Chapter Six

Rage was a good look on Maggie.

But then, everything was a good look on Maggie Tate. That was why she was Maggie Tate.

She’d taken off the baseball cap and sunglasses. Her blonde hair was still gathered into a sloppy bun at the nape of her neck, but he could see her face more clearly now. And her eyes. She’d always had the most incredible eyes he’d ever seen. Turquoise. Seriously, who had turquoise eyes? But Lori had, and Maggie did, and they were shooting sparks at him now.

“You’ve been glowering at me since the second I showed up. We used to be friends,” she reminded him.

Yeah. And then you got famous. She’d gotten a taste of success and left everyone she cared about behind. Ian figured he had a right to have a chip on his shoulder about women like that.

“What did I ever do to you?” she demanded.

“Lolly was my friend,” he said, the words hard.

“So because she and I disagreed about how I should live my life, I’m the antichrist now? You know me.”

Ian didn’t know exactly what Lolly’s falling out with Maggie had been about, but he knew enough to get the broad strokes. And he knew enough to know that Lolly had been upset. Hurt. He didn’t want Sadie getting hurt too when Maggie left. Because she would leave. Women like her always left.

“You said you were fixing the place up to sell. You aren’t sticking around and I don’t want Sadie getting attached.”

“Is it really so horrible? Having a friend for a few weeks at a time? Most of my friends are people I only know for the length of a film shoot. Did it scar you for life when I left when we were kids? We always knew you were going back to Seattle and I was going back to El Paso, but we were friends, weren’t we? Was that so traumatizing?”

God, she was just like Sadie and his mother. What was it with women and their incessant need to argue him to death today?

“So you want to be friends with a nine-year-old now?” he asked, the words icy.

“Maybe I could use a friend,” she snapped, and Ian had a feeling it was the most honest thing he’d heard her say as something vulnerable flashed in her eyes.

The hunch that he might actually be behaving like an irrational dick began to creep up the back of his neck, but she was already holding up her hand like a stop sign.

“I get it. I’ll stay away from your kid.” She turned, heading back toward Lolly’s house. “C’mon, Cecil.”

The fluffy little designer dog Ian had forgotten about popped up from his place in the brush and scurried after her.

“Lori…”

“It’s Maggie,” she said, something about the words tired as she looked back over her shoulder.

“Right. Sorry.” She turned back toward the house and her golden hair caught the sunlight as she stepped out of the shade.

He remembered the first time she’d dyed it, the summer they were thirteen. She’d been blonde her entire career. How many people in the world even knew it wasn’t her real hair color? How many people really knew Maggie Tate?

Ian shook off the thought. It was none of his business. He had enough to worry about without adding a rogue movie star to the mix. He turned back toward the beach house, pushing the great Maggie Tate out of his mind.

* * * * *

Maggie stepped back into the cool, dark cave of Lolly’s living room with the words maybe I could use a friend echoing in her head.

She didn’t have many friends. Not for the deep stuff anyway.

She had a thousand acquaintances. Co-stars she’d worked with and gotten along with. People she joked with and hugged with genuine enthusiasm on the red carpet. Crew members who were kind to her, whose kids’ names and birthdays she always tried to make a special point to remember. Directors who had been dicks to her in the name of making a better movie and would then turn around and pretend they were the best of pals after the cameras stopped rolling and they stopped snarling at her.

Those people didn’t know anything about her life, really.

Melanie knew. Mel knew everything. Well, everything about her life in Hollywood. Her manager hadn’t known about her father or Lolly. Melanie cared about her, Maggie genuinely believed that. And they were friends, in a way. But Mel was also an employee whose job was to keep Maggie functioning. To organize her life so it didn’t derail her career. And lately things with Mel had been strained. Or maybe that was just Maggie feeling the strain of living a life that no longer felt like it fit her quite so well.

She did have one friend, Bree. Though that friendship always felt sort of fragile to her. Like she was going to mess it up and it would go up in smoke.

A year ago Bree Davies had been Maggie’s decoy, a look-alike Maggie paid to pretend to be her to throw the press off the scent when she wanted privacy. Maggie had been engaged to Demarco then—who was quite possibly the nicest man she’d ever dated and who really hadn’t deserved the way things had blown up in his face. The way she had blown up in his face, like a scandal grenade he’d been holding when it suddenly went off.

