Good at Being Alive(47)
Several inches of the happy trail are now on display, as well as his tan, muscular thighs, lightly dusted with hair. If he was my actual husband rather than my fake husband, I’d be thinking I was the luckiest woman alive. If he was my actual husband rather than my fake husband, I’d tell him to continue undressing.
They set up the shot to follow him walking through the room toward me. I’m to face the sea until I hear him.
There’s a strange buzz of anticipation in my stomach for this husband-wife moment we are about to have, one I know he will quietly bitch about and distance himself from as soon as possible.
The curtains move behind me and I turn my head. I was going to smile, but there’s something in his gaze as it travels over me in the robe that has me swallowing instead.
He walks up behind me, I relax against his chest, and his hand wraps around my waist to pull me closer, as if it’s second nature. As if it’s something he does often. Is he thinking of the complication as he does this? Does he imagine sliding the back of her robe up and pushing her panties to the side? Because I’m imagining him doing that to me. A quiet, desperate noise escapes my chest. His hand grips my hip tight at the sound.
“Perfect,” says Lars. “Now I’d like you to talk about your day. You’ve just woken, there’s nothing planned. What will you do? Don’t force it. Talk to each other the way you normally would, minus the profanity.”
Jon moves closer, holding a boom mic just out of view.
Theo tenses against me. This is the part neither of us cares to do, but I suspect it’s harder on him than it is me, since he’s the kind of person who thinks before he speaks.
“What are we doing today?” I ask brightly. Maybe it’s harder on me. I sound incredibly fake.
“There’s a nice run down the Passeggiata Sorrento I was looking at,” he says. “We need to start training for the marathon.”
Ugh. He can’t stop being responsible, even when he’s pretending to be someone else. I roll my eyes. “That sounds terrible.”
He tucks his head against my shoulder. For a half second I think he might kiss my neck, and I shiver in anticipation. He’s…far more natural at this than I’d have predicted. “You’ve got to be able to run twenty-six miles by October, Rebecca.” It’s something about the way he says my name, his low voice rumbling against my ear, that makes it sound like a promise and a threat at the same time.
Goose bumps climb up my neck.
Man, it would not be all bad, occasionally being Theo’s actual wife.
“How about if we do our own thing for a few hours?” I suggest. “I’ll do something American and you do something British.”
“British?”
“Tea. Beheadings.”
When I catch his low laugh at “beheadings,” I want to run a victory lap around the building. “Is this because you want to do something American like…fire multiple guns at once?” he asks.
“No. I want to do something American like spend money I don’t have on crap I don’t need.”
“That’s not American,” he replies. “That’s female.”
I dig my elbow into his stomach, he releases me with a shocked laugh, and Lars ends the shot, pleased with us for once.
“?‘That’s not American. That’s female,’?” I mimic. “Way to make yourself the enemy of our entire female audience.”
He flashes me a cocky half grin and gestures to his broad, defined chest and downward. “Take a long look, wife. I could say a lot worse than that and get away with it.”
I hate that he’s right.
Theo
We are filmed that evening dining at a Positano restaurant perched high above the sea. To our right, there’s an entire cliff of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century villas and palazzos built one atop the other. To our left, the midnight-blue Tyrrhenian Sea sweeps as far as the eye can see. It’s a view you’d save your entire life to witness even once—but I’m a little focused on Bex at the moment. She’s in a silky pale pink sleeveless dress, her sun-burnished skin gleaming, her gray eyes bright and happy. The waiter can’t take his eyes off her, nor can the guy at the table across from us. I have the bizarre urge to try to block her from their view.
A voice in my head warns that my thoughts sound a trifle…possessive. But it’s simply that I can’t afford to have anyone fuck this up. Not Peter, with his obvious crush on my wife, not Caden, whose every glance at her makes me want to put my fist through a wall, and not fucking Brian, for a number of reasons.
Not the audience, either. Bex smiles and bats her eyelashes at everyone she meets…and it’s impossible not to fall for her when she does it. Some lunatic among millions of viewers is going to convince himself she’s doing it for him. Who’s going to protect her when that happens?
The waiter glances down her dress as he removes her plate.
“Don’t let me catch you at that again,” I warn him quietly as he comes to my side of the table. Fortunately, Bex is too busy studying the wine’s label to have noticed.
“You know there was a seven hundred percent increase in grape production during Prohibition?” she asks.
“Increase?”
“Grape concentrate was being sold in record numbers,” she says, swirling the liquid in her glass. “It came with a warning not to stick it away in a cupboard for three weeks because it would turn into wine.”