Chapter 22
Theo
We are filmed that evening dining at a Positano restaurant perched high above the sea.
To our right, there’s an entire cliff of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century villas and palazzos built one atop the other.
To our left, the midnight-blue Tyrrhenian Sea sweeps as far as the eye can see.
It’s a view you’d save your entire life to witness even once—but I’m a little focused on Bex at the moment.
She’s in a silky pale pink sleeveless dress, her sun-burnished skin gleaming, her gray eyes bright and happy.
The waiter can’t take his eyes off her, nor can the guy at the table across from us.
I have the bizarre urge to try to block her from their view.
A voice in my head warns that my thoughts sound a trifle…
possessive. But it’s simply that I can’t afford to have anyone fuck this up.
Not Peter, with his obvious crush on my wife, not Caden, whose every glance at her makes me want to put my fist through a wall, and not fucking Brian, for a number of reasons.
Not the audience, either. Bex smiles and bats her eyelashes at everyone she meets…and it’s impossible not to fall for her when she does it. Some lunatic among millions of viewers is going to convince himself she’s doing it for him. Who’s going to protect her when that happens?
The waiter glances down her dress as he removes her plate.
“Don’t let me catch you at that again,” I warn him quietly as he comes to my side of the table. Fortunately, Bex is too busy studying the wine’s label to have noticed.
“You know there was a seven hundred percent increase in grape production during Prohibition?” she asks.
“Increase?”
“Grape concentrate was being sold in record numbers,” she says, swirling the liquid in her glass. “It came with a warning not to stick it away in a cupboard for three weeks because it would turn into wine.”
I grin. “If we were living during Prohibition, you’d have been the one to think of it and create the marketing plan.”
Her head cocks. “You say that as if it’s a good thing.”
“I think it is, don’t you?” I ask. “You can only suppress people for so long before they find a way to fight back.”
She blinks, something uncertain passing over her face. I’m not sure why it’s such a revelation…it seems to me she’s been fighting back against one thing or another her entire life.
Lars tells us they’ve got enough as darkness settles in. The lights of the cliffside homes twinkle like a thousand stars, and I guess that’s a once-in-a-lifetime view too, but I’m still not paying it much attention.
We hand our mics over, the crew leaves, and the waiter returns with a plate of cookies and a bottle of amaretto.
I fill both glasses and we toast each other, our shoulders settling. She makes it look easy on film, but she’s happier, more relaxed when the cameras are gone.
“How classless will you find it if I wrap this cookie in a napkin and take it back to the room?” she asks, sipping her amaretto.
I raise a brow. “You can do whatever you want, but why don’t you just eat it?”
She shakes her head. “I prefer them frozen. I’ll put it in the fridge and have it later.”
“Frozen? That’s the craziest thing I’ve heard you say, and as you’re aware, the bar was already set rather high.”
She shrugs, not quite able to meet my eye. “I just like to eat my cookies frozen. It’s a weird thing from childhood.”
I cock my head. “Aren’t they hard to eat?”
She sighs. “I guess. I told you it was weird.”
“But how does something like that even…evolve? You’re taking a delicious food and making it intentionally almost impossible to chew.”
“Jessie used to hide these cookies in the freezer, and—”
“Why was she hiding cookies in the freezer?”
A faint blush graces her cheekbones. “I was a really hungry little kid. She had to hide stuff and lock it up so I wouldn’t eat it.”
What. The. Fuck.
Bex, if anything, borders on being too thin. Even a few days of filming takes a toll on her, so of course she was a starving little kid. “Why wouldn’t she just give you the fucking food?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m sure she got tired of me eating it all. Anyway, she’d keep cookies in the deep freezer for her and Bronwyn, but Bronwyn gave me the code.”
This story is getting worse by the second. Jessie hid the food from her stepkid, the one who clearly needed it, and let her kid have whatever she wanted.
