Over-Exposed (Perspectives Book 2) Read online

  After blow-drying her hair and pulling on comfy lounge pants with a loose tank top over a fitted cami, she cursed herself for having left her laptop on the kitchen table. She would’ve preferred to hide in her room until the whole debacle was over, but there was work to be done and a video conference to prepare for.

  When she opened her door, the soft music surprised her. What surprised her even more was the beautiful vision of Sam Danmore upside-down in a challenging yoga pose. The weight of his entire body rested on his strong forearms; the tan muscles of his chest and abs were tight, and his long legs reached straight to the ceiling. He looked relaxed. Peaceful, even. His eyes were closed and he wore nothing but a pair of soft linen drawstring pants. Pants she had never seen before.

  And there was a suitcase. Not hers, and expensive, given the label.

  And there were bags of groceries from Whole Foods lined up on the kitchen counter.

  She looked back to Sam, who hadn’t budged and didn’t seem to know she was there.

  The man’s body was a work of art and Natalie stared accordingly.

  As she watched, his legs slowly lowered until he was in a plank position. The slabs of muscle in his back bracketed the deep groove of his spine. She itched to sink her teeth into the perfect hard globes of his ass.

  Sam lowered his hips to the floor, straightened his arms and pushed his chest up, moving into what Natalie knew was called a Cobra pose. His eyes opened and looked directly at her, the rich brown even darker than usual. The bastard knew she was there the whole time.

  “Ever try yoga, Nat?”

  “Nope. I’m just fine with kickboxing.”

  “And kickboxing looks just fine on you.” He punctuated that statement with a leer. “But yoga’s good for flexibility.” He winked and twisted into a side plank, bringing his oblique muscles into stark relief. “And flexibility is good for... other things.”

  She ignored the blatant invitation in his tone. “Where’d all this stuff come from?”

  He turned to hold plank on the opposite side. “My buddy, Mitch sent over a few things.”

  “A few? It looks like you plan to stay a month.”

  He shrugged the shoulder that wasn’t responsible for holding him off the floor. “If it comes to that.”

  “If it comes to that, your buddy, Mitch will have a dead body to pick up.” She turned away from him and went to the kitchen to make some breakfast. An impossible task, since she had no appetite with him there. But she was raised to be polite, so she forced herself to ask, “Did you eat, yet?”

  “No. Let’s see what Mitch sent.” He stretched up and out of a flat plank and joined her. Together, they unpacked the grocery bags. Back in LA, Sam apparently had a personal chef who worked closely with his nutritionist, so there were quite a few items in the bags that Natalie had never heard of and some she couldn’t even pronounce.

  She picked up a package of something that looked like chunks of wet dog food. “Uh, this looks like it should be refrigerated. Or flushed.”

  “Yeah, it goes in the fridge.”

  “The hell is it?”

  “Seitan. Vegetarian meat substitute. Kind of like tofu.”

  “It looks disgusting.”

  “Yeah,” Sam sighed and flicked a glance at the crushed pizza box in the trash can. “It is.”

  For some reason, that made Natalie laugh. A lot. Like, she couldn’t stop and almost peed her pants. Sam smiled and chuckled a little until she snorted, then he was laughing just as hard.

  Tears streamed down Natalie’s cheeks and she wiped them with the back of her hand. “I don’t-- I don’t know why I’m laughing so much!”

  Sam’s eyes were bright with his laughter, too. “Probably because I’m rich and famous and I can’t even enjoy it ‘cause I’m forced to eat shit like this!”

  “Oh my god, I think you’re right!” She snorted again.

  They fell into an easy camaraderie as they finished putting groceries away. Sam’s self-deprecating laughter changed his demeanor from man-whore to (Natalie hated to admit it, even to herself) that of a genuinely nice guy.

  A genuinely nice, scorching hot guy.

  She eyed the text of his tattoo and reminded herself that she despised him.

  Chapter Six

  AS DAY TWO of Natalie’s forced incarceration with the movie star dragged on, she became increasingly desperate to get out of the freaking condo and away from him.

