Elias Read online

  "What's West Bend like, anyway?" she asked, as we pulled into the parking lot.

  I shrugged. “I don't know. Like any other small town.”

  How the hell did I explain West Bend to an outsider? Real pretty on the outside but rotten to the core inside? Maybe it was just me and my brothers that were that way, all looks and no substance. It’s what my father used to say.

  God rest his soul, my mother said when she’d called to tell me the news.

  I’d laughed bitterly. Can’t rest what you don’t have, I’d told her.

  "Are all small towns the same?" she asked.

  I was going to formulate a smartass response, but I merely grunted, since we were already pulling into the parking space. And then River was practically scrambling over the top of me to get a look at the menu. “Excuse you,” I said, as she dug her hand into my thigh.

  “Didn’t complain when I was this close to you before,” she said.

  True. And I could see down her shirt, so that was a bonus. I felt the familiar stirring between my legs, and she looked down, then up at me. I shrugged. “Don’t put your hand down there if you don’t want it to get hard.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, but we were interrupted by the car hop at the window. While the girl was taking our orders, I found myself actually wondering what River had been about to say.

  We ate in silence for a while, until River spoke. "So," she said. "You grew up in West Bend?"

  "Yup." I popped a French fry into my mouth, and didn't elaborate.

  She let the silence linger for a minute before breaking it. "Anyone ever tell you you're amazing at small talk?"

  I shot her a look.

  "Thought so," she said, her voice light. "Well, there's this thing called conversation, where one person asks a question and the other one answers, but says some more stuff in response."

  I shrugged. "I'm not much for talking about where I grew up." I got the hell out of West Bend as soon as I could, and I'd only gone back once. I wasn't exactly looking forward to going back now.

  Especially considering the fact that now I had to think about what the hell I was going to do with a movie star in tow.

  I sure as fuck couldn’t take her to my house. A girl like that would run screaming when she saw where the hell I came from. Hand to mouth living was probably the best way to describe my family's situation growing up - we had four walls and a piece of dirt, but not much more than that. My father- the asshole, as my brothers and I called him- brought in our meager income mining on our land, until that went to shit when I was in high school.

  I wasn’t about to bring a girl like her home with me to see my family’s clapboard house, that was for damn sure, even if the asshole wasn't there anymore.

  “Well, we’ve got how much longer until we get to West Bend?” she asked.

  “About an hour or so,” I said.

  “Then you’ve got about an hour or so of a captive audience here,” she said. “Considering you had your tongue down my throat before, I’d say we’re pretty well acquainted enough for small talk.” She winked at me, and it made me laugh.

  “All right,” I said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Who said I wanted to know anything about you?” she asked. “I’m a fucking movie star, and you don’t want to ask me anything?”

  The same damn words out of someone else’s mouth and they would have sounded stuck up and bitchy and just plain tacky. But there was this...lightness about everything she said, this playfulness about her.

  I laughed. "You are full of yourself, aren't you?"

  “Just direct,” she said. “I don’t see any point in beating around the bush about it. There’s obviously something worrying you about going home, and you’re clearly man enough to tell me if you don’t want to discuss it.”

  “I don’t want to discuss it,” I said.

  “See how easy that was?”

  "Okay, princess," I said. "Where'd you grow up? Hollywood? You think you're going to be able to hack it in rural America?"

  She looked down for a minute, and I hoped she weren't going to start fucking crying again. But she didn't, just took a bite of a French fry. "Golden Willow, Georgia," she said. "I know small towns. I think I'll manage just fine."

  "Huh." I hadn't expected that.

  "Surprised?" she asked, her smile more of a smirk.

  "Didn't expect you were a country girl," I said.

  "Not all of us movie stars grow up rich, you know," she said. "I wasn't always a princess."

  "You're not really what I expected from an actress."

  "Glad I'm not disappointing," she said, munching on the end of a fry. "I'd hate to be a cliché."

  I watched as she took a bite of her burger, and she turned toward me, her hazel eyes bright, hair messily sticking up on the ends. "You're definitely different, River Andrews," I said. "That's for damned sure."

  “You’re sure this place is discreet?” River asked. “This is someone you’ve known for a while?”

  “You sound like we’re visiting a whorehouse or something,” I said. “It’s a bed and breakfast.”

  I deliberately failed to mention that I wasn't friends with the owners, and that people from West Bend may not exactly be particularly happy to see one of the Saint brothers show up, dragging with him a movie star demanding to stay incognito. That’s not the kind of problem you just dumped on people who thought you were the scum of the earth.

  Not that I knew the people running the bed and breakfast anyway.

  Not personally.

  That's not to say we didn't have history, a sordid history. But I didn't know what else to do with River. All I could think about was the look that would inevitably cross her face when I brought her home to my house.

  No thanks. I sure as fuck wasn’t a masochist.

  And I sure as fuck wasn't bringing her home.

  Not to my house.

  Not to my mother.

  Not to my brother.

  "You sure we shouldn't have called first?" she asked, giving me this weird look.

  "I'm sure it's fine." I said. I wasn't.

  River met me on my side of the vehicle. Her hand went up to my shirt, where the collar would be, her fingers lingering at my neck line. The way she did it, the way she paused there, reminded me of a scene from an old movie, the way a woman would adjust the tie of a man.

  "Well," she said. "I'm guessing this is goodbye." Up on her tiptoes, she touched her lips gently to the side of my face.

  "I'll walk you inside," I said. "Jesus, I am a gentleman."

  She laughed, this bawdy, totally in the moment sound that lacked any kind of pretense whatsoever. Her finger trailed across my chest, and she bit the bottom of her lip. I could see her tongue snake along the edge of her lip, and it made it me want to be the one doing the biting. "Somehow I doubt that," she said.

  "That I'm a gentleman?" I asked, my brow furrowed. All of a sudden, I was offended that she didn't think of me that way. I found myself wondering what the hell I'd need to do to prove that I was, in fact, a gentleman.

  River nodded, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. "Elias Saint, I doubt you could ever be a gentleman."

  She turned and walked toward the white ranch house, leaving me wondering whether the hell that was an insult or a compliment.

  And leaving me in her wake.

  I had a feeling I wasn't the first man to feel that way.

  At the front door of the ranch house, River knocked. I stood behind her, feeling like I was back in middle school again, the dirty son of a coal miner, a no good kid from my no good home. I knew June Barton owned this place now, and June's family wasn't like that. I didn't know her, but I knew that much.

  She didn't know me, either. Not personally. That's what I was counting on here. The last thing I wanted, with River standing right here, was for June to realize who I was.

  A woman came to the door, wearing an apron over her T-shirt and jeans. The apron didn't do much to hide