His First Choice

She hadn’t said a word. And just because one particular face kept showing up in her thoughts didn’t mean that anything had changed in her life.

“You’re imagining things,” she said now, waiting for Kacey to turn back around and put the guys out of their misery. Hoping at this point that she would. And was uncomfortable when she didn’t.

“You watched that aftershave commercial last night like you were memorizing every detail,” Kacey said.

The guy in the commercial had been a construction worker. She’d taken a little side trip, trying to remember if the only other construction worker she knew personally, Jeremiah Bridges, wore cologne.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said now, wondering how long they were going to stand there staring at the horizon with the ocean lapping at their feet. Until the tide came in? The tips of her shorts would get wet and she hated driving with the wet, soppy feeling at the back of her knees.

“You had a pretty good study of the men’s underwear section at the department store the other evening.”

It was the whole “boxers or briefs” thing. Yeah, Jeremiah’s face—and, well, other imagined parts of him—had come to mind, but that only meant the guy was memorable.

He was a reprobate. And prickly, too. The fact that he stood out in her mind was hardly her fault.

“You’re wearing your hair down.” Kacey broke into Lacey’s silence.

“You told me to!” No hiding the accusation in that tone.

“I always tell you to. You never listen.”

“I do, too.” Pretty much every time her sister nagged her, she’d leave her hair in a ponytail rather than putting it up in the twist she p

referred.

“I want what you have, Lace,” Kacey said.

“I don’t have anything.”

“You have a chance.”

“Right. Like you don’t?”

“You think I’m going to meet some nice normal guy who’d like to make a real home with me?” Kacey’s pain cut through Lacey’s defenses.

“You will,” she said, grabbing her sister’s hands and turning her to face her. “Just stop spending all of your time in the clubs and Hollywood hangouts.”

“I go to the library one night a week,” Kacey told her. “I actually joined a book club. Not a single normal guy has even talked to me.”

Because she effervesced sex and power and money, which intimidated “normal” guys. Even when they’d been little with parents who’d had a middle-class income, Kacey had fit right in with the celebrities they’d encountered at the studios, as though she’d been born to be a star.

Lacey had liked the work, liked a lot of the places they got to go; she’d just been more reserved. It had been a lot easier to let Kacey charm all of the strangers with whom they’d come in contact. She was a natural at it.

Lacey had no idea what to tell her. Except... “Well, one thing you can do is stop going out with guys who clearly aren’t what you’re looking for.”

Nodding, Kacey dropped one of her hands, kept hold of the other and started walking again.

“So...you aren’t going to tell me who he is?”

“There is no one.”

“I understand, you know?”

“Understand what?”

“Why you won’t tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”