Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 76647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
After a few moments of awkward silence, I looked over at him. He was staring at me as if he’d never seen me before.
Crap.
14
DREW
Holy shit. It still didn’t seem possible that the shy, unassuming young woman at the opposite end of the couch was a genuine movie star. She didn’t act like a movie star. She was so… well, shy and unassuming.
Then again, she was beautiful enough to be an actress. There was no doubt about that. But still, the way she was slouched down, all but buried in those oversized clothes with a blanket on top, she wasn’t exactly the picture of Hollywood glamor.
They were, in fact, my clothes, I realized. Or at least the sweatpants were. Shit, that meant a Hollywood actress had gotten in my pants. It was a juvenile thought, but one that was amusing, nonetheless.
“What?” Sierra asked. I’d thought her attention was on the movie on the screen. Tristan and Carter had gone upstairs about ten minutes ago, after some subtle nudging on Tristan’s part. He probably thought Sierra needed space. I agreed, but I had no room to retreat to. Besides, she didn’t seem in any hurry to rush off to the bedroom.
“I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around it. I don’t usually encounter genuine celebrities trapped under a tree.”
She raised an eyebrow in a way I found sexy as hell. “It’s not your traditional Hollywood meet-cute, I’ll give you that.”
But she was cute. In addition to being gorgeous, of course, but with her knees pulled up to her chest and the blanket covering everything but her face, she looked adorable. The ponytail made her look more like a college student than an actress. All she needed was glasses to complete the look. “I’ve seen the movies, you know. The first three.”
“You have? You don’t seem the type for car chases and fight scenes.”
I grinned. “I may have grown up as a computer nerd, but I’m still a man. We like that stuff.”
I didn’t mention I also liked seeing the hero get the girl—especially since it was a different one each movie. That had never struck me as incredibly sexist until just now.
Sierra was the star of the upcoming one, but there was no way she’d be in the next one. Chase Cooper, Aiden Hunt’s character, would move on and Sierra’s character would never be mentioned again. I wondered if that bothered her.
Sierra seemed interested in what I’d just said. “Did you get teased as a kid?”
“Big time. I had glasses. I was in the A/V club and the debate team. And, I didn’t even break a hundred pounds until a growth spurt near the end of high school.”
“Not even a hundred pounds,” she mused. “Funny how that’s a bad thing for a guy and a good thing for a girl.”
“Yeah.” That was another thing I hadn’t spent much time thinking about. “Since you were a child star, and a female at that, did you have to watch what you ate?” I’d taken a peek at an online bio of her when she’d slipped into the bathroom before.
“No,” she said, surprising me. “I didn’t watch what I ate, everyone else did it for me. My mother, my agent, the director, male costars… I don’t think I had an unsupervised bite throughout my first decade in the industry.”
“I hope you indulged while you were at the cabin. I would’ve pigged out with no witnesses around.”
“It was tempting, but I have to look good for the upcoming publicity and the premiere.” Her voice was bitter.
As far as I was concerned, she always looked fantastic, but all those people who told her what to eat probably would want her to wear something other than sweats. “Is it true how bad stage moms can be?”
“Yes.”
Her voice was clipped, and she swiveled her head back to the fire, a clear sign that it wasn’t something she wanted to talk about. I understood, but I still wanted to continue the conversation, now that I’d finally gotten her talking. In order to avoid any sensitive topics with her, I decided to reveal more about myself. “In college, I was the only computer science major who worked out twice a day.”
That made those gorgeous green eyes point in my direction again. “Why?”
“Most didn’t care about their bodies. All they cared about was coding.”
“No, I mean why did you work out so much?” Unless I was mistaken, her gaze dropped to my bicep, which was flattering.
But she probably wanted a real answer and it was hard to explain. “I—I resented my scrawny body in high school. It felt like something that was inflicted on me instead of being a part of me. But my roommate, freshman year, went to the gym regularly, so I tagged along. I liked the way it felt to work my muscles. It… it was like my body and my mind were one—and not like my brain was the only important part of me, and the rest of me was just luck of the draw.”