In another life, I’d have considered making a place like Maryland home. Maybe I had lived here in some previous life, hiding priests in tiny holes and growing tobacco like Tess said. But I’d chosen my home and my life for now. And the financial promise of the path I was currently walking made it pointless to think about things like this. Hell, maybe I’d known Tess in some past life, too. How else could I explain the way I felt around her, the closeness I sensed was already between us?
Or maybe I was just longing for the kind of life I couldn’t have. At least not now. It didn’t stop me from thinking about it though, about what it would be like to live here with a girl like Tess in this quiet beautiful place, maybe open a little production company someday.
After lounging in bed a while, I thought I could hear Juliet talking with her sister in low voices somewhere outside my door. I glanced out to see them both heading for the stairs and couldn’t resist the urge to let my eyes trail down Tess’s back as she disappeared from sight. Juliet was beautiful, but her sister was in a completely different class.
The hot-as-balls class, if you wanted to know the truth. The class that made my blood pound a He-man rhythm through my veins and my nether regions come up with ideas that were altogether inappropriate, given that I was supposed to be dating her sister.
Where Juliet was an indisputable beauty, her appeal was very obvious, almost in your face. Her sister, on the other hand … something about her made you want to look longer.
From the long angles of her nose and chin to the round pout of that small mouth. She wasn’t tall, and she wasn’t short—she was perfect, as far as I could tell. She moved away from me, having no idea I was tracking her every move. Her body was curvy and generous, and everything about the way her hips moved as she walked made me want to drop my hands to her waist and feel the motion for myself—maybe pull it into me.
If I was honest, Tess’s body made me think of dirty, dirty things… but I forced my mind away from them and chastised the parts of me that insisted on obsessing about what it might be like to feel her close and tight and hot around me as my hands filled themselves with her perfect breasts.
Even though she was physically perfect, that wasn’t the thing that made Tess so strangely compelling, and I realized it wasn’t any one thing—it was everything I’d learned and seen so far. I realized I barely knew her, but something fundamental inside me had responded the second I first saw her, and now I seemed to be nursing a serious fixation. It was a little unsettling, actually, because I was a guy who spent long days around Hollywood starlets, and I’d never been more taken with anyone than I was with this girl I’d found practically in the middle of nowhere.
I wanted to know her. To have the privilege of learning her.
There was the small issue of having to pretend to be smitten with her sister, however. But, I told myself there was no reason I couldn’t learn a little more about Tess Manchester on a purely platonic level while fulfilling my duties to her sister. And this little ruse wouldn’t last forever.
It wasn’t long before Juliet came up to get me for lunch—I’d been catching up on email and general news in the room. Something about being so far from a big city made me feel oddly out of touch, despite the fact that we’d left Los Angeles just the night before. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant feeling, actually.
“Come meet Gran,” she said, leaning against the doorframe.
“Anything I need to know?” I tensed a bit at the thought of telling our lie to an elderly family matriarch. I wanted to make a good impression.
While lying, of course.
Juliet tilted her head to one side and then wrinkled her nose before speaking. “She’s quirky.”
“Quirky how?”
“You’ll see.”
Juliet wasn’t lying. Gran, who I’d expected to be a frail old woman with maybe a cane or a shawl over her shoulders, was decked out in a designer sweat suit, looking a lot more Beyoncé than Grandma Moses. She was bent over the counter by the sink, giving a silver cocktail shaker a workout, when Juliet called out to get her attention.
“Gran, this is Ryan,” she said.
Gran looked over her shoulder with an appraising look and then turned back to her task, pouring a brown concoction into a martini glass before putting down the shaker and wiping her hands on her pants as she faced us. “Hello,” she said, smiling sweetly. “I’m Helen, but everyone just calls me Gran, so you might as well join in.”
“It’s a pleasure,” I told her, shaking her small thin hand gently. “Thank you so much for having me.”
She gave me a narrow-eyed look then, and I got the distinct impression I was being evaluated. “Do you smoke pot?” she asked.
Juliet stifled a laugh and I shot her a look, trying to figure out if there was an appropriate response I didn’t know about.
“Um, no ma’am. I mean. Once? In college? I didn’t inhale, of course.” I felt my face reddening.
“Right,” Juliet laughed.
“You do coke?” Gran was escalating her investigation, and I wondered exactly where we were heading. What was the right answer here? I got the sense it might not be the one I would normally default to around parental types.
I swallowed my surprise and shook my head. “No ma’am. I’ve got a pretty serious Altoids habit I’ve been trying to kick, but I’m clean when it comes to opioids, narcotics, hallucinogens and whippets.”
“Whippets?” Juliet asked, her eyes wide.
“Yeah,” Gran said. “Whipped cream cans? You’ve never done one?”
Juliet’s brows lowered at Gran’s explanation. “Seriously?”
“I think we’re having pie later,” Gran said. “I’ll
