“I bet you have more impact than you know—being the badass commando librarian you are.”
She laughed, and he found himself smiling. When was the last time he’d hung out with someone like this? Someone so genuine. Someone without an agenda—or at least, with an honest one. Easy company, but with a spark too. It reminded him of what he’d had with Ethan, but for a different time of life. Someone whogothim and saw him for who he was and not what the world said he was. She might be using him for what little help he might be with her sister, but he didn’t mind being used like that, not by her. And it was beginning to feel like that wasn’t the only reason he felt compelled to stick with her.
Or was he the fool, overriding a lifetime of programming to open up to a stranger with a pretty face and a hypnotic manner?
“Griffin? You’re retracting?”
“I am? Just wondering if maybe you’re a gossipmonger, right now planning your exclusive about your twenty-four hours with Griffin Hart and his massive ego and his asshole ways, and I’m the dumbest shit in L.A.”
“As if I could hide a secret like that from you with your mind-reading superpowers.”
“How do you know I’m not bluffing about seeing right through you, just to find out what you’ll confess to?”
“Because so far, you’ve been one hundred percent correct.” She shrugged. “Seems like we’ll just have to trust each other.”
“Easy as that?”
“Can be.”
He wasn’t so sure. But here he was, about to take a normie home—and surprisingly nervous about it. Good thing his mom wouldn’t be there to see it.
Chapter 13
Lana
“This is going to sound bad,” Griffin said as they drove along narrow streets, past flat-roofed mansions and California pines, “but it’d be wise if you hide as we go into my place. Fans and paps sometimes gather outside my street at the weekends, and if I get photographed taking a woman home…”
“Say no more. I don’t want anyone looking at me.”
“There’s a windbreaker of Darnell’s in the back, if you want to use it for cover.”
Lana climbed into the back seat and curled into the footwell on the passenger side, pulling the jacket over her. They kept ascending, taking a hairpin bend that seemed to go in a full circle before relenting. By the time she heard a turn signal, it felt like they’d left the world behind and were heading into the sky.
“Here we go,” he muttered. There was a click as he locked the doors. “If I have to stop, don’t move. Brace yourself.”
She was about to ask what for when she heard a shout, followed by another. People calling his name, mostly. More than one “I love you.” Someone shouted, “You’re a dick.” What kind of person waited outside someone’s house just to tell themthat? Griffin lightly accelerated and the voices faded into a shrill bubble.
“Safe to get up,” he said. “They won’t spot you from here. Maggie was there. The redhead, too.”
Lana emerged and peeped out the darkened rear window. Beyond a tall iron gate, a couple of security guards watched over a dozen people. Most held up phones or cameras. “That’s normal for you?”
“At some point it became a game or something. Let’s play, ‘Spot the actor-hermit-guy!’ I’m hoping this Where-is-Griffin-Hart bullshit gets boring soon, otherwise I’m gonna be forced out of the street.”
They turned a corner, and Lana returned to the front seat. Unlike in most of L.A.’s elite suburbs, the homes weren’t hidden behind walls and hedges, but they also didn’t give much away. She rolled down her window. The warm breeze lifted her hair, and she tied it up. The properties looked elegant and restrained—relatively modest, even, though she guessed that was literally a facade. Rock walls, elegant masonry and perfect lawns. Geometric breeze block and metal lattice screens. Landscaped courtyards, manicured hedges, and silence. The kind of entrances that architecture books called “considered.” Every home was single-level but expanded sideways to stake a claim to the view, leaving not even a glimpse of the valley between them.
“It’s like a mid-century modern Elysian Fields,” she said.
“Isn’t that wheredeadGreeks go? It’s basically a retirement village for old Hollywood—actors, producers, octogenarian rock stars. Their parties are something else. They’re always in trouble with the community committee.”
“It’s not where I would have pictured you. Because I know you so very well.”
“It’s not where I would have pictured myself, once. I did leave home for a time. Had a house in Malibu. Kind of placeevery actor buys when they land their first major job. So close to the water you could almost dive off your deck. Drifting off to sleep listening to the ocean. That wasliving. But after the pipe bomb?—”
“The what?”
He gave a short, humorless laugh. “I keep forgetting you don’t know my history. Most people at least know the top-line stuff.”
“Pipe bomb? What the hell?”
