Grounded By You (16 page)

Then he opened his arms, and she flew into them. As his lips covered hers, Millie wanted to forget everything and stay in that moment. Here in Sam’s arms, the doubts in her mind finally fell silent.

He shouldn’t have followed her, but after seeing her reaction when he showed up to the party with Delaney, he knew that he needed to do something. Everything was derailing, and although he thought that he had been okay letting her go, as soon as he saw the pain on her face, he knew it was going to rip him apart. He had been lying to himself thinking any part of it would be easy. It was going to be the hardest thing that he ever had to do.

He realized during the rehearsal with Delaney that just like Jackson Monroe, he was being placed in a situation where he had to give up the woman that he cared about to spare her feelings in the long run. Breaking up with her and leaving her alone was the best thing for him to do, even though every fiber of his being said that it was the wrong thing to do.

He knew that he could tell her the truth and ask her to wait on the sidelines for him. They could try to make it work flying as far under the radar as possible. But it wouldn’t be fair to ask her to watch his relationship with Delaney be splashed all over the news. She would have doubts, and those doubts could fester into something that would destroy what they had forever. He had to trust that once the movie was over, it wouldn’t be too late for them. When it was over, he would figure out a way to explain why he had done what he done. In the meantime, Millie didn’t deserve to be put in such an unsavory situation.

But just like Jackson Monroe, when the moment of truth came, his heart won out over his head. He should be telling her that it was over, but instead, he kissed her. That was because kissing her and tasting her was like a drug that he was addicted to. He couldn’t leave her like this, not without at least showing her one more time how much he truly cared about her. If he couldn’t tell her, then at least he could show her.

He matched the urgency in her kiss without question. He hungered for her, and there was a part of him that wished they had more time. But he had to make the best use of the few stolen moments that they had available to them. It would have to be enough.

He tugged on the hem of her dress. It had been hard for him to look anywhere else when he first saw her in it. The skirt hit high on her thighs, and every time she moved he saw it shift half an inch higher. He’d felt the tightening in his pants, and he had to look away. She had been so tantalizingly close, but with all eyes on him, she had never felt further away.

Sam groaned as he felt her fingers find the button of his slacks. Their panting gasps were the only sounds that he heard and in the dimly lit room, he could imagine that they were completely alone and had all the time in the world. She would hate him later, and he didn’t know yet how he was going to be able to live with himself.

The thought drove him forward. He needed to be inside of her. He pulled up the hem of her dress even as he walked her backwards and pressed her up against the wall. Her legs opened for him as his fingers made their way up her thigh. He found that silken part of her was hot and moist and totally ready for him. He moaned against her lips.

He had a moment of clarity then as he considered what they were about to do. “Are you sure about this?” It was two questions wrapped into one. Someone could walk in at any moment, and he hadn’t come prepared for this to happen.

Her answer was sliding her hand into the front of his slacks and grasping his hardness. She stroked him up and down as she rubbed her body against him. He put his hands against the wall on either side of her head as he felt the bubbling pleasure build inside of him.

He brought her hands up over her head and held them there even as he nibbled at the side of her neck. His other hand found the straining points of her nipples underneath her dress. Then he reached down and explored the folds of her wetness again. He wanted to make sure that she was as ready for him as he was for her.

“I want you. Now,” she said, her voice full of desire as her hands slipped out of his grasp and pushed his pants down.

Panting, he grabbed her waist and lifted her up, bracing her against the wall. She brought her legs up around his hips. He pushed the wisp of her underwear aside and slid her down onto his straining length. Then he captured her lips again as he drove into her. She bit into his lower lip even as she moaned. She felt so good that Sam almost lost it right there, but he slowed his strokes, showering her with kisses even though his lip felt bruised. He thought that she might have drawn blood based on the slightly rusty taste in his mouth. That didn’t stop him from pushing his tongue into her mouth and stroking her tongue even as he moved inside of her.

Then keeping her pressed against the wall, Sam began to move his hips in a slow circle. He felt her hips begin to buck against him in impatience.

“Harder,” Millie panted against his ear.

He couldn’t deny her. He wanted to give her everything. Although he knew that he was going to do the unthinkable, at least in this moment he could give her this, and it would have to be enough.

He drove into her hard, and she gasped. His strokes became shorter and faster, and he felt her muscles squeeze him tightly as she climaxed. Then her head fell into his shoulder as a low moan escaped her lips. He found his release seconds later. He wanted to stay like that forever. He held her body tightly against him, unwilling to let her go although he knew that he would have to.

“You’re shivering,” he whispered.

Her legs slid down his body and then he set her gently on the floor, but he didn’t release her from his embrace. Not yet.

“I don’t want you to go,” she said, looking up into his eyes.

A tiny part of Sam’s heart broke at her words. She had been hiding it from him, and now she said it. He wanted her to take the words back because it was going to make what he had to do so much harder. Millie put on a brave front, but he knew that she was soft and vulnerable underneath. “I don’t want to go either, baby. But I have too,” he said, cupping her face and setting his forehead against hers.

“Everything’s changing, isn’t it?”

Her perceptiveness was part of what made her such an amazing artist. She saw things that other people didn’t see. Which meant that he had to pull off the acting job of his life. He wanted to tell her that nothing was changing, but that would be a lie. If he loved her, he owed her the truth. And he did love her. But truth of the situation was worse than fiction, and he couldn’t let her know that.