  Her late morning video conference -- the one rescheduled from the day before, thanks to him -- threatened to be a disaster. The only way she could position her laptop so Sam wouldn’t be on camera left her facing him directly.

  “I’m happy to wait for you on your bed,” he offered and received a glare in return.

  She would have taken the conference from her bedroom, but she didn’t have a desk in there, let alone a chair to sit on. It was doubtful her clients would feel confident in her ability to counsel them if they saw her reclining in bed for their meeting. She knew they’d also lose confidence in her if she stammered through the meeting and stared off-screen at the hunk of male beauty she was saddled with. In the end, she had to agree it made the most sense for Sam to hang out in her room and read or watch TV until her conference was over.

  When Natalie spoke with Kari after the conference, she had to lie and say the television was on when Sam’s voice carried from the other room. Then she had to keep her mouth shut while her friend recapped speculation from various news outlets regarding Sam’s whereabouts. Apparently, the news trucks were still parked all along the street below the office and traffic wouldn’t be back to normal shitty conditions until the missing actor resurfaced.

  Finally, she disconnected all live communication with the outside world and went to kick Sam out of her bedroom. Chuckling to herself about that (because she was no doubt the first woman ever to kick Sam Danmore out of her bedroom), she pushed open the door.

  And screamed.

  “Jesus, Nat, you could’ve knocked. You scared the piss out of me.”

  “Put that down!” He had her old photo album. In his hands. And it was open.

  Just fucking shoot me.

  “How old were you in this one?” His knowing grin told her all she needed to know. A glance confirmed he was looking at a picture of her in her old bedroom, the walls of which were covered with posters of Sam Danmore.

  “I was fourteen. Can I have the album?”

  He ignored her request and studied the photograph. “Hm... you look older than that. Were you taking the posters down? It looks like you were rolling them and putting them in that tube for safe keeping.” His sexy eyes sparkled, mischievous and teasing.

  “I wanted to preserve childhood memories. There’s nothing embarrassing about that.”

  What was embarrassing was the fact that she was actually eighteen in the photograph, carefully packing her cherished Sam Danmore posters so she could hang them in her dorm room when she moved in the next day.

  To her great relief, he closed the photo album and dropped the subject. There was none of his usual leering and tit-glancing. She wasn’t sure what to make of that.

  Days later, Natalie was still saddled with the gorgeous, unwanted movie star houseguest, although it was becoming increasingly difficult to hate him. They watched the news together each morning and night, and his response to popular opinion of his actions left her feeling that his cocky arrogance was a put-on.

  That and the increasing frequency with which he seemingly forgot to be cocky and arrogant. Like when he made the sofa up to sleep on, he no longer tried to flirt his way into her bed. And when she came home from the gym, he didn’t comment on her figure -- though she did catch him looking once or twice, but he acted embarrassed to have been caught... so not characteristic of the man she’d presumed he was.

  Sam Danmore was proving to be funny, smart and even helpful.

  One afternoon, Natalie came back from running errands to find Sam had assembled an Ikea shelf she had bought months ago t
hat had been sitting in its box ever since. Another day, she found him under the kitchen sink with a wrench fixing a small leak. When she thanked him for doing so, he shrugged it off and said the dripping had been keeping him awake.

  She got the impression he wanted her to think he was cocky, and had a nagging feeling she’d misjudged him.

  Of course, she was self-aware enough to recognize it was possible she was simply taking too much enjoyment from seeing his gorgeous face across the kitchen table, watching movies at night while he shared stories of behind-the-scenes Hollywood pretentiousness, or the hour each afternoon when she pretended not to watch him do yoga and tried not to salivate at the spicy-warm scent of his skin when he was done.

  Almost a full week after the incident in Sam’s trailer, he’d finished yoga and excused himself to take a shower, leaving Natalie to work in relative peace for a while. “Relative” in that she had complete quiet in which to work, but the voices in her head were screaming louder than ever that Sam Danmore was naked and wet less than twenty feet away. She’d been physically drawn to him from the moment she realized he was in the backseat of her car, but it would be much easier to keep her hands and eyes and fantasies to herself if she still thought he was a prick.

