Grounded By You (18 page)

Josh’s mouth tightened, and he swung his chair away from her. She caught something in his expression that alarmed her. She stood and moved around his chair. She crossed her arms. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“This is a big deal, Millie,” Josh suddenly shouted. “If you aren’t going to take it seriously, then get the hell out! I don’t need someone working with me who is going to fold under the pressure and not give a shit.”

Millie was shocked. She and Josh had their share of fights over the years, but he had never spoken to her like this. “Josh, I’m trying. I’m sorry.”

Josh pushed to his feet. “We’re due in DC on the twenty-eighth. If you are going with me, then you better brush up on all of this and fast.” He strode out of the room without a backward glance.

Millie sank into her chair with a low groan. She pulled out her phone and went into her calendar. The twenty-eighth was the Monday after Kate’s engagement party, which was a week away. She’d fly directly to DC from there.

She couldn’t remember feeling so tired in her entire life, even after cramming with no sleep during finals. The only good thing about her new job was that she didn’t have time to think about Sam. Every waking moment seemed to be taken up trying to accumulate as much information as she could about the financials of her father’s company. She remembered now why she considered studying law instead of getting her business degree.

The one thing that she hadn’t been able fully to shake though was her desire to paint. She originally planned to terminate the lease on her studio space, but something held her back. She didn’t intend to paint again, but she couldn’t bring herself to give the space up. Not yet. In time, she thought that she’d fully be able to give that up, but she decided she didn’t need to rush it.

She started packing up the paperwork in front of her. She intended to go home, have a glass of wine, and pour over the numbers again in an attempt to try to make it all make sense. Being sequestered in the conference room with Josh was fraying her nerves, which was part of the reason she thought she couldn’t concentrate. The closer they got to the meeting on the twenty-eighth, the tenser that Josh got, and the crankier they got with each other. She thought there was probably some rule out there about not having siblings working together that she missed.

Her phone lit up and vibrated on the table. “So are you fully recovered from your weekend of post-engagement bliss?” she asked. “You were supposed to call me forever ago with all the details. Text messages aren’t cutting it.”

“I know. I’ve been completely slack, but it’s been crazy around here. The trip was amazing,” Kate said. She rattled on about the suite that Reed reserved and then provided some rather graphic details about what they had done in it that normally Millie would be completely enraptured with. Tonight, however, she found that she could barely focus.

She cracked a yawn as she pulled her coat off her chair. “I’m glad to hear that Reed is treating you right,” she said. “He knows that otherwise he’d have to deal with me, and he’s not that stupid.”

“I’m so lucky,” Kate sighed. “Oh, I’ve seen Sam around a few times too since I’ve been back.”

Millie instantly tensed. “Oh?”

“He looks hot. You didn’t tell me that boy has been working out,” Kate giggled. “Up close he’s downright yummy. Don’t tell Reed I said that!”

“Yeah, it’s part of his job,” Millie said, refusing to comment on Sam’s appearance at all. She didn’t need to reminisce about his rock hard abs or how she still dreamed about his strong arms holding her up against the wall during their last tryst.

“I’ve heard the crew gossiping that there’s something going on between him and Delaney Rose. Sounds like a fairy tale if it’s true,” Kate said.

Millie felt nauseous. Unbidden, an image of Sam making love to Delaney on the beach behind the Willoughby rose in her mind. Although she knew it was just an image that she conjured up from the pages of
Where My Heart Breaks
, it still felt real now that she could add faces to it.

“I
gotta go,” she said. She threw the phone down and scrambled down the hall. Her skin suddenly felt cold and clammy. She was thankful that it was late and so there was no one in the ladies room when she burst through the door. She barely made it to the toilet in the first stall before the heaves started.

When it was over, she leaned back against the cool tile and wondered what the hell was wrong with her. She figured that she must have eaten something for lunch that didn’t agree with her. She definitely didn’t have time to get sick. She peeled herself up off the floor and made her way to the sink.

Splashing cool water on her face, she finally felt her stomach returning to a semblance of normal. She looked at herself in the mirror. It would be just her luck if right before Kate’s engagement party and the big meeting in DC that she came down with the flu. She wiped the water off of her face and started to throw the towel in the trashcan when a horrifying thought blossomed in her mind.

Josh said the meeting was on the twenty-eighth. She looked at her watch. The ivory face told her that it was the twenty-first.

“No, no, no, no,” she whispered as she shot out of the bathroom and back down the hallway to her office. She grabbed her phone and pulled the calendar back up. She swiped back to the month before.

“Shit,” she said to the empty office.

She was late. Her hand moved to her mouth as she thought about that last time with Sam in her bedroom at her parent’s apartment. They hadn’t used any protection, and she hadn’t worried about it because she was on the pill. She forced herself to be calm. Then she picked up her briefcase and coat. There was only one way to know for sure.

Two hours later, Millie stared forlornly at the glass of wine that she poured herself but couldn’t bring to her lips. The wine was supposed to be the liquid courage she needed to face the results of the three different pregnancy tests that she bought at the corner drug store. The test strips were laid out in front of her on the coffee table.

One had a non-threatening pink plus sign in the window.

One had a smiley face in the window.

The third seemed cheerily to announce “Pregnant”.

Her mind alternated between being completely blank, and then panicking about what she was going to do. She had always known that this was a possibility, especially with her track record, but that’s why she was always so careful to use protection. Until Sam.

She was pregnant with Sam’s baby. Millie felt the waves of nausea roll over her again, and she ran to the bathroom. On the bathroom floor, cradling her middle, she began to cry.