“It just turned into this weird thing where I started to actually enjoy it,” Bex continues, her teeth sinking into her plump lower lip. “It felt like…a relief, somehow, gnawing on one. I know it’s weird and pathetic. I have no idea why I was so much hungrier than her or Bronwyn. I just was.”
I stare at her. These little snippets that she’s offered of her childhood have been consistent in one way only: they paint Jessie in a highly unflattering light.
And it’s not that I think she’s trying to do it.
I think Jessie deserved to be painted in an unflattering light, and for some reason, no one did it.
I’m not even sure that Rebecca has put it together herself.
“I don’t think that’s weird,” I tell her. “I think it’s fucking heartbreaking. Why did your father allow that?”
Her gaze is fixed on the empty shot glass. “I probably never even mentioned it to him.”
Why? Why didn’t she mention it, and why didn’t Rick ever ask his wife why the fucking freezer was padlocked, and, come to think of it, why did he allow her to take so many potshots at Bex when they were in public?
Jessie was always throwing Bex under the bus, right in front of him. And even when she wasn’t around, Rick never once alluded to how fucking brilliant his daughter was…and he must have known. Spend an hour with Rebecca and she’ll do or say something extraordinary.
“Freeze one of the cookies if you must, but eat the other one now.”
“I don’t want it now.”
“Bex, you’ve got a hollow leg. I’ve never seen you claim to be full. Eat the fucking cookie, right here, and I swear I’ll never bring it up again.”
With a deep sigh, she lifts the cookie, bites into it, and chews, frowning the whole time.
“What’s the verdict?”
Her eyes narrow. “It’s really good.”
I laugh at the almost childlike anger on her face. “But you’re still pissed at me?”
“Yes.” She takes a second, scowling bite.
Beneath the table I reach out and squeeze her knee. “Then at least we’re back to normal.”
· · ·
Because the waters around Capri fill up fast, the only way to make the boat ride from Sorrento to Capri without too much traffic clogging the view is to leave at sunrise.
I get down to the lobby at six and Bex arrives only a minute later, wearing a gauzy swim cover-up through which I can see the outline of her white bikini and a whole lot of skin.
I picture the robe sliding from her shoulders.
The way she’d gasp as I pulled the ties of that string bikini and let it fall to the floor.
I swallow hard. Just because you have an impulse to do something doesn’t mean you have to act on it. And I definitely won’t act on it, but bloody hell, I think of it often.
Her stilettos echo across the marble floor as she takes her suitcase over to a bellman, then turns my way. “You need a cover-up for that cover-up,” I grunt as she approaches, taking careful, tiny steps. “And why the hell are you wearing high heels to go on a boat?”
She rolls her eyes, moving toward the revolving door. “You don’t actually think this was my decision, do you? I just wore what Mindy told me to wear.”
“Go get the sandals,” I tell her, narrowing my eyes at the gawking bellboys and valets. “I’ll have the crew wait.”
She shrugs. “I’m trying not to piss anyone off this early in the process. Besides, I’d have to unpack the whole suitcase.”
When the van appears, she’s ogled equally by the valets and Caden as she climbs in. I’d pay a thousand bucks to put her in a full-coverage robe and a pair of flip-flops right now.
“Lars isn’t available this morning,” says Caden. “Paula’s directing and I’m AD1.”
Excellent. I’ll be taking direction from Caden, then. Caden, who has checked out Bex at least ten times in the past minute. I can’t possibly see how this could go awry.
We careen down a steep, twisty road carved into a cliff face and pull up behind the other van at the marina. Caden jumps down from the passenger seat and waits by the van’s sliding door, eager to help Bex out.
“I’ve got it,” I bark, bumping him out of the way and helping Bex climb down in the ridiculous shoes.
“Fucking take them off,” I demand. “If you try to climb those rocks in heels you’re going to break something. Mindy isn’t all-knowing.”
“I’m not sure I want to climb them barefoot either.”
She’s right. And I can only see one solution at present, one solution I’d prefer not to employ, but fuck it. I swoop her up into my arms, as if she’s a bride being carried over a threshold, and continue to walk, ignoring her surprised gasp.