  When the bathroom door opened a while later, Natalie did a double-take. The man who walked out was unrecognizable. He wore nondescript, wire-frame glasses and had a mustache and a short, shaggy beard. A worn Atlanta Braves baseball cap, matching t-shirt and a pair of baggy jeans completed the transformation.

  He did an exaggerated catwalk turn and Natalie wrinkled her nose. “You look like somebody’s creepy uncle. Where’d you get all that crap?”

  “Mitch sent another care package. Too much?”

  “Probably not if you’re out in the world. It’s too much to handle in here, though,” she laughed.

  “Good. Let’s get out of here, then.”

  “Really? You think that’s a good idea?” she frowned. “Not that I wouldn’t love to boot your ass back to Hollywood, and I wouldn’t blame you for going stir-crazy, but I also don’t wanna be fielding calls from the National Enquirer.”

  His ratty fake beard split in a panty-melting grin. “It’s sweet the way you worry about me.”

  She broke eye contact so he wouldn’t see how he affected her. “All right. Where do you wanna go, Uncle Creeper?”

  “Got any good sushi places in Atlanta?”

  “Um... you don’t look like a sushi guy. Not right now, anyway.” She stood beside him and they both studied his scruffy reflection in the decorative hall mirror.

  “You’re right. I’d say I’m more suited to a food truck. Or a dumpster.”

  Natalie grinned. “I know where to take you. Give me a minute to change.”

  She was too self-aware not to know why she chose to wear the pale-blue halter top. One of the benefits of having breasts that were barely a handful was the ability to go braless without looking like a porn star. As a lawyer she didn’t go out like that often, but there were one or two places she could safely fly her shy little freak flag.

  When she came out, Sam flicked a glance from her hair, which she’d worn loose to brush her bare shoulders, over her top and down her favorite ripped jeans to her red Converse low-tops. The whole perusal -- including the tiny quirk of his eyebrow -- took only a fraction of a second, yet Natalie still felt thoroughly touched.

  The drive took them from the high-rises of Midtown to historic, craftsman homes in suburban neighborhoods. Fifteen minutes later, they passed the open-mouth skull entrance to The Vortex and pulled into a parking lot in the district called Little Five Points. Before they even got out of the car, they saw an eclectic mix of people -- drunken hobos, young professionals, hipsters, street performers, and heavily tatted and pierced people of all ages.

  “See? No one will notice you here.” As she shut the car door, she felt her nipples tighten when they brushed against the soft fabric of her top. She simultaneously hoped Sam would notice and prayed he wouldn’t. Fucking schizophrenic attention whore.

  “I could probably lose the beard and they’d still not notice me.”

  She glanced over at the faded Braves t-shirt doing its damnedest to cover Sam’s world-renowned physique -- and failing miserably. “Best not take a chance.”

  They started at The Vortex because Sam had heard about their famous hamburgers. Having eaten only stuff approved by his nutritionist all year, he said it had been too long since he’d had a really good burger. After reviewing the amusing and eclectic menu they ordered two different burgers intending to share. And they didn’t need more food than all that, but before their waiter walked away Sam pointed to his menu, adding, “Oh, and the lady will also have the ‘Big Naked Weenie.’”

  Natalie laughed and started to say something, then slapped her hand over her mouth. As soon as they were alone, she hissed, “Jackass! I almost screamed your name. You’d have been real sorry, then!”

  His self-satisfied grin faded and his dark eyes grew even darker. “I’d never be sorry to hear you scream my name.”

  She ignored the shot of lust that shot straight to the crotch of her panties and rolled her eyes, hoping he couldn’t see what he’d just done to her. “I bet you say that to all the girls, Uncle Creeper.”

  “You’d lose that bet.” He seemed pensive when he spoke the words, but his mood lightened again so quickly Natalie wondered if she had imagined it.

