I pad to the living room, where he is currently shrugging offhis jacket. It’s only been a week, but I’ve missed that face. I’ve missed those serious eyes and that lovely mouth and the way he’s almost always frowning but has to fight a smile when he seesme.
He’s not even fighting it now.
He takes me in, head to toe, and raises a brow. “We’ll need to set some ground rules.”
“Sex but no kissing on the mouth?”
He rubs a hand over his face. “Rebecca.”
I’ve even missed the way he scoldsme.
“Sorry,” I chirp without even a hint of remorse. “What ground rules?”
“No jokes like the one you just made, first of all,” he says. “And no wandering around in your underwear.”
I look down at my bare legs and throw my hands in the air. “Fine! Get a good look! You’ll never see my panties again!”
“Somehow I doubt that,” he says. “We’re supposed to be downstairs in ninety minutes. Don’t you need to get ready?”
I turn for the bedroom. “I like the dream version of you better.”
“You’re dreaming about me now?” he asks. “Do I want to know?”
“You were just as boring in my dreams as you are in real life,” I toss over my shoulder.
I shower quickly, then look over the outfit Mindy has chosen for tonight: a gauzy white maxi dress that will be filthy halfway up the long flight of steps near Sacré-Coeur.
A woman arrives to blow out my hair before I have time to put iton.
“You’re an American TV star?” she asks as I take a seat in front of the mirror, tightening my robe.
I shake my head. “No, not at all.”
“You must be someone important to be in this room and married to him,” she says with another smile, nodding in the living room’s direction.
I don’t tell her it’s all fake, obviously, since I can’t, but it suddenly hits me that these things aren’twhollyuntrue. Through some bizarre combination of terrible luck and good luck and laziness and persistence, I’ve managed to position myself as a potential TV star and Theo’s wife. And, at least temporarily, I’m someone who stays in an expensive suite in Paris and has a stylist do her hair.
I have fallen into this situation, but not entirely. There’s something inside me that contributed, too.
My hair is blown out, the coarse strands transforming to silk before my eyes, and when it’s done, I return to the garment bag.
Theo was right, in Italy. Mindy is not all-knowing. And while I might only be playing the role of a woman competent enough to co-own a large company and star in a show and be married to Theo…
I alsoamevery one of those things.
I push the white maxi dress to the back of the closet and pull on a skirt of my own, along with the Hermès sandals and a linen tank Mindy sent “just in case.”
When I look in the bedroom mirror, a new version of Bex stares back at me. She isn’t the prissy sophisticate Mindy created in Sorrento, but she’s also not the cut-off T-shirt and torn leggings Bex of old. She isn’t a girl who’s fighting back against something.
She’s…growing into something, I think.
I’m still not sure what.
Theo is waiting in the living room. “Much better,” he says.
“I know how much you hate seeing my panties.”
“Despise it,” he agrees. “You ready? Once we step outside this room, we’ve got to act like a real couple.”
