My Secret Fantasies

Those rare conversations hadn’t been a case of my parents trying to welcome me back with open arms. Those talks had been not-so-subtle coercion to admit I’d made a mistake. But that hadn’t happened, and it wouldn’t happen. I’d protected myself from the past for six years, and I planned to keep on protecting myself from it, even if that meant turning my back on something that might have been really good with Damien. He didn’t want more drama in his life, and me? I was the drama queen in more ways than one, even if I didn’t want to be.

Damien drank some of the tea I’d made and then inhaled the scent drifting toward him in a tendril of steam, as if still trying to identify the tastes. I liked that he paid careful attention to the game we played. It lifted my spirits as we talked about stuff that I found kind of depressing.

“And when did you start working for Joelle?”

“Almost as soon as I arrived in L.A.” I took Damien’s half-finished vanilla-cinnamon tea and sipped. “Joelle’s place was close to my first apartment, so I could walk there. I’d been on the staff for about a year—hostessing for the restaurant and running the register for the store—when I realized I had much more fun at my part-time job than I did pounding the pavement for acting work.”

“What do you like about it?” He polished off his tea and set the cup aside. Candlelight still flickered above us, casting appealing shadows on his face. “The cooking? The customers?”

“I’m good at it.” I’d never thought about that before. “All my life, I searched for something that was just mine—something my sister wasn’t better at than me. I was always a better cook, but that was never celebrated in my family, because I used the skill to make things like homemade cream puffs and buttery cobbler...all kinds of great treats that made me put on too much weight.” Definitely not a healthy coping mechanism for family stress. “But now I can cook for other people and watch them enjoy it.”

“I enjoyed the tea,” he said suddenly, turning the conversation in a direction I hadn’t expected. “But I’m not sure I could tell you anything that was in it.”

“Guess your taste buds aren’t as refined as I thought.”

“Or else I have a taste for you, and only you.” He reached across the blanket to palm my bare thigh, his warm, callused hand covering half my leg.

I was a sucker for those calluses. They snagged lightly on the hem of my T-shirt and gently abraded my skin.

“That sounds like a come-on line, if ever I heard one.” I walked my fingers up his muscular forearm to his upper arm. His shoulder.

“How’s it working?” He came closer again, leaning in to nibble at my neck.

Shivers tripped up and down my spine as I swayed toward him.

“Really, really well.” My heart rate spiked wildly, my whole body caught up in the magnetic draw of his. “I wish—”

I stopped myself before I finished that thought.

But not, apparently, before he’d heard me.

“You wish what?” He quit kissing my neck to cup my jaw and stroke his thumb over my cheek.

Putty. I was total putty in his hands. Maybe that’s why a little dream of my heart leaped out.

“I wish we had more time.”

I knew it was the wrong thing to say even as I said it. Those words changed the mood from lighthearted and fun to brooding and intense. Damien’s eyes turned a shade darker, his expression transforming into the hard lines I remembered from that first time we’d met, on the side of the road.

“We can take all the time we want.” His voice was serious, the tone full of warning. “You don’t need to let anybody chase you away from here if you want to stay.”

“I don’t feel like I’m being chased.” Maybe a little, I did. I’d seen a few overnight sensations in Hollywood wake up to the mayhem of superstardom, only to realize they no longer had a life. “More like this simple existence is about to implode. The quietness of the farm. The fun of new guests. Being part of a new foal’s first days...”

“You like the farm more than me.” Damien tipped my face up to the candlelight, his expression serious.

“No.” I shook my head. “But I think it’s great how you built this haven away from everything. You didn’t like Hollywood so you got out. And you found a world that suited you much better.” I brushed a kiss along his bronzed, rippling shoulder muscle.

Shaelynn would eat her heart out to see me now.

“That’s the key, though. I built something. And that means you have to stick around long enough to let a plan develop. To let a dream build.”