It’s a bit over the top to call someone perfect, and I’m not naïve enough to think that any such person exists.
I was with a beautiful man who had an amazing heart, boundless ambition, and he was crazy about me.
He had protected me when I was in danger. He had brought me to the heights of passion -- both physical and emotional.
I’d never let my walls down that much, never shared such intimacy with someone before.
It was as close to perfection as I'd ever been. And I discovered nothing comes without risk....
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Excerpt:
I would have been content to take a little nap after that round of incredible sex, but Max was eager to show me around the vineyards. He also said he was famished, which I began to suspect was the real reason he was in a hurry to go out somewhere. What is it with men who have to eat after sex? Something animalistic, perhaps. Judging by Max’s ferocity in the bedroom earlier, I guess that’s a good assumption.
We showered together. Max washed my hair—an extremely intimate and erotic thing, in my book. I loved the way my hands slipped and slid all over his naked, lathered-up body. Forget the nap idea; I could have stayed in that shower all day.
But there was so much to do, so much to see.
We had lunch at a California cuisine restaurant, out on the deck, overlooking fields of grapes that seemed to go on forever.
“How is it?”
We had moved on from the salad to sharing a flatbread with fresh local tomatoes, artichoke hearts, onions, mushrooms, topped off with herbs and a layer of fresh house-made mozzarella.
“Amazing,” I said. “I almost wouldn’t even call it pizza.”
“Healthiest kind there is. More wine?”
I nodded but didn’t speak, having taken another bite already.
We enjoyed a few moments of silence and then I asked Max if he still wrote movies.
He looked at me and frowned. “All the time.”
“Are you going to make any of them?”
Max sipped his wine, set it on the table, and a heavy sigh left his mouth. “Probably not.”
“Why?”
“I just write for myself now. I think I’ve said all I wanted to say in my movies that got made.”
There was something on his face that told me he didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe a kind of regret, or remorse, or…maybe exhaustion.
“I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to do this,” he said. And quickly, he added, “But that’s between you and me.”
I wondered if the movie he was making with our client, Jacqueline Marthers, would be his last. I had read the script and thought it would make an amazing movie. To think that I had played some small part in the creation of what may be Max Dalton’s last movie was thrilling and chilling at the same time.
More importantly, though, was the fact that he had apparently shared a secret with me. He trusted me enough to tell me he was thinking about getting out of the business. There was no way I’d breach his confidence.
“Okay,” I said, “so you write for yourself. Do you have all these scripts lying around somewhere?”
“Not lying around.” He smiled. “I keep them all in a desk drawer. Which,” he added, “is locked, so don’t think about stealing them and selling them on eBay.”
“What?!”
Max laughed heartily. “God, you’re fun to tease, you know that?”
“We have good banter.”
“Yes, we do.”
He lifted his wine, we clinked glasses, and drank.
We spent at least another lazy hour there, looking out over the vineyard, looking at each other, making mostly small talk. That is, until he brought up Chris.
“What’s he capable of?”
I shrugged. “What do you mean?”
“You told me what he did that night, but is there more?”
“No.”
His eyebrows rose. “Honest?”
“Honest. And I’d rather not talk about him right now.”
“Olivia, if I’m going to protect you, I need to know—”
“I don’t need you to protect me,” I said, a bit more acidly than I had intended. “If he comes back, I’ll call the cops.”
Max shook his head. “They won’t do anything. At least not until he crosses a major line and tries to hurt you, or actually hurts you.”
I knew he was right. Plus, there was the whole aspect of keeping this from my family.
By this time, however, now that Chris had showed up in L.A., I began to think there probably was more depth to his obsessively controlling anger. But what was I going to do? Express that fear to Max? Then what? I didn’t exactly know what Max was capable of, either. I really just wanted Chris to go away, back to Ohio, and stay there.
Equally as much, I wanted the topic of Chris to go away. This was supposed to be a fantasy getaway weekend. It had started that way, but Max’s worries about Chris had derailed it. I needed to get things back on track.
“Tell me more about you.”
He looked at me. “What do you want to know?”
I thought about it for a second, then said, “Everything.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Are we in a hurry?”
