CHAPTER 1
My heart got slammed pretty hard, but it wasn’t broken. When you've got as much sass as me, you don’t crumble easily.
However, nothing knocks you over quite like having a complete stranger notice your pain. For me, it was the photographer’s assistant, a very nice, very g*y young man named Mitchell.
(Not Mitch. Mitchell.)
I was getting ready to mainline three espresso shots when Not-Mitch Mitchell came up to me, tipped his immaculately-groomed face to the side, and said, “Two things: may I call you Peaches, and may I offer you a hug?”
I held him back with a raised palm. “Don’t you dare be nice to me. I am just barely hanging on by a thread.”
We were alone in the swanky kitchen at the photography studio. Mitchell, compact and blond with an angelic face that made his age difficult to guess, looked around furtively, then whispered, “Did you have a fight with your boyfriend? With Dalton Deangelo? We’ve never met, but of course I love him to pieces. That face. Those green eyes.” He fanned himself with one hand. “But if you want me to, I’ll start hating him immediately.”
I wrapped the pristine white terry cloth robe tighter around myself, keenly aware that the bits of fabric I was modeling that day were underwear and not the parts of a swimsuit. I’d said to my father it was basically the same thing—underwear, bikini, whatever. But it was NOT basically the same thing.
Just like how dating someone because you like them is NOT basically the same thing as dating them as research for an acting role.
I’d been up past four o’clock that morning wrestling with the horrifying realization that Dalton Deangelo, the super-hot actor you know and love as vampire Drake Cheshire, had been dating me the last two weeks as research.
He’d been in my hometown shooting an indie movie in which his good-looking, successful character dates a chubby girl. I happen to be a chubby girl (just one of my many awesome attributes), so you can see how I made that leap of logic.
I tossed back three tiny cups of espresso and tightened my robe again.
Mitchell swatted my hand. “Not too tight, or you’ll give yourself red wrinkle lines on your skin.”
“So? Won’t they just airbrush that out?”
Mitchell laughed. “My boss doesn’t allow airbrushing of his photos.”
“No airbrushing?”
He gave me a sympathetic look. “The lighting is very bright.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of!”
Another sympathetic look. “Do you want that hug now? It will help. I give excellent hugs.”
“Fine, but stop being so damn nice to me. Treat me bad. I think a little abuse brings out my strength.”
“I can be butch,” he said, frowning.
“You’re wearing a lavender turtleneck and what smells like Chanel No. 5.”
He frowned and joked, “Shut up. I’m going to be all forceful and hug you now and you’re going to like it.”
Mitchell was already blushing with embarrassment as he came in to give me a hug, so I squished my boobs against him harder, then murmured in his ear, “Pull my hair.”
Bless his heart, he reached up and gingerly gave my teased-out blond locks a tug.
“You animal!” I howled, laughing.
He stepped back from the embrace, grinning. “My hugs are good, right?”
I kept laughing, and then I remembered the words I’d read in Dalton’s movie script the night before. His character told a friend that maybe f**king a fat girl wasn’t so bad after all. That if he closed his eyes, there was so much of her, it was like having a threesome.
And then I wasn’t laughing anymore. I was sniffing back tears, barely hanging on, and poor Mitchell scurried around apologizing and handing me tissues.
Thanks to Mitchell, I got through the morning’s photo shoot. The photographer seemed both disgusted and fascinated by me, if that makes sense.
He’d say things like, “Interesting,” as he looked at one of my curves or creases, and I didn’t want to know what he meant. I had two days of photographs, and I just had to get through it, one minute at a time, the same way you get over heartbreak.
Whenever I got flustered, mixing up my right arm with my left arm and nearly knocking over lights instead of looking fetching, Mitchell caught my eye.
“Don’t make me pull your hair,” he’d whisper in his trying-to-be-butch voice.
I wanted to fold him up and take him back home to Beaverdale in my luggage.
I told him about my souvenir plans when we took a lunch break, and he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Your town is called Beaverdale? Oh, no. That’s all wrong. In case you haven’t guessed by the summer-weight cashmere mock-turtleneck, I’m not into beaver.”
We were standing under the awning of a food truck, eating salad wraps with rice noodles, prawns, and peanut sauce. The day was overcast just enough that Washington didn’t seem so far away from LA.
“Oh, no,” Mitchell moaned, staring past me.
I turned and followed his gaze.
“Hold me back before I embarrass myself,” I muttered under my breath.
The shirtless man approaching us was all meat, no filler. His six-pack was so defined, he made Dalton Deangelo look like the Before picture in a gym advertisement. Oh, and he had a face of some sort, too. Not that I saw it for the first minute or so when he came up to us and greeted Mitchell by name.
They talked while I jammed the noodle wrap into my mouth to keep myself from saying something ridiculous. I don’t think of myself as being a very fun or outgoing person, but my mouth thinks it’s fun. My mouth says a lot of things, not necessarily endorsed by me or my brain.
“I’m Keith,” he said, offering me his hand. “We’ll be shooting together this afternoon.”
I shook his hand gingerly. “Nope. You couldn’t be more wrong.”
He laughed. “You’re Peaches Monroe, right? Yes, I assure you. We are shooting together this afternoon.”
I turned to Mitchell. “It’s true,” he said, offering me another of his sympathetic looks.
Keith ordered a salad wrap and leaned back against the food truck, his shirtless torso on display. My gaze drifted up to his face. I’d already had a gander at everything around, above, and below his gray jogging shorts, but my eyes had saved the best for last. His face had a sexy Clark Kent vibe, with a square jaw, smirking lips, and a swirl of curly dark hair falling down over his forehead. The only flaw keeping him from being SuperMan’s alter ego was that his eyes were a golden brown, not blue. He wore nerdy black-framed glasses, which, combined with his bare chest, caused a few circuits in my brain to over-fire and burn out. The result was a shocking five seconds of silence before my mouth got moving again.