Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 65643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
And I couldn’t remember why.
“Garrett, do you really want to rehash this?” Noemi asked gently. “It was a long time ago.”
“You just fell out of love with me, right?”
“We fell out of love with each other. We were best friends who were good together in bed. That’s not a marriage.”
It sounded like a hell of a marriage to me, but then, she must be right. Otherwise, I would have fought it, and I hadn’t. Trying to summon it now, I could only conjure a vague memory of disappointment and sadness and just a small tinge of relief.
“How good in bed?” I asked.
Noemi laughed, and the somber mood lifted. “Great in bed. We had a good marriage, Garrett. You were a good husband.”
“Not good enough though?”
“Not good enough,” she agreed. “Neither of us were.”
Yeah, that sounded right. “But we’ve had a hell of a divorce, haven’t we?” I asked.
“Absolutely. Now what are you thinking for Destiny’s hair? Because I’m thinking that she should go brunette again, but darker than her Magical Melody days. She can pull it off.”
I let Noemi describe in detail what she was envisioning, even though I didn’t have a clue what she was saying when she got into terms like balayage and low lights. “Whatever you think,” I said when she was done, which was probably about what I said when she asked for the divorce twenty years ago. Some things never changed.
“Hey,” she said as we were about to get off the phone. “One day you’re going to meet a woman who makes you grateful I asked for that divorce.”
“Oh, I’ve met a few,” I assured her.
Noemi laughed. “I mean it, Garrett. I know I’ve been a cynic about love, but with David…” she trailed off, probably realizing that extolling the virtues of her new fiancé to her ex-husband wasn’t the best move. “I just mean, the right woman is out there.”
“Great,” I said, deadpan. “Now I know who to avoid.”
Noemi laughed again and hung up so she could call Pierre. I turned off the car and sat for a minute, looking at my house. At the view beyond it. As always, a sense of deep satisfaction spread through me at the sight of it.
Forget finding the right woman–finding the right house was more than enough for me.
Wednesday was my day off, but I still ended up working. First, I read everything I could find about Destiny Pollock that wasn’t adjacent to the Geoff Dorsch/underaged yacht girl scandal. There wasn’t a lot. Her last movie had been released almost a year ago. Six months ago, she did an interview where she talked about how she wasn’t taking certain kinds of roles anymore–she didn’t want to play the bitchy mean girl. She was holding out for something of substance.
Good for you, I thought, staring at the picture that accompanied the article. She was wearing all black, sitting cross legged, leaning back against a gray wall. The neutral tones made her vivid beauty pop. Her hair looked bright enough to burn the delicate contours of her heart-shaped face, and her eyes looked otherworldly. I knew how hard it was to break out of the lane Hollywood put you in. Noemi had had trouble getting the public to see her as anything other than the classic leading lady. It was a comfortable lane to be in, but it was a short one. She knew that soon enough, she’d hit forty and the roles would dry up unless she proved she could be something other than the girl who got the guy.
I respected Destiny for resisting the easy paychecks I was sure came her way, for holding out. Since this interview, though, she only popped up in tabloids and on gossip sites. She was usually surrounded by a group of girls who were vaguely recognizable as either C-list actresses, aspiring models, or daughters of legitimately famous people. Destiny Pollock and I Socialite Squad, one blogger had dubbed them, and the name stuck.
I’d have to unstick it. I made a mental note to find something, anything, that would keep her occupied and away from this career poison.
Next, I researched Andrew Quinn. He was that one lucky person who rose from the ashes of a wildly popular teen show and managed to reinvent himself. I was going to be fighting an uphill battle to get Destiny’s career on his track. There wasn’t a whole lot to read about Andrew either. He gave canned interviews that had obviously been cleared and curated by his publicists. He was quiet on interview panels, letting his co-stars carry the limelight. He was hardly on the gossip sites at all, not since he broke up with an up-and-coming actress and stopped showing up at hot spots.
I rubbed my lip, considering this. Andrew Quinn clearly liked to fly under the radar, and he didn’t need the cache of media attention. Would he put himself back in the crosshairs of cameras for Destiny? Something told me he would. I’d heard genuine warmth in her voice when she spoke to him on the phone. When she turned around, her face looked softer, her eyes less wary. They had a connection.