She’d screwed things up with him in more ways that she could count—and screwed things up with Bree too, asking the decoy to claim responsibility for some of the stupider things Maggie had done, like making out with her ex while engaged to the nicest man on the planet.

Demarco had never forgiven her—not that she could blame him—but by some miracle Bree was still speaking to her, and in an additional miracle they were actually sort of friends now.

Bree had quit working as Maggie’s decoy, focusing instead on her art career, which—thanks to her undeniable talent and a little publicity Maggie had quietly thrown her way—was really starting to take off. They didn’t talk all the time, sometimes not for weeks at a time—Bree had a tendency to fall into her work for weeks at a time and Maggie’s hours could be ridiculous when she was filming—but when they did it was nice having someone to talk to who didn’t have an agenda.

She sank down onto Lolly’s sofa and Cecil leapt up beside her, making himself at home in her lap as she dialed Bree’s number.

It rang until voicemail picked up and Maggie hung up without leaving a message, reminding herself that Bree tuned out everything when she was working. It didn’t necessarily mean she was ignoring her on purpose—words it was easy to think, but hard to believe. Just like it was easy to tell herself that Ian had overreacted and he didn’t really think she was unfit to be around his daughter, but hard to convince herself that it was the truth.

The room grew darker as the sun set and still she didn’t move. Her body seemed to grow heavier on the couch the longer she sat there, like an oak tree slowly taking root. As if she could just stay here forever, plant herself, sink into the earth.

She might have sat there forever if Cecil hadn’t whined, wriggling into her lap to remind her that he hadn’t had dinner yet. “Okay, baby,” she murmured, forcing her heavy arms and legs off the couch. Cecil leapt down with a bark, wagging his tail, his head tipped up to her, eyes glowing adoringly. At least he loved her.

She found the bag with her salad and Cecil’s food, frowning at the can. She couldn’t just give it to him in that, could she? He might hurt himself on the sharp edges. Normally Cecil traveled with as much luggage as she did—doggie beds and ergonomic dishes designed for a dog exactly his size—but all of that had been left behind in LA.

Relying on memory so old it felt like instinct, she opened a cupboard and found a familiar mismatched array of dishes—the same hodgepodge Lolly’d had twenty years ago, chipped and cracked over the years.

She found one small stoneware bowl that looked sturdy and set it on the counter next to Cecil’s food. When was the last time she’d actually fed him herself? She had people for that. People who made themselves useful, and then they made themselves indispensable. And she let them. Because if her entourage was big enough, if her house was constantly filled with people, she never had to be alone, never had to feel the quiet pressing in on her like an anvil.

It hadn’t worked though. She still felt alone. No matter which celebrity she was dating or how many people lived in her house.

Cecil was the only one who seemed to lighten the weight of that. He barked at her ankles, that high shrill bark of his to remind her that she was taking entirely too long with dinner. She dished up his food and set it on the floor, watching him dive into it as she grabbed a fork and sat at the table, poking at her salad.

She’d told Mel she wanted to do this herself, but she didn’t have the first clue where to begin. The cottage was small—a three room shack, really, with paper-thin walls, floors that seemed to slant ever so slightly and finishes that hadn’t been updated since the seventies. It had never been fancy, but it had gotten even more run down in recent years and Maggie wondered again if Lolly had needed money.

She’d been in LA, sitting on a mountain of money while Lolly had been living here, in a hovel that looked like it might collapse in a stiff breeze.

It wouldn’t be a small project to make it attractive to buyers. Not that she needed the money from the sale, but she felt like she owed it to Aunt Lolly to spruce it up before she sold it.

Not that she had idea one about how to do that.

She hadn’t always been this way, letting other people do things for her, helpless and stupid in the face of any obstacle because she was so used to obstacles being removed from her path. She’d been driven once. She’d had to be as an actress trying to get auditions in LA. No one had done that for her. She’d had to fight for every opportunity, working as a waitress and a barista to pay the rent. She’d been good at it too, the hustle. Before her ship came in, before she got everything she’d ever wanted, she’d been the kind of person who knew how to work. Who knew no one was going to give her anything so she would have to fight for everything.

Where had that person gone when people started giving her things? When life became easy, had that part of her just died?

Cecil whined at her ankle and she realized he’d finished eating while she was staring at the cracks in the Formica countertop, her salad all but untouched. She set down her fork, leaving the salad out for when she got hungry later, and bent to pick Cecil up before standing. “Come on, baby,” she said, cuddling him close. “Let’s see what we can do.”