“Wait,” calls Caden. “We’re not ready.”
“Not everything is a performance,” I growl, ignoring him and trying very hard to ignore the fact that it’s her bare thighs resting on my forearms.
Bex raises her sunglasses, her eyes twinkling up at me. “I didn’t know you were capable of this much chivalry, babe.”
“It’s not chivalry,” I reply. “I’m just sick of wasting time.”
She smiles, wrapping her arms around my neck. “That reminds me of this poem. ‘Porphyria worshipped me; surprise / Made my heart swell, and still it grew / While I debated what to do /…all her hair / In one long yellow string I wound / Three times her little throat around.’ ”
I frown. “Is this more Byron? I can’t really masturbate here.”
She laughs. “No, this time it’s Browning. Also British, obviously—you guys are a laugh a minute. It’s about a guy who loves this girl Porphyria but doesn’t know what to do with the feeling, so he strangles her to death.”
I suppose, in this scenario, I’m the guy and she’s Porphyria. She’s joking, but inside me those words echo like a rung bell, one I hurry to silence.
“Maybe Porphyria was mouthy,” I say, setting her down abruptly. “You can’t assume he didn’t have his reasons.”
She dons her heels, grasping my arm for balance as a wave rocks the dock beneath us, before climbing aboard the waiting boat. I follow, poised to grab her the minute those heels become an issue.
We sit on the prow while the crew gets set to shoot, graced with yet another view straight out of a postcard.
The sky is the same deep blue as the sea this morning, broken only by the cliffs and the old stone homes clustered along them.
There are trees at the top—a vineyard, perhaps?
An olive grove? I was never much of an explorer—I left that to Kieran—but I wouldn’t mind an extra day here with Bex to see what we missed.
If we could do so without the bloody cameras following us, that is.
Paula and Caden approach with LJ behind them. “Are you both ready?” Paula asks.
We nod, and then Caden looks us over and tips his chin at Bex.
“Take off the cover-up.” He’s smirking, as if it’s an inside joke, and I don’t know what the joke would be, but I dislike the idea of them holding a single unchaperoned conversation.
“We need some eye candy if we’re not gonna have you miked. ”
She sheds the robe and Jesus…Mindy must have bought a child’s bikini with as little as it covers.
Bex stands in front of the whole crew with far too much skin on display: lean legs, flat stomach, surprisingly ample chest. And as brazen as she is, as apt as she is to talk about her vibrator with a relative stranger, there’s a flush to her cheeks, her arms wrapped around herself.
She knows these people. She helped Jon choose the diamond he purchased. She helped LJ’s kid write a history paper, and now she’s practically nude in front of them all. Her discomfort is palpable.
Caden wolf whistles. “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.”
I’ve had it. “Keep objectifying her and commenting on how she looks and I’ll make you regret you ever signed on to this show.” I turn. “Bex, put the cover-up back on.”
Paula looks between us. “Theo’s right—it’s inappropriate, Caden. But there’s nothing sexy about the two of you sitting there fully clothed.”
I could argue that the cover-up was hardly fully clothed, but instead I pull my polo overhead and hand it to Bex. “Put it on.”
“But—” Paula begins.
“There’s nothing sexier than a woman wearing a man’s shirt, Paula,” I say. What I’m actually thinking is that there’s nothing sexier than Bex in my shirt. “And it’s that or I walk off the fucking boat and take her with me.”
“Fine,” says Paula. “But Theo, you’re not in charge.”
Caden smirks.
“Neither are you, Caden,” she adds.
Bex swallows, pulling the shirt on and tying it off at the waist as I take my place beside her again. “Thank you,” she says quietly, and then she stretches out, lying face down on her lounge chair—which means her lovely ass is on display for Caden, for the crew, for the viewing public.
For me.
I understand why Browning’s obsessed hero strangled Porphyria.
Dealing with a bunch of feelings you can’t act on is incredibly unpleasant.