“I wanted to talk to you about that. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I don’t think the long-distance thing is going to work. Maybe once all of this is over…”

She pushed against his chest, startling him. “Maybe once all of this is over, what? So you want to go off and do whatever you want for a few months, and I’m just supposed to wait for you to come back? I’m not Camilla. I’m not some naïve little girl who thinks that the man of her dreams will come back and rescue her. I have my own life too, Sam.”

He could tell that she was hurt, and he wanted to take that pain away. He pushed forward before he changed his mind and did something that he might regret the rest of his life. He made his voice cold. “I have to go do this movie, Millie. You know as well as I do that trying to do whatever this is long distance is going to be hard, if not impossible. Everything I do is going to make the evening news. I need to lay low and do my job. I can’t afford to be distracted. I can’t do anything that will ruin my chances to show them what I’m capable of. This is my career, and I won’t jeopardize it.”

Millie straightened her skirt. She didn’t say anything for several long moments. Then she looked at him as if she were looking through him. Sam had never seen her like this, and it scared him. “I’m sorry that I’ve been such a distraction for you. I’ve been thinking to. You’re right, but it’s more than that. I see that now. Whatever this is wouldn’t have worked anyway.  We’re just too different. It’s better that we part ways now before things get messy.”

He wanted to say that she was wrong. He wanted to confess that it was all a lie and that he’d quit the movie and stay. But he didn’t. He was faced with an impossible decision: his dream or Millie. Either way he chose, he would end up a loser.

He cleared his throat. “I guess that’s settled then. We should get back to the party,” he said.

He thought he saw tears welling in her eyes, but she turned away from him before he could tell for sure. Then she said the words that tore a hole in his chest.

“Good-bye, Sam.”

Somehow it felt ten times worse than when she left him with no words at all.

As soon as dinner was over, Sam and Delaney excused themselves begging off because of their early flight. Millie left soon afterwards. She felt cold and emotionless. She didn’t understand how she and Sam had gotten to that point. Everything had gone horribly wrong. One thing she hadn’t been willing to do was beg him to stay with her. A St. John didn’t beg.

When he followed her into her bedroom, she expected him to explain what was going on. She was going to ask what she meant to him, but in the end, she got her answer. Those final passionate moments together had been a final swan song to a brief thing that she wasn’t even sure qualified as a relationship. She bitterly thought that she wouldn’t know an adult relationship if it bit her in the ass anyway. She supposed that was her own fault.

At seven-thirty the next morning, Sam boarded the plane for North Carolina. Millie knew because a fellow passenger on Sam’s plane posted a picture of him and Delaney, and it popped up on her social media profile. In the picture, the two actors were holding hands.

The picture went viral.

Millie sat in her living room that morning and stared at the painting that Sam inspired. It was a myriad of blues, yellows, and greens. It started out as an abstract scene of the Willoughby Inn, but morphed into something else that she could only call a visual song of her hope for the future. The longer she stared at it, the more it seemed to mock her. What she thought was real was a lie. Sam was an even better actor than she imagined.

She wondered how she could have allowed herself to stray so far from what she knew and who she was. It went all the way back to the summer she spent at the Willoughby. Somehow, Sam
Groveson entered her life and made her believe that she could be someone different. She bought the whole thing, hook, line and sinker. She hated him for that, just like she now hated the painting in front of her. She didn’t have talent. She was a hack, and it was time she woke up from the fairy tale dream that she had been living in for the last year.

She got up from her seat and walked into the kitchen. She pulled a knife from the silverware drawer. Then she went back to the painting.

The first cut into the canvas released something primal deep inside of her. As the second slice of the knife went down through the thick fabric, the real tears began to fall. Sobbing, she kept cutting and slicing the canvas until there was nothing left to cut into. The knife clanked to the floor, and she dropped her head into her hands and wept.

Some time later, she wiped the tear streaks from her face. Calm now, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and dialed her brother’s number.

Josh answered on the third ring. “I’m busy right now, Millie. Can I call you later?”

“I want to help you,” she said. “Tell me how I can help.”

There was a pause on the other end. “What about your art thing?”

She stared at the ruined canvas in front of her. “It’s time I acted like a grown-up and stopped chasing stupid dreams. Assuming that job is still open, I’d like to start on Monday.”

“You know it’s been waiting for you,” Josh said.

“Good,” she said. “I’ll see you then.”

She clicked off the phone. She was already making a list of everything she had to do before Monday. She didn’t have a lot of time, but Millie intended to erase every memory of Sam Groveson from her life before then if it killed her.

Sam threw himself into his work. He didn’t know what else to do. Unfortunately for him, Jackson and Camilla’s tragic love story
wasn’t a calming salve of distraction, but a constantly poking reminder of what happened with Millie.

At first, being back in Bleckerville was strange. People he had known since he was a kid now looked at him differently, almost as if he were someone else. When his twelfth grade English teacher asked him for his autograph, he knew for sure that everything was different. He was grateful that at least his parents treated him exactly the same.

After the first weekend though, hearing his mother complain for the third time about the photographers camped out at the edge of their driveway, Sam realized that he couldn’t stay with them any longer. It was supposed to be comforting to be at home, but he was imposing on their regular lives. Normalcy was a luxury that he could no longer afford. He wondered if his life would ever feel like his own again.

Victoria managed to score him a room with the rest of the cast and crew at a hotel in the neighboring town of Cheshire. After that, he and Delaney rode to the set together every day. After all, it was what was expected now that everyone was under the impression that the two of
them were in a budding romance.