“Well, yes, you and I know that there’s no shame in a regular life, but most people don’t see it that way. The coverage would be brutal. Please tell me your security team did a background check, at the very least?”
Griffin sighed. “No, Dad, they have not.”
“We have rules about this kind of thing.”
“You don’t even know what this thing is.” Hell,Griffindidn’t know. This wasn’t a thing he did—kiss a normie, kiss a woman he’d known less than twenty-four hours. Let alone kiss a normie he’d known less than twenty-four hours.
His phone beeped. A text from Natasha. She’d found Vivien’s ex.
Andthatwas what it was all about—a vulnerable woman who needed help. Not some will-they-won’t-they narrative.
“I know you’re too old to be answerable to me, but I must say I’m surprised.”
“Stand down, Dad,” Griffin snapped. “I have no intention of dating a ‘normie.’”
His father raised his eyebrows. “Well, whatever you’re intending.”
Griffin ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m not intending anything. You only need to take one look at her to know she’s not my usual type.”
His father’s gaze flicked meaningfully toward the terrace. A warning. Before Griffin looked, he knew: the doors were open, weren’t they? His parents always opened all the doors the second they got home. He stepped to the terrace. Sure enough, across the pool, his gaze met Lana’s for a split second before she looked away. Shit. What had he said? Why was he even so worked up?
By the time he deposited the last of the luggage into his parents’ closet and walked back around the pool, his mother was quizzing Lana about her life. Evangeline Zavala had a voice that carried, so he could hear her questions but not Lana’s answers: “Do you cook every night, or cook once and let it last the week?” Followed by, “Do you survive on canned soup between paychecks?”
“Mother,” Griffin said in a warning tone as he walked into the pool house. She was sitting on the sofa. Beside her, Lana widened her eyes in a “save me” look.
Evangeline turned, all innocence. “It’s not often I get to chat with alibrarian!”
She said it the way a regular person might say “snake charmer” or “professional mourner.”
“She’s mining you,” he told Lana. “They do this. You wait—she’ll be a librarian in her next movie. Mom—Dad says if youdon’t go help him right now, he’ll recategorize your shoes by color.”
“He wouldn’t dare,” Evangeline said, but she stood.
As she left, Griffin sat in the armchair across from Lana. Awkwardness hung in the air between them.
“Sometimes it’s like my parents are amateur anthropologists, except the culture they’re researching is their own,” he said.
“No need to explain. It’s not far off the way I feel.”
“Listen, you might have overheard some of my conversation with my dad…”
“Couldn’t miss catching a few keywords.”
“Lana, I hope you don’t think?—”
“Honestly, don’t worry. I get it, I really do.”
Griffin wasn’t sure if even he got it, but she was obviously not keen for a discussion. “It came out so very wrong. I’m sorry. Do I also need to apologize for my mother?”
“Your mother is not your responsibility. And I get it—she’s a mom. She worries.”
“That bad? What did she say?”
“A version of the conversation I’m guessing you had with your father. But then she demanded to know the exact date, time and place of my birth, because apparently if I’m Scorpio rising, it’ll never work.”
Griffin grunted. He suspected a motive on his mother’s part that was less about astrology and more about a background check.
“And then,” Lana continued, “she moved on to asking me about the logistics of catching a bus in L.A., followed by grocery shopping, and I think the rest you heard.”
