Chapter 7
It took us another few days to finish putting together the set.
For once, my long list of failed hobbies had come in useful, as least where dyeing the curtains and painting the vase were concerned.
The white damask curtains were now a pale blue, which looked amazing behind the chair, and the ugly vase had been transformed with a little white paint and some blue and pink painted flowers.
And I’d even had a couple of tapers left over from the two minutes I’d convinced myself I could make and sell artisanal candles.
The set looked almost as good as Dash himself.
I admit it—when he buzzed me into his building and opened the door to his apartment, I had almost passed out right then and there.
His light tan breeches were molded to his muscular thighs, and his billowy white shirt showed just enough of his chest that the first words that popped out of my mouth were, “Are you sure you’re shooting the non-spicy ones today? ”
But that was indeed the plan.
I curled up on a regular old office chair in the corner of his spare room, my laptop out in case we needed to make any last-minute changes to the script.
After our little work session at the laundromat, we’d started full-out cowriting the scripts—Dash’s spreadsheet of tropes and vast knowledge of the romance genre had been a huge help in figuring out what would be the most swoon worthy.
He had placed his tripod on the windowsill, which allowed him to brace himself against the wall in a way that was probably making his biceps bulge under his shirt. Watching the image playing back on the monitor next to my chair, I felt excitement like Pop Rocks in my stomach.
“You dropped your fan outside the stables earlier,” Dash said into the camera in an English accent. A slight smile was playing over his lips, as if he—or rather, the Duke—was aware of how flimsy a pretext it was. “I thought you would want me to return it.”
He flipped open the fan, showing off the landscape that had been painted on the delicate silk.
“In all sincerity, I was hoping for a quiet moment with you. I know it’s terribly ungentlemanly of me to mention what transpired between us at your aunt’s ball.
That night in the rose gardens, however…
every time I close my eyes, I see you shimmering in the moonlight.
I see the stars in your eyes. And most of all, my darling, if you can forgive the impertinence of my calling you by such an intimate endearment, most of all I see the way my world has shifted to place you at its center.
You are my sun, incandescent and vibrant and so beautiful you dazzle me. ”
He did that thing where he dropped his voice and made it just a touch gravelly.
“Look at me, darling. Tell me you feel the truth of it as strongly as I do. Tell me you want to steal away with me again, and find a darkened corner to share a kiss like that last one. Did you know that your mouth looks like a rosebud? And your skin… your skin is velvet and silk, so soft I want to bury my face in your neck and trace the lines of your neck with my lips.”
His lips curled and a sudden wicked sparkle came into his eyes.
“Does that shock you? We did all that and more in the rose gardens, and I don’t recall seeing you blush then.
What would you say if I told you I want to make you blush?
And sigh and gasp… and pant. I want to shatter you the way you’ve shattered me, and then I want us to remake each other. ”
I held my breath as Dash reached out to touch the underside of the lens, as lightly as if it were his imaginary lover’s chin. “I love your smile,” he said softly. “And darling, I love you.”
My arms were rippling with goose bumps, and it wasn’t just because Dash seemed to have that effect on me. For the first time since we’d started this thing, I knew for a fact that our videos were going to go viral. And it was all down to him.
Yes, he was brimming over with charisma, and yes, he was so intensely beautiful it was almost hard to look at him.
But the truly captivating thing about Dash was that he understood the female gaze in a way few cis men seemed to.
He wasn’t relying on his body or even his beautiful, full lips to capture the viewer’s attention, he was blazing with sincerity and barely restrained desire and just enough vulnerability to win over the most hardened of hearts.
The protective shell around mine must have started to crack, because when Dash finished his speech and clicked off the camera, I didn’t just feel won over—I felt breathless with how badly I wanted to knock the filming equipment aside and beg him to say all those things to me.
“I think I have time do another take before we lose the light,” he was saying, reaching for his tumbler and rattling the quickly melting ice cubes in his coffee before taking a swig. “Do you have any notes?”
“None, other than… holy crap, you’re amazing.” I shoved a handful of hair away from my face, grinning at him from across the room. “Amazing isn’t even the right word for it, but I’ll be damned if I can think of any better ones.”
