Except there wasn’t complete darkness. An eerie green glow lit
the ceiling and Cassie gasped as she looked up and saw hundreds of
glow-in-the-dark stars covering the huge expanse of ceiling in the very large
room.
She looked at Tuck. ‘You did this today?’
He nodded. ‘I paid one of the astronomy majors to do me an
exact replica of our solar system. You like?’
Cassie squirmed down until she was lying on her back.
‘Cassiopeia,’ she said, pointing to the constellation as familiar to her as her
own name.
Tuck lay down beside her and they star-gazed as they had that
other night in Arizona, except indoors this time.
‘Are you even allowed to do this?’ she asked, glancing at him
as they exhausted the solar system. ‘Defacing a rental apartment?’
Tuck shrugged. ‘I’ll pay to have them removed and the ceiling
returned to all its boring plainness if they want when we’re done here.’
‘Yes, it
was
kind of boring, wasn’t
it?’ she murmured as the stars glowed down at her. ‘But not any more.’
Tuck nodded. Just like his life. It had been boring and
predictable before Cassie. He knew that sounded ungrateful, that plenty of
people had lives that were barely tolerable and that his life had been very
good. There’d been many years when he’d enjoyed it and the perks that came with
it. But being on the celebrity treadmill, going through the motions, was about
as appealing now as a plain white ceiling.
If he wasn’t careful he’d forget that they had an expiry
date.
‘And the best part is,’ Tuck said, rolling up onto his elbow,
looking down at her, ‘I literally get to make you see stars every night.’
Cassie shut her eyes as his scent wafted over her and breathed
him deep into her lungs. The primal urge to feel him inside her bloomed deep and
low.
‘But I think it’s only fair that you get to see them first.’
She pushed on his chest. When he fell back against the bed she rolled on top of
him.
Tuck smiled up at her as she straddled him, naked but for her
underwear, just like that night in the desert. ‘Okay…’ he said, his palms
sliding up her torso, finding her breasts. ‘If you insist.’
But his hands soon fell away as her intent became clear, and
when she kissed her way down his body and right into his boxer briefs he felt as
if he’d snatched a little piece of heaven from off the ceiling.
The next morning the bubble they’d been living in,
tucked away in Ithica, away from the rest of the world, well and truly burst. It
was a phone call from Marnie that alerted Cassie to the looming disaster.
‘How you doin’, hon? Are you okay?’ Marnie asked.
Cassie stopped looking at the data on her computer screen and
frowned. There was something in Marnie’s Southern twang that put her on high
alert. ‘Er…yes…sure… Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘Oh. You haven’t seen it, then?’ she asked.
‘Seen what?’
‘The tabloid article?’
Cassie went back to her work. ‘About the paternity stuff?
That’s old news.’
‘No, not that. Same tabloid but…it’s about
you
and Tuck. There’s some not very flattering pics, and the
headline…it’s pretty awful.’
It was sweet of Marnie to alert her, but Cassie just didn’t
care about celebrity gossip or the weird obsession people had with it. ‘I’m sure
I’ll survive,’ she said dryly.
‘Okay…just don’t… Ignore it, okay? Anyone who knows you knows
how beautiful you are—inside and out.’
Cassie frowned at the odd parting remark, but was quickly
absorbed in her work again.
Gina phoned next, followed by Reese. She assured both of them
that she was fine and had better things to do with her time than worry about
tabloid gossip. And she put it out of her mind.
Until she arrived home at seven and Tuck was pacing in front of
the large windows, yelling into his phone.
‘I don’t just want an apology. I want a price put on that pap’s
head. I want him dead or alive. I want the whole freaking paper shut down. I
want to tie them up in the world’s most expensive legal case until they’re
haemorrhaging money. They think they can mess with me after the Jenny thing?
They just made me their worst freaking enemy!’
Cassie jumped as Tuck hurled his phone at the glass. It bounced
off and crashed to the ground. He raked a hand through his hair, ignoring the
felled piece of expensive technology.
