‘Wait there, let me get the door,’ he instructed, hopping out of the truck and pocketing his keys.
‘I’m not completely useless,’ I replied. Chivalry made me uneasy. ‘I can open a door myself.’
Only I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried. On the other side of the glass, Ren watched with amusement.
‘It won’t open,’ I called, tapping on the window.
‘I know,’ he replied, tapping back. ‘That’s why I said I would get it.’
‘And there was me, thinking you were being a gentleman,’ I muttered as he flipped the outside handle and opened the door.
He offered me his hand to help me down from the cabin, his skin rough and hot as his fingers curled tightlyaround mine, and I felt another flutter in the pit of my stomach that I did not care for.
‘I am a gentleman,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Most of the time.’
‘Is it a seasonal thing or do the hours differ daily?’ I asked, shaking off his hand and my unexpected, unwelcome reaction.
‘All changes are at the discretion of the management. Wanna go see some dead people?’
‘Oh, go on then,’ I returned, handing him the picnic basket and falling into step at his side, Ren’s woody, warm skin scent carrying me on into the cemetery.
‘This is one of my favourite places in the whole city,’ Ren said as we crossed the grass to find our footpath. He nodded at a security guard who barely even flinched as we strolled by, very busy looking at his phone while I concentrated on not thinking about what, or who, was underneath my feet. ‘It’s so quiet and peaceful. Makes for a great place to come and think.’
‘It’s quiet,’ I replied with a shiver, ‘because everybody is dead.’
‘Touché.’
The soles of my flip-flops thowcked against my feet and I cringed with every single step. If I’d known where we were going, I’d have insisted on going home to change into a closed toe. Wearing flip-flops to a cemetery had to be the most disrespectful thing in the whole world; I was sure at least a hundred of the people underfoot were spinning in their graves.
‘It’s not just a cemetery, they do a bunch of cool things here.’ Ren pointed straight ahead as we took a left turn.‘Down there by the big white building, they have bands play all the time. They do movie screenings, yoga classes, all kinds of stuff.’
‘Bringing a whole new meaning to corpse pose,’ I muttered, brightening slightly when he laughed.
Cemeteries were never at the top of my must-visit list but as we walked on, I saw that Ren was right. Hollywood Forever was more peaceful than morbid, settling my frayed nerves with a pleasantly serene atmosphere, and even though I couldn’t help but keep an eye out for non-sparkly vampires or boilersuit-wearing psychopaths in hockey masks, I was able to appreciate the beauty of the place. We walked past an actual lake, complete with happy-looking ducks, following each other around two by two, and the architecture of the monuments was stunning, as long as you didn’t think too much about the residents enjoying their very long naps inside.
‘OK, I take it all back,’ I admitted. ‘This place is gorgeous. Thank you for bringing me here and sorry for being such an ungrateful mare earlier.’
Ren slowed for a second and gave me a reassuring, maybe even slightly surprised smile. ‘It’s cool. You don’t have to apologize.’
Chewing the inside of my cheek, I wasn’t sure what to say next. It would not have been cool for me to complain if Thomas had done something for me, even if I was half-joking. But Ren was not Thomas, far from it. Ren was kind and open and had abs you could grate cheese on, a strangely erotic thought.
‘Yet another totally random thing in the middle of the city,’ I said, pushing away visions of me, Ren anda family-sized block of Cathedral City. Hunger would do terrible things to a girl. ‘This place is huge. How is it so huge?’
‘LA doesn’t make any sense,’ he replied fondly. ‘It used to be even bigger, but the owner sold a bunch of land to build Paramount Studios and the super crappy strip mall out front. And no, they did not exhume the bodies.’
‘So you’re telling me it’s one hundred per cent haunted.’
‘I would not use the AutoZone out front if my life depended on it.’
A big open space came into view and I saw a handful of other people perched on picnic blankets in twos and threes, smiling, laughing and generally enjoying themselves. A perfectly ordinary Friday night chilling out in the cemetery. Why not?
‘This must be the most fun place to be buried ever,’ I remarked, not at all checking out his backside when Ren bent over to unfurl a red-and-black plaid picnic blanket. If I did, it was just for a moment. For research purposes.
‘Kind of like being laid to rest in the middle of a very cool party with an extremely exclusive guestlist,’ he agreed. ‘Not the worst place to end up.’
While nothing could ever approach the glory of an M&S picky tea, Ren’s spread was very, very close. A crusty baguette, vegan cheese, fresh hummus, sliced avocado, cherry tomatoes, grapes, nuts and a brown paper bag with ‘chocolate chip shortbread cookies’ scrawled across it in marker pen which I had to physically force myself to ignore for fear of grabbing them out of his hand and sprinting across the cemetery to keep them all to myself. Sitting down without flashing my knickers was a chore, the nap dress I’d been loungingaround in all day not really designed to be worn in civilized company. Not that there was anything civilized about the way I intended to inhale all this food.
‘You just happened to have all this in the fridge?’
