible, a thank-you gift to her and Lacey for a commercial they’d done and which Lacey hadn’t wanted, she looked up at him—a good five inches up—into his shaded brown eyes.
“Why do you say that?” she asked, not sure she liked the slightly derogatory tone that had accompanied his pairing them together. Leaning back against her car, she crossed her arms to keep from reaching up to brush his longish blond hair back from the side of his face. The hair wasn’t really long enough to cover what was left of his scars, but the way he held his head, cocked to the side with the damaged side down, looked as though he was used to doing so.
“You’re the most vivacious, beautiful, outgoing and social creature, and me... If I didn’t have a family that I needed to keep off my ass—and work to do at the Lemonade Stand—I’d happily be a recluse.”
He didn’t talk about whatever had blown apart his left lower jaw. Or what she assumed had to have been years of surgeries to repair his face. She’d asked him about it once. He’d told her there’d been an accident during his senior year of college. And then abruptly changed the subject.
But she’d be a ready and willing listener if he ever chose to confide in her.
“You’re an absolutely beautiful creature, too.” The words were drawn from someplace deep inside her. Completely authentic—and a tad embarrassing out in the open.
He kind of smiled at her, and she figured he thought she was humoring him. She considered pressing the matter but figured it was wiser to let it go. Used to pushing forward, to going for whatever she thought should be, Kacey held back with Michael Valentine. She didn’t want to lose him.
“And anyway, there you go, mentioning your family again, and them being on your ass.” Her tone was lighthearted, setting them back into their peaceful place. “Yet, here I am, still not meeting them.”
As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she regretted them. She’d just told herself not to push him.
“Forget I said that.” She reached out to touch his forearm. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.”
He grinned, not seeming the least bit bothered, making her feel instantly better. Which was halfway nuts, too, because Michael never seemed bothered by anything.
“I’ll get some answers for you, Kace,” he said, his tone as even, as soothing, as always. “How late are you working tonight?”
“I’m only in two scenes this afternoon, so I’m thinking no later than seven.” With all of the changes in recent years, they didn’t film by scene sequence anymore. Everything was shot by set, not in time sequence, in four long days so the actors had three days off and the daytime viewers still had five episodes to watch every week. If she didn’t have a scene on a particular set, like that morning, she didn’t have to be there.
He nodded.
“I’ll call you when I get out,” she said—more because of this curious urge to keep talking to him than because she thought he’d have any answers for her that soon.
He grinned at her. “You’d best get your butt into town,” he said, chucking her on the arm like a brother might do. “You’d really give them something to gossip about if you showed up on set like that.”
She wore a wig on the show and looked completely different without her stage makeup. For the first time, she wondered if he thought the Beverly Hills Kacey looked better than the toned-down version he always saw.
Why it should suddenly matter made no sense.
“You know that I know that life is about far more than looks, right?” It wasn’t like her to have these retrospective moments. She was facing the sun and had to squint to look up at him.
Squinting caused facial lines.
She wanted to not care, but turned so that neither of them was facing the sun.
“What’s going on?” His question was as pointed as he’d ever been with her.
“I don’t know.” She heard the brush-off in her words. “I really don’t, Michael. I just... I am who I am, you know?”
“Of course I do. You have no problem here, Kace, if that’s what you’re thinking...”
“No.” She shook her head. “It’s just, I hear myself sometimes, you know, like the first time we met...”
She cringed even bringing up that horrid afternoon. Her second class at the Lemonade Stand. Standing at the front of the room, telling nine battered women that their looks did matter. That if they did what they could to make themselves look their best, they’d feel better about themselves, which would breed confidence, which then bred strength. If they felt good about themselves, they’d be more apt to really believe in their own worth and then stand up for themselves until they were treated respectfully.
It was all true. All valid and important. She was helping women she’d come to care about a great deal. In a little less than a year, she’d seen two of those women get jobs, places of their own, and stand up in court and win.
“I was the one in the wrong that day.” Hands in his pockets, he shrugged, as if there was nothing to talk about.
He’d interrupted her at the beginning of her lecture when she’d still been talking about how much it mattered to take time to do your hair and makeup. To choose clothes purposefully for your body size and style. He’d suggested, quietly, in a completely Michael way, that she might want to consider where she was and whom she was dealing with before she started in on her beauty-pageant rhetoric.
She’d had no idea he was a volunteer at the Lemonade Stand—one who had financed the computer repair shop that now helped support the shelter and who’d started and still oversaw computer-skill training classes there for the residents.
“No, that’s just it.” She touched his chest, fiddled with the button on his black button-down shirt. She was naturally a toucher. With everyone. She stopped, concerned she’d offended him again. Her hands hung suspended in midair. “I mean, yes, you were wrong, but so was I. I’d seen you come in and it didn’t even occur to me to change my rhetoric.”
She’d been talking about the value of beauty, knowing that a man with a markedly scarred face was in her small audience. She should have shown more sensitivity.
She’d later found out that he’d shown up at her class on behalf of a group of residents who’d asked him if their reasons for not wanting to come to her class were valid. They didn’t think a woman should put so much value on her looks.
“And you were right, too,” she quickly continued, letting one hand land on his chest—as some kind of weird compromise she was making between life as she’d known it and life as it was. “We can’t help what we’re born with or what happens to us, and there are a lot of victims of domestic violence who have had what beauty they were born with permanently altered...which doesn’t in any way diminish their worth. Their rights.”
It felt good to speak with passion in real life, rather than just on camera. And odd and somewhat threatening, too. So many changes in the past year...
“I
