“I love you, C. This is going to happen.” I hope. I pray.
“Thank you. Now, you go enjoy your date, and call me tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I grin as we hang up, and pull through Addie’s gate, ready to see my girl.
“I’VE NEVER BEEN here before,” Addie says with a grin as she dips her bread into cheese dip.
“How have you never had fondue before?” I ask, watching her eat. God, that mouth makes everything in me sit up and take notice.
“I dunno,” she says with a shrug, which makes the black blouse that lays off of one shoulder slide farther down her arm. She has gorgeous shoulders. “Just never got around to it. Here, you have to try this.”
She holds a piece of bread, dripping with cheese, out for me to take. I oblige her.
It’s delicious.
“Good?” she asks with a smile.
“Good.”
She immediately dives in for more and it occurs to me that I’ve never seen her eat before. The way she enjoys her food is fun.
“Did you grow up in Portland?” I ask and finally dig in with my own skewer. If I keep watching her, I’ll walk out of here with an embarrassing hard-on.
“Yep,” she replies and licks cheese off her lips. Maybe fondue wasn’t a great idea. “Mia, Cami, and I all grew up here, and have been friends since we were little.”
“That’s cool,” I reply, remembering the photos on her mantel. “Are your parents still married?”
“They are, and they live in Hawaii.”
“What took them there?”
“A job. My dad is a college professor, and he took a job there so Mom could work there as a marine biologist. She got her degree in her forties.”
“Wow, that’s amazing.”
Addie nods and smiles. “She had me very young. It was a huge scandal.” She leans forward, as though she’s telling me new family gossip, making me smile. “She took my father’s advanced physics class when she was a senior in college, and they had an affair. She got pregnant”—she points to herself—“and they got married.”
“Wow, that is scandalous.”
Addie nods and shoves more bread in her mouth. “She hid the pregnancy until the end of the semester so my dad wouldn’t lose his job, and then they got married.”
“Is he a lot older than her?”
“About ten years,” she replies. “He was a child prodigy in math and science. He was a college professor at the age of twenty-two.”
“That explains why you’re so damn smart.”
She snorts and rolls her eyes. “He’d disagree with you, I’m sure. Anyway, Mom stayed home, raising me and being a housewife, and she never complained about it. She liked it. But when I went away to college, she decided to finish college herself, and now works as a marine biologist, with a love of all things sharks.”
“Sharks?” I ask with a laugh. “Is she a thrill seeker?”
“She got pregnant by her college professor. I would say so.”
“Do you see them often?”
“No.” She shakes her head, her eyes suddenly sad. “They’re busy, I’m busy. We talk on the phone about once a month.”
I tilt my head, chewing, watching the change in her. “That’s a sore spot for you.”
She shrugs again. “A little.”
The waitress exchanges our appetizer cheese and bread with the main course of different meats and vegetables.
“How about you?” Addie asks before I can question her further. “Are you from here?”
“I thought you read the tabloids,” I reply with a raised brow. “My life story is out there for everyone to see.”
“I only read the juicy stuff about women who’d been done wrong.” Her pink lips tip up in a half smile, but her eyes are shrewd, watching for any reaction.
“You do realize that most of that is made up, right? It sells magazines, but it’s not the truth.”
“So, you didn’t get a woman pregnant with twins and then send her away to Bermuda to have the babies and make her give them up for adoption, paying her ten million dollars to not talk about it?”
My jaw drops as I watch her tell this story.
“If I paid her ten million to shut up, how did the story get out?”
“So you admit it?”
I laugh and shake my head. “No, Addie. None of that is true. Jesus, that’s one I missed.”
“I made it up,” she admits with a giggle. “But it would be a fun story.”
“Let’s get this straight, right now, so we can move on without any suspicions. The band broke up five years ago, and since then I’ve had one girlfriend that lasted roughly one year before I discovered that she was more interested in my money and what my name could get her than in me, and I’ve slept with a few women since then.”
“And before the band split up?” she asks, watching me intently.
“I was a jackass,” I reply. “I let the fame and the attention go to my head. I slept with more than my share of women. I enjoyed the booze. Too much. I abused cocaine, because it, combined with the booze, was the best high there is, and I will never go down that road again. It nearly cost me the most important person in my life. So I walked away from all of it.”
She blinks, holding my gaze, then picks up her skewer and stabs a piece of chicken. “So, where did you grow up?”