‘Hi,’ she said.
Tuck turned and saw her standing there. He took half a dozen
long strides and swept her into his arms. He didn’t say anything, but she could
tell from the fierceness of his hug that he was still angry.
Tuck pulled back and looked into Cassie’s blue-grey eyes.
They’d become such a part of his life he couldn’t begin to imagine a time when
she wouldn’t be here, all calm and thoughtful. And that made him even
crazier—their time together was definitely finite!
‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ he said.
‘Is this about the tabloid article?’ she asked.
Tuck gaped. When his PA had first alerted him that morning he
hadn’t thought that Cassie would want her day interrupted—plus he hadn’t wanted
to tell her over the phone. So he’d left informing her in preference to jumping
on as many heads as he possibly could before she got home.
‘You’ve
seen
it?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But I’ve had phone calls from Reese, Gina and
Marnie about it.’
Damn!
He hadn’t thought about them.
‘It’s okay. By the time I’m through with them they’ll think the Jenny debacle
was a freaking Sunday school picnic.’
Cassie stepped out of his arms. This seemed a lot of fuss about
some dumb tabloid article. ‘For goodness’ sake, what does it say?’
‘Oh. They didn’t tell you?’
‘No, I was busy doing
important
things, like my PhD research at the very place where
Carl
Sagan
himself studied. Now, what the hell does it say that has
everyone in such a tizz? Have you got a copy?’
Tuck looked behind him at the pile of newspapers he’d bought
from practically every newsstand in Ithica. ‘One or two,’ he said.
Cassie blinked at the stacks that littered the formal dining
table and the nearby floor. She marched over, picked one off the top and opened
it. The glaring headline on page three jumped out at her—
‘Tuck’s Ugly Duck’.
There were several pictures. One was of them at Barringer
Crater, where she looked all hot and bedraggled, and three more had been taken
the next morning. One was a shot of the wind billowing under her T-shirt, so she
looked like the Michelin man, another was of her face all screwed up when that
rock had jabbed into her, and the last was their passionate kiss just after
that, with Tuck all bare-chested.
They were a little fuzzy, but it was definitely them.
The article speculated as to who she was and how unlike Tuck’s
usual glamorous consorts she was. It seemed to be drawing a parallel between the
fading of his star and his luck in the lady stakes. Cassie rolled her eyes and
threw the paper down in disgust.
‘It was that bastard in the RV,’ Tuck said, resuming his
pacing. ‘He has to have been paparazzi too—not just some visitor wanting to cash
in on an unexpected opportunity. You’d need a serious camera to get those images
of us.’
Cassie thought about it for a moment. ‘It was the guy with the
big gold jewellery,’ she said.
Tuck stopped pacing. ‘What? Why didn’t you tell me there was a
pap around?’
She shrugged. ‘I didn’t realise he was at the time.’
‘Well, what makes you think it was him now?’
‘He kind of hung around a bit. He asked me if you were my
boyfriend. He commented that I wasn’t your usual type. He looked kind of puzzled
as to why we were together. He had a little boy with him…Zack…you signed an
autograph for him.’
Tuck nodded. He remembered. The man hadn’t been familiar—and
Tuck had got to know most of the paps over the years.
‘Good,’ he said, stalking over and picking his phone up off the
floor. He hit the last call button.
Cassie listened to the one-sided conversation as Tuck relayed
the details to his lawyer and they discussed ways to access Barringer Crater’s
records of who had come through that day. Tuck paced again as he spoke, and even
though his anger seemed less palpable she could sense frustration surging off
him in waves, much the same way she’d always been sensitive to his
pheromones.
Tuck hung up the phone and turned to face Cassie. ‘I’m sorry.
I’m so, so sorry,’ he said, trying to gauge how Cassie was feeling about the
article. ‘I won’t let them get away with this.’
Cassie shrugged. ‘Get away with what? Who cares what they
think?’
Tuck blinked. Any other woman he knew would be
outraged
at that headline. ‘But they’ve insulted you,’
he said.