“And here I thought you had a really good vocabulary.” Dash beamed back at me, and I couldn’t help but think that in this case, beam was certainly the right word, because happiness was radiating out of him like moonbeams. And yeah, that was mostly because he was bathed in light from the open window, his pale skin practically gilded in it, but also because his enthusiasm was just that bright.
But before I could gather myself enough to say so out loud, Dash accidentally dribbled a few drops of iced coffee onto his shirt. “Ah, fuck,” he said, his smile dimming by like half a watt. “Let me run this under cold water before it sets.”
If my brain hadn’t been at its prime a moment before, it fully shorted out the moment he peeled off his shirt and turned to head to the bathroom.
“Oh!” I blurted out. “You have a tattoo!”
He craned his neck to glance at his upper back in the large mirror on the wall behind me, as if he’d forgotten the arc of words sweeping under his sharply defined shoulder blade.
“What does it say?” I asked, avoiding the impulse to trace the finely molded words with my fingertips, and the gleaming skin beneath them.
“Happy endings, they never bored me. It’s a line from ‘Fuck Forever,’ this song I used to be obsessed with.”
“Does it have anything to do with your love of romance novels?”
“Kind of,” Dash said. He was still looking backward into the mirror. “It’s more of a reminder, I guess. I’m old enough to know that my parents are never getting that happily ever after I always wanted for them. But I still have time to find one for myself.”
He smiled at me over his shoulder, and this time there was no flirtatious hair flip, just a half-shy, half-earnest little quirk of his lips that turned my knees into jelly. And not just because my legs were primed to run away in another flail.
“Yeah,” I said softly, then cleared my throat.
We hadn’t talked about the moment we’d had in the garden of Second Chance and maybe that was a good thing, because I would have rather licked a subway seat than confront the fact that Dash and I had…
what? Almost kissed? Almost kept sharing highly personal stuff without my even coming close to breaking out into hives?
I had gone from cursing Kitty Marlowe for the interruption to being grateful for the cranky cat. I mean, who knew where we might have ended up if she hadn’t broken the tension by diving directly onto my head, like it was a landing pad and she a crashing helicopter?
“If anyone’s getting a happily ever after, it’s you,” I said, trying to sound matter of fact.
He breathed out a laugh. “I mean, I hope so. But it’s not like I’m doing much about it at the moment. I’m… not really doing the whole dating thing right now.”
“What, dating is as hard for you as it is for us mere mortals?”
Lucky for me, Dash didn’t seem offended by my sarcastic remark.
“It’s partly because some people get kind of weird when I tell them what I do for a living.
Not always in a shame-y way, but… I don’t know, just weird.
And partly…” The monitor trembled when he leaned against the desk and crossed his long legs, which were as bare as his feet below the hem of his breeches.
“I think I’ve been putting too much pressure on myself, and on all of my relationships.
For a while there, I was so obsessed with finding my own happy ending that I basically kept trying to force it with everyone I was dating. ”
“And if there’s one way to keep from getting a happy ending, it’s forcing a happy ending,” I said.
“Pretty much. So yeah, right now I’m just giving myself some time and space to figure out how to date without getting too… intense.”
“I don’t get why that’s such a bad thing,” I said before I could think better of it.
“Being intense, I mean. If nothing else, it’s a welcome change to all the guys who act like they have a deathly allergy to being even the slightest bit thoughtful toward the people they’re hooking up with.
Forget baseball—ghosting is the national pastime! ”
I’d meant to make him laugh, but of course Dash took one look at me and went straight for the feels. “You’ve been hurt a lot, huh?”
“More like severely annoyed,” I said, glancing away. “If I let myself get hurt every time someone flaked out on me, I’d be a walking wound.”
“So instead you bury your head in the sand and pretend it doesn’t bother you?”
He wasn’t wrong, but I was in no mood to be analyzed. “Ouch, Dashwood. Way to stick a knife right in my chest.” Untwisting my legs, I clambered out of the chair and snatched the shirt from his hand. “Come on, we gotta go do laundry.”
Dash trailed after me. “Are you going to run away every time I try to talk about your feelings?”