We are filmed that eveningdining 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 fuckingBrian,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 isgoing 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.”
I grin. “If we were living during Prohibition, you’d have been the one to think of it and create the marketing plan.”
Her head cocks. “You say that as if it’s a good thing.”
“I think it is, don’t you?” I ask. “You can only suppress people for so long before they find a way to fight back.”
She blinks, something uncertain passing over her face. I’m not sure why it’s such a revelation…it seems to me she’s been fighting back against one thing or another her entire life.
Lars tells us they’ve got enough as darkness settles in. The lights of the cliffside homes twinkle like a thousand stars, and I guess that’s a once-in-a-lifetime view too, but I’m still not paying it much attention.
We hand our mics over, the crew leaves, and the waiter returns with a plate of cookies and a bottle of amaretto.
I fill both glasses and we toast each other, our shoulders settling. She makes it look easy on film, but she’s happier, more relaxed when the cameras are gone.
“How classless will you find it if I wrap this cookie in a napkin and take it back to the room?” she asks, sipping her amaretto.
I raise a brow. “You can do whatever you want, but why don’t you just eat it?”
She shakes her head. “I prefer them frozen. I’ll put it in the fridge and have it later.”
“Frozen?That’s the craziest thing I’ve heard you say, and as you’re aware, the bar was already set rather high.”
She shrugs, not quite able to meet my eye. “I just like to eat my cookies frozen. It’s a weird thing from childhood.”
I cock my head. “Aren’t they hard to eat?”
She sighs. “I guess. I told you it was weird.”
“But how does something like that even…evolve? You’re taking a delicious food and making it intentionally almost impossible to chew.”
“Jessie used to hide these cookies in the freezer, and—”
“Why was she hiding cookies in the freezer?”
A faint blush graces her cheekbones. “I was a really hungry little kid. She had to hide stuff and lock it up so I wouldn’t eat it.”
What. The. Fuck.
Bex, if anything, borders on being too thin. Even a few days of filming takes a toll on her, so ofcourseshe was a starving little kid. “Why wouldn’t she just give you the fucking food?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m sure she got tired of me eating it all. Anyway, she’d keep cookies in the deep freezer for her and Bronwyn, but Bronwyn gave me the code.”
This story is getting worse by the second. Jessie hid the food from her stepkid, the one who clearly needed it, and letherkid have whatever she wanted.