Cassie snorted. ‘You think I’m
insulted?
You think how
beautiful
you
are counts when you’re up for a Nobel Prize? Those things don’t go to the
prettiest
candidate, Tuck. You think
science
cares about what you look like? You think they
select people to go to Antarctica based on their
attractiveness?
I really don’t think you realise how very, very
little this matters to me.’
‘They don’t have the right to say such horribly hurtful things
in a national newspaper about you,’ Tuck said, his anger once again exploding to
the surface at Cassie’s calm acceptance. ‘About
any
woman.’ Didn’t she realise how beautiful she was?
Cassie shook her head, amazed at how angry he seemed to be. But
then she supposed it
was
a bit of a slap in the face
for Tuck, who was used to accolades, to being known for his beautiful women.
‘Oh…I see,’ she said. ‘This isn’t about
me.
This is about an affront to your
masculinity.
That some two-bit rag has the
audacity
to call one of
your
women ugly.
Are you afraid you’re not going to make the A-list any more with an ugly,
brainiac
girlfriend?
’ She shook her head. ‘Just what
the hell are you doing with me, Tuck?’
Tuck couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of her
mouth. Rage, white and hot, built in his gut and leeched into his bloodstream.
How could she think he was so damn shallow?
‘I don’t
care
about that crap,’ he
snapped, shoving his hands on his hips. ‘But I
do
care when a national newspaper calls
any
woman ugly.
Who has the right to be the arbiter of that? The right to say it? And you? You
are smart and sexy and warm and intelligent and beautiful and
natural
in a way beyond anything any of those
twits
with their freaking airbrushes and computer
programs would know anything about, and I’m not going to sit still and let them
call one of the most brilliant minds on the planet,
and
the woman I
love,
ugly.’
Tuck was breathing hard when he finished. In fact it took him a
few seconds before he even realised what he’d said.
‘What did you say?’ Cassie said.
He’d said he loved her. His first instinct was to take it back.
Pretend that it had been said in the heat of the moment and not meant. But,
whilst it had
totally
been said in the heat of the
moment, he did mean it.
He loved her.
He just hadn’t
realised it ’til that moment.
He’d almost spat his coffee all over the paper this morning
when he’d first read the article, and his anger had been building with the
ominous power and thrust of a dangerous weather front all day. He hadn’t been
able to articulate where the immediate irrational anger had come from when he’d
first dialled his lawyer, but it had been frighteningly, utterly palpable.
And now he knew why.
He’d never felt like this about a woman. Not even April. He’d
wanted to love her like this, had committed to that, but the plain truth was
that he’d only ever just liked her, and she’d been there to cling to when
everything was spiralling down the plughole. But it hadn’t been enough, and he’d
been wrong to give her hope that he could love her as she’d deserved.
As he
loved
Cassie.
‘I love you,’ he said. And then he said it again for good
measure, weighing it up. ‘I love you.’
He’d spent a lot of his life thinking those three words would
mean his life was over, but it didn’t feel like that—it felt as if it was just
beginning. It wasn’t scary and awful—it was just
right.
Cassie blinked. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Even if I
believed that such an emotion existed, and wasn’t some commercial construct to
sell movies and Valentines, we’ve known each other for just over a month—it’s
preposterous.’
Tuck shook his head. ‘It’s not.’
Cassie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Len might never
have performed oral sex on her and blown her head right off her shoulders every
single night, but he would never have complicated their arrangement by falling
prey to such schoolboy fancy. This was what happened when she got involved with
someone who let his heart—or other parts of his body—rule his head.
Now she understood why her mother had been so determined to
school her in the importance of her career and not to let distractions derail
her from what was truly important.
Declarations like this could stop a person
in their tracks!
But not her. She had her PhD to finish, then she was heading
home to Australia, and next year she was going to Antarctica—come hell or high
water. And she was
not
going to let some jock talk
her out of it because he
imagined
himself in love
with her.