That was the way that Millie faced everything in her life that seemed impossible. One good cry. She allowed herself one, good, self-pitying cry and then she didn’t cry about it again. Crying got her nowhere. But in those moments while the fat, hot tears slid down her face, she felt an ache deep inside of her.

She could try to bury her feelings for Sam, but they were there. She didn’t believe in things like fate or destiny, but couldn’t deny that there was something out there that seemed to think that she and Sam were supposed to be part of each other’s lives.
If she kept the baby.

That was a sobering thought, and one she almost immediately dismissed. It hadn’t happened with some random guy. It was Sam.
Sam, who was embarking on what was likely the start of a huge career. Sam, the movie star. How would he react to the news? He had made it abundantly clear that his career was the most important thing to him. She didn’t think that he would react well to this kind of news at all.

Millie pushed herself off the floor and went back out into the living room. She took the glass of wine, considered it again, and then took it into the kitchen and poured it down the drain. Until she decided what she wanted to do, she wasn’t going to do anything risky. She needed time to think. Sudden movements at such critical junctures in a person’s life were a bad idea.

Feeling slightly better, she kicked off her shoes, changed into her pajamas and curled up on the bed with the television turned toward her. She hadn’t had time to watch anything since starting her new job, and she was woefully behind on her favorite shows. She thought that sounded like just the ticket to take her mind off of her present situation.

As she flipped through the channels, she heard his name. She knew she should change the channel, but her finger was frozen on the remote.

“Filming continues in western North Carolina on the set of Where My Heart Breaks. Fans were delighted to see the two stars of the film, Carter Samuel Groveson and Delaney Rose, attending the premiere of Silverstine Studios latest film release over the weekend. The two young stars looked quite happy, and their reps confirmed that Groveson and Rose are romantically involved.”

There it was. A video of Sam and Delaney on the red carpet waving to fans off-screen and posing together for the cameras. Delaney was dressed in a skin-tight red mini-dress with her hair falling loosely around her shoulders. Her lips were blood red. Standing beside her with their fingers interlocked, Sam looked happy, just like the announcer said. At one point, he leaned down and said something in Delaney’s ear, and she laughed.

Millie turned the television off. She felt the tears starting to gather in her eyes, but she wiped them away. “You already gave him his one cry. That’s all he gets,” she whispered. She leaned backwards and stared at the ceiling.

Her hands crept to her stomach, and she let them rest there. Forcing her mind to empty, Millie fell into a fitful sleep.

The days blurred together as the filming schedule condensed to become more intense than anyone planned. Sam wasn’t sure how he was able to do it all, but he felt the line between himself and Jackson fading, and soon he spent more time in character than out of it. He was losing himself, and there was a sort of exhilaration in peeling free of the persona that everyone expected and becoming someone else.

His almost constant companion was Delaney. They were partners in crime working together doggedly toward their goal now. They both heard the twitters of excitement from the producers about how they thought filming was going so far filter down to the crew. They were making magic happen. He could feel it, and he knew that Delaney felt it too.

The filming schedule had been carefully structured to build to the scenes that they were filming in a few days. It was Jackson and Camilla’s first kiss, and then their first fevered, passionate tryst on the beach. Filming would wrap with the scene where Jackson goes to tell Camilla that they can’t be together, but changes his mind at the last moment. But then Camilla falls on the rocky shore. Jackson loses her forever to a fatal blow to the head from a sharp rock.

“You nervous about the scenes next week?” Delaney asked him during their commute to the set.

“Maybe a little,” Sam admitted. “I’ve never pretended to make love to someone in front of a bunch of cameras before.”

“Lee’s doing it really tastefully,” she said as she skimmed her script. He wasn’t sure why she bothered. Delaney was the ultimate professional. So far, he had only seen her completely forget a line once. She seemed perfectly in control of her character and how she wanted to play her. “We’ve got the first kissing scene before that though. I am sure Lee will make us do that take a million times.”

“He wants to be sure it’s perfect,” Sam said. The legendary director was a perfectionist, and Sam was fairly certain that whatever lag there had been in the expedited schedule had to do with him shooting the same take over and over again until it was just the way that he envisioned it in his head. Sam understood that and appreciated it. He wanted Walter Moolen’s story told right as well.

“You heard anything else from Millie lately?” The question was casually thrown out there, but it still made Sam jump out of his skin.

“No,” he said tersely. “We broke up, remember? I think it was pretty clear that once I was gone, we weren’t going to try to stay in touch and that my career was taking priority.”

“Harsh,” Delaney said with a shake of her head. “So, I’ve been thinking.”

Sam cut a glance over at her. They had spent enough time together now that he knew those words meant Delaney was concocting some kind of plan or mischief. “You’ve been thinking…”

“Everyone thinks that we’re an item now.”

Sam didn’t even want to think about it. As expected, their joint appearance at the studio’s film premiere sent tongues wagging and then Victoria let it “slip” that they were a couple when asked about it.

“I know,” he said. “And we’re just not telling anyone any different.” He was sure that Millie had seen the news. “The crew watches us like hawks. They’re almost worse than the photographers. I think half the stuff up on YouTube is from stuff the crew videos on the sly, as opposed to the guests at the Willoughby.”

“Well, maybe it’s time we took the game up a notch,” Delaney said.

“Delaney, I told you that I like you, but…” Sam started.

Delaney hit him with her script. “Don’t make me swoon, Sam.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You’re missing my point,” Delaney said. She stabbed her finger at the script. “We’ve got some of the really good scenes coming up, the stuff that you know Lee is going to go over with a fine tooth comb. He’s going to be carefully examining every look and every movement. I don’t even know if you’re a good kisser.”