  When the food arrived, they cut their burgers and swapped halves. She refused to touch the monstrously-huge hot dog Sam had ordered.

  “I’ve got plenty to eat here as it is, and I am not putting that thing in my mouth in public!”

  His eyes twinkled behind the ugly glasses. “In private?”

  “Probably not even then.”

  The waiter wrapped it to go.

  It was still early when they finished, so they wandered down the uneven sidewalk and window shopped at funky thrift stores. When they passed a skinny homeless man napping outside a head shop, Sam slowed a moment to set the bagged hot dog next to the man’s makeshift pillow so he’d find it when he woke up. Natalie just chuckled and kept walking, while her uterus got online and started looking at baby furniture.

  Sam caught up with her and grinned. “I’ll buy you another one.”

  “No thanks. I’m good.”

  There was a light breeze, so they found a table on the sidewalk outside an Irish pub to taste craft beers and people-watch. Their server was a sexy young girl with blue hair and a diamond stud in one cheek, and Natalie was privately shocked that Sam neither checked her out nor flirted with her.

  They were on their third round and she was feeling every ounce of it, when she noticed the corner of Sam’s mustache had lifted. Shit. That’s not good... Resting her elbows on the table, she leaned close and cupped his fuzzy, beautiful face in her hands.

  “Don’t mind me... you’re about to blow your cover and I wanna make this look natural.”

  He had stopped talking mid-sentence, eyes widening a fraction at the unexpected view down her top. “I’m good with natural.”

  She pressed the mustache in place with her thumb as she brushed a kiss on his lips. “That’s prickly,” she giggled and sat back down. Yeah. Prickly and delicious, corrected her beer-addled brain.

  Ah, fuck. Her brain was right. Good thing Sam now seemed completely disinterested in her as a woman, since she intended to wake up in the morning still hating him and not herself.

  Chapter Seven

  AT THE START of the second week of having a movie star on the lam as an uninvited houseguest, news trucks and other media had finally left the area and Natalie was able to return to her office.

  She went by to check in with her father, but he was behind closed doors with a client. And not with Jeff, praise Jesus! Then Emma told her that Jeff had played golf with her father over the weekend. Jesus must’ve had a pretty good laugh over that one.

  While Kari caught her up on some work matters and speculated
about the latest Sam Danmore gossip, Natalie was tempted to admit where, in fact, the elusive heartthrob had been since he ran off the set naked. But she kept the juicy secret to herself. Barely.

  She couldn’t help but notice it was getting harder to hate him. Maybe it was due to his effective incarceration, but he had begun to treat her with kindness and respect. No leering, no flirting, no suggestive remarks.

  It was a relief.

  Or rather, it would have been a relief, if she weren’t dying to catch him looking at her inappropriately.

  When she got home later that evening hoping (okay, half-hoping) to find an empty condo, she was immediately hit with the mouthwatering smells of something Italian on the stove and crusty bread in the oven.

  Sam looked up from setting the table. “Hey, honey. How was your day?”

  The honest smile created just for her was even sexier than his crooked, world-famous trademark grin, and his own beard had grown nearly as scruffy as the fake one. He wore a fitted grey t-shirt and an ancient-looking pair of maroon sweatpants which emphasized his narrow hips and his apparent lack of underwear.

  “All right, I guess...” She peeked under the lid to see what was simmering in the pot. Home-made meatballs? Are you kidding me right now? “I never knew you could cook.”

  “I haven’t always had a private chef,” he shrugged. “Red wine okay?”

  Sam Danmore made dinner for her.

  On what planet does this make sense?

  “Perfect, thanks.” She looked at the label on the Pinot Noir he’d opened and left to breathe. “This is my favorite wine.”

  “Thought so. I cheated and looked through your jar of corks over there.” His wink did fluttery things to her insides.

  She cleared her throat to make sure her voice would work properly. “I take it Mitch sent another care package.”

  “No, I took the train to that little market a couple stops up.”

  Correction: Sam Danmore risked being mauled by fans and paparazzi to go grocery shopping. Then he made dinner for her.