Page 75 of Take Two

He lets out a quiet laugh.

“Eventually.” He adjusts the earpiece tucked behind his ear before looking back toward the arena. “A friend invited me to watch him fight tonight.”

I glance over, “A fight?”

“MMA.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Anyone I’d know?”

A small grin tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Rome Sinclair.”

I let out a low whistle. “No kidding. He’s pretty formidable.”

“Yeah.” Cameron’s smile lingers for just a moment. “He’s something.”

There’s something in the way he says it that catches my attention. Nothing obvious. Just enough to make me wonder if ‘friend’ isn’t quite the whole story.

I don’t ask. If Cameron wants me to know, he’ll tell me.

“I actually thought about asking if you two wanted to come,” he says instead, his eyes drifting toward the trailer door. “Then I remembered there’s only one place he’d rather be tonight.”

I smile, because Cyaire is coming home with me. I don’t want to share him with anyone else tonight.

Before I can answer, the trailer door swings open.

Blue steps outside, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, the long day visible in the fatigue softening his features. The second he spots me, a smile spreads across his face. “There you are.”

“Here I am,” I say closing the distance between us, and he doesn’t hesitate. He leans in and steals a quick kiss, soft and unhurried, familiar in the way that still catches me off guard every time because I haven’t fully gotten used to something this easy being mine.

Behind us, Cameron lets out an exaggerated groan that echoes off the corridor walls.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” He pinches the bridge of his nose with the expression of a man who has been dealing with this for longer than he signed up for. “You two really are incapable of keeping your hands off each other, aren’t you?”

Blue grins without a single trace of shame. “I thought that’s what a bodyguard was for. You know, protecting me while I romance my man.”

“I signed up to dodge paparazzi,” Cameron shoots back, already pushing off the trailer wall. “Nobody mentioned I’d be third-wheeling a rom-com for the foreseeable future.”

I laugh, shaking my head, as Blue slips his hand into mine.

“Come on,” Cameron says, already heading toward the exit with the long-suffering efficiency of a man who has made his peace with his situation. “Let’s get you lovebirds home.”

The service corridor is almost unnervingly quiet after the constant motion inside the arena, the noise of twelve hours of filming and several hundred extras reduced to the distant sound of equipment being broken down and loaded out. Crew members drift off in every direction, already deep in conversations about tomorrow’s call sheet, their radios crackling with end-of-day updates. Cameron leads us toward the players’ exit without breaking stride, and for a moment it’s almost peaceful back here, the three of us moving through the low hum of a long day winding down.

The second the security doors swing open, everything changes.

Flashes explode from behind the barricades, bright enough to make me blink against the sudden white, my eyes adjusting too slowly as photographers lean over one another, cameras firing in rapid succession, the sound of shutters overlapping into something close to continuous.

“They’re coming out!” someone shouts.

“Cyaire!”

“Jamie!”

Questions fly from every direction at once, voices cutting across each other, everyone trying to land theirs first.

“How did filming go?”

“When does the movie come out?”