No one moved.
“Are we having a staring contest?” he asked, shifting so his body was closer to hers. “Because I will win.”
“Okay, prove it.” She hadn’t blinked. Even so, her eyebrows seemed to raise in a dare.
The air between them snapped with awareness.
Then she blinked, snapped her fingers in front of his face, so he blinked, too. “I’m sorry, honey pie, I don’t have time to play right now.”
She turned on her heel and headed to the back door.
“You’re just going to leave me here all by myself?” he asked.
“Do the things on the list, ’kay?” She pulled the door open and didn’t even glance behind as she left.
Left without telling him where the hell they were getting married.
Chapter Three
IRINA
Being successful was exhausting,and it tasted perpetually like paste.
Worse than that? She missed Denver, all her friends, Harley, and Knox.
Irina slogged down the hallway to her Los Angeles apartment three weeks after leaving Denver, two weeks after a last-minute switch for the next George Clooney movie that netted her a very nice role in a gazillion-dollar production, and a couple of weeks until she said, “I do” to Knox.
She didn’t like how much she missed him. Missed how he always made her smile when they were in the same space. Missed how he knew what to say to make things better. Lately, her days were too packed for any effective communication. Her part in this production involved about three hours in the makeup chair every morning to turn her into the best friend for an alien rom-com meets Pitch Perfect. Thankgawdshe only had a few more days of that torture and then things could go back to some kind of normal.
She pulled a bit of the glue from her hairline—the stuff was in every-freaking-thing.
Uh-huh. That’s the part they offered when she’d come to town for the callback-not-a-callback audition. Now, she entertained multiple new auditions every day. Because of all that, trying to remember to eat, keeping up with the wedding plans, and sometimes getting sleep…she stuck around in California and drowned in an ever-growing list of things to do.
But tonight, things were changing. Tonight, before she fell asleep, she had a date with her bathtub, a Hershey bar, and maybe she’d find ten minutes to catch up with Knox.
That thought had her smiling after a day of forcing all the happiness to show.
She slid her key in the lock and had barely turned the bolt when the door across the hall opened. One would not think this was odd, given that she lived in an apartment building with lots of other people, but that was Courtney’s old apartment. The landlord hadn’t been willing to let her out of her lease, so she continued paying for the space until the end of the year.
All that to say, no one lived there now.
A glance over her shoulder and she choked a little on her spit.
As if she’d called him into existence, Knox stood there in the doorway of Courtney’s apartment with only a white towel around his waist.
Her gaze landed on his chest…tanned with an athletic build that she did not expect from a man who enjoyed macaroni and cheese as often as he did.
Fun fact? Knox manscaped. He manscapedwelland with attention to detail. That little drop of water trailing over his pecs to his nipple was not playing Plinkoat allwith any stray hairs. She gulped and her fingers itched to help it along the path toward his—
He cleared his throat.
She shook away her temporary fatigued infatuation with his pectorals and lifted her gaze to meet his.
“How are you here?” she asked, because anything else that might’ve come out of her mouth would’ve been inappropriate and involved commenting about his manscaping.
“Airplane,” he replied, checking her out sort of like she’d just done to him.
What was she supposed to do with that? They should not be checking each other out, any more than she should be missing him.
