Читать книгу Her Secret Life - Tara Taylor Quinn - Страница 16

CHAPTER SEVEN

MIKE BROUGHT WILLIE home to spend the night with him. Ostensibly he made the offer because he was taking his brother to school in the morning to sort out the cheating issue with Willie’s biology teacher, Mr. Weatherby.

He’d been one of Mike’s favorite teachers. Aeons ago.

The underbelly truth was that their father was at his wit’s end with Willie. He’d been in and out of trouble since junior high, refused to follow even the simplest of requests like keeping his music down or honoring a curfew.

And yet he always seemed to stop far short of felony status.

At his core, Willie was a good kid, a decent human being. He just had a mountain of guilt to get over.

“Wow, who’s this babe?” his brother called out to him, and Mike’s stomach sank.

He walked from the kitchen through to the family room that was almost consumed by a wall-size screen, an entertainment center couch and a myriad of technological wonders lining the two side walls.

If Willie had his way, he’d never leave the room.

On the couch, with a state-of-the-art wireless keyboard on his lap and Mike’s computer called up on the big screen, the blond, blue-eyed high school senior was staring at the Photoshopped picture of Kacey and practically drooling.

With the push of a button on one of the many towers on a shelf next to the couch, Mike shut down the machine.

He never left his personal computer on. Never.

Except when he was talking to a woman on the phone as he was changing and was not aware he’d be bringing anyone home with him, which would have made him doubly focused on shutting everything down.

Still, if there’d been a break-in while he was gone...

Stupid. He’d been talking to Kacey and had made a stupid mistake. One that could have had repercussions for some of his clients and his business.

Most personal information was kept on secure drives at the office, and the cases he’d be working on from home were on separate flash drives. But he’d called Kacey’s up before he’d phoned her...

“Wo-ho! Man!” Willie’s chuckle didn’t sound innocent. Or kind. “You’ve got a babe? Big brother Mikey has a babe? That looks like that?”

The boy, with his long hair falling over his cheekbones and the corners of his eyes, was looking at the computer tower. The screen. Not at Mike. Never at Mike.

At least Willie wasn’t staring down at his shoes, which was where his gaze usually landed when he and Mike were in the same room.

Mike picked up the glasses of chocolate milk he’d carried in from the kitchen. He’d set them down to shut off the computer and now handed one to his baby brother.

“I do not have a babe.” That much had to be made clear from the get-go. And the rest... “You were on my computer.” The truth was safest for all concerned. “She’s a client.”

It wasn’t like Willie had ever been inside the Lemonade Stand, or would ever have cause to know any of the women or workers there. No reason to recognize Kacey.

That part of his life—the counseling and the work he did there—was his alone. Off-limits to his family.

And none of them had any knowledge of his association—his friendship—with the famous Kacey Hamilton. None of them even knew he’d met the actress.

Part of Santa Raquel’s allure to Kacey was that no one there recognized her or knew who she was. And for Lacey’s sake, they kept it that way.

Willie slurped the chocolate milk and nodded, his focus on the bottom half of the now empty screen. “Sure. That’s cool.” He mumbled something. Mike couldn’t make out the words, but the derogatory tone had him on alert.

“What was that?” he asked.

“Nothing.” Willie grabbed one of several controls in the console between the reclining seats. “Flip on the game station, man. Let’s get this night going.”

The brothers were pretty much neck and neck in a yearlong interactive world-building video game. They built police forces, got jobs, voted for politicians. They took risks and could get sick, hurt, maimed or killed. For once Mike didn’t feel like playing.

“No.” Finishing his milk, he set the cup on a side table and sat down on the couch—opposite end from his brother. “I want you to tell me what you just said.”

“Let’s get our game on, that’s what.” The boy dropped his glass in the holder and stared at it.

“Will, tell me what you said.” Why was he pushing so hard? The kid was already on the verge of complete rebellion.

“I said, ‘Of course she wouldn’t be your babe.’” He spoke in a loud voice, his head half bowed, his gaze aimed somewhere near Mike’s elbow. “It was... I just... You know, like, how great would that be...if you had a babe that looked like that.”

Willie had hoped Kacey was his girlfriend. The idea made his little brother happy. The opposite...he’d been bitter.

“I’m sorry, okay?” Willie tapped his foot on the floor and his hand against his thigh. “I shouldn’t have said it. I... Look, man...”

With another remote in hand, Mike pushed buttons and a game came on the screen. He queued it up to where he and Willie had left off. “It’s not a problem, Willie,” he said now. “And for the record, I don’t have a girlfriend because I choose not to, not because I can’t get one.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Willie grabbed a control.

And started racing his car down a busy street.

* * *

WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY were killer days on the set. Kacey worked from seven to seven to get the week’s scenes shot within the new four-day workweek. She’d barely had time to text with Mike. The biggest news had been the name of the shop where he’d traced the IP address, an internet café not far from her condo where she sometimes took her tablet to read news while she enjoyed a cup of coffee.

Oh, and he’d been able to straighten things out with his younger brother. The kid got to stay in class. And keep his grade. Michael had said something about counting the days until graduation. He actually knew how many were left.

She loved that about him. That he cared that much. That he was so...aware.

“Now, when you first meet them, my folks can be a little overwhelming.” Bo broke into her thoughts and she was back in his Jaguar, dressed in a short tight-fitting black dress with three-inch heels and almost as much makeup as she wore on set.

Her necklace, an angel pendant with multicolored Swarovski crystals, was big and bold on her bare chest, hanging almost to her cleavage. At the last minute she’d changed the matching earrings for the ones Lacey had given her. Diamonds and Swarovski went hand in hand.

“And my brother, he can be a bit of a nerd, but he’s harmless.” Bo was embarrassed by his brother. He hadn’t said so, but the thought came to her anyway.

It wasn’t a normal Kacey observation. But then, she’d just been thinking about Michael and his brother troubles.

Mostly, she wasn’t her usual happy-go-lucky, take everything at face value self. She couldn’t shake the fact that someone was out to sabotage her. And she was exhausted.

Definitely not up to meeting the folks.

Bo reached for her hand and squeezed it. “You okay?” The smile he sent her was as gorgeous and adoring as they came.

“Of course.” Sending him an equally engaging smile, she squeezed back. She liked Bo. He seemed to support the changes she was making in her life. Sure, there was an occasion now and then when he wanted to go to an after-party and she insisted on going home.

But he was trying.

“Thank you for doing this. You have no idea how much it means to my folks.”

His words brought a bit of a clench to her heart. She and Bo...they were together, but not together together. Not yet.

She supposed they were heading that way, and wasn’t fighting the possibility. Bo, whose last gig was playing the heartthrob star of a sitcom, was currently considering his options on his way to becoming one of the nation’s top stars. Their lives would be busy and exciting and everything she’d always envisioned.

But he also had family he cared about. Down-home, earthy, real-life stuff.

Suddenly glad to do this, she gave his hand another squeeze. “I’m anxious to meet them,” she said. If she and Bo made it all the way, the people she was about to meet could be her family someday.

And she’d discovered over the past year that family was what she valued more than anything.

* * *

MIKE SAW A photo of Kacey during his routine client surfing Friday morning. He’d been searching her name continuously since their Monday lunch meeting and had seen more beautiful, sexy and revealing shots of the woman than he’d needed, if his nighttime sweats were anything to go by.

The whole thing was off. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen images of beautiful women before. To the contrary, he saw them all the time in his line of work and had pretty much grown immune to them.

But these photos weren’t of a stranger. Or even just a client. They were of Kacey. Except for the one in question, they were also all legitimately posted, including the one from the night before.

It was a seemingly random shot by a journalist who happened to be having dinner at the same place as Bo and Kacey and Bo’s parents. A common occurrence in Beverly Hills.

Still, as he dressed in jeans and a cream-colored button-down denim shirt, ran his fingers through the blond mop that had once won him a “best hair” award and headed toward the computer shop outside the Lemonade Stand, he couldn’t get the vision of Kacey’s short black dress and remarkable cleavage out of his mind.

Neanderthal had been looking at that cleavage.

Kacey’s smile was directed toward the older couple holding their hands out to her.

The caption read, “New family ties in the making?”

Had she seen it?

He couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say about the shot.

Unless she thought it was great...

Wait.

The thought stopped his self-talk cold. If she thought it was great, that was cool. Totally cool.

She was his friend. He wanted her happy.

And if joining Neanderthal’s family made her happy, then he was happy for her.

Period.