“Guys?” Lucy whispered urgently, just below the stage.
Olive stiffened in my arms for a moment as if she’d just remembered the bar full of people we were giving a show, but I caressed her back and she melted against me. Then we both glanced at Lucy.
“I’m fucking loving what is going on here”—she motioned between Olive and me—“but people have been filming the whole thing. Since you look like you’re ready to go at each other on stage, I thought maybe you’d want to know before you start losing your clothes.”
Shit!
“We should leave,” I said to Olive and quickly got her down off the stage. No matter how quickly we left, I knew we would be the talk of the night. With the videos and the news of our marriage, maybe even more so in the coming days.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Olive
I let Jason pull me behind him as we exited the bar and came face to face with a handful of paparazzi swarming us. The biggest grin I’d ever sported in my life fell off my face and I reached for Lucy’s hand so she wouldn’t fall behind as the flashes started to go off inches away from our faces. Jason’s hand tightened on mine and he slowed his pace, falling a step behind us to herd us toward the private parking lot. I glanced at Lucy and saw that she was keeping her eyes down and trying to keep up with our almost running pace in her spiked high heels.
The paps kept asking me questions instead of Jason, and I felt my panic spike when they started to close in on us. When one of them—a blond guy with the complete surfer look—got a little too close for my comfort and caused me to almost knock Lucy down in my haste to get away from him, Jason let go of my hand and shoved the paparazzo with a not-so-gentle push on his shoulder. I let Lucy pull me closer, but Jason had stopped walking to face the man, so we had to stop, too.
“Don’t put your hands on me, man,” the guy said with a half growl as he lowered his camera. “Just doing my job here and taking a few pics of the pretty ladies.”
Was he goading Jason?
“I don’t care what the fuck your job is. I don’t want you getting in her face.”
I curled my hand around Jason’s arm and tried to force him to keep walking before things escalated between them.
The jerk smirked and said, “Ease up man, maybe she needs someone to get in her face. I hear you’re not quite doing it for her.”
A few of the others let out low chuckles and kept taping the whole thing. They were eating it all up. Jason took a step forward, and then another as his muscles kept tensing underneath my hand where I was trying not so successfully to hold him back.
“Olive, do something or he’s going to lose it,” Lucy murmured urgently in my ear.
“Jason,” I said sharply when I saw his hands had balled into fists. “We need to go.”
His eyes still on the smirking idiot and his jaw set, he gave me a sharp nod and started forward again. The paps kept following us and even though they were keeping their distance this time around, the questions kept circling around my reaction to his lackluster kiss at the premiere.
I was half tempted to stop walking and just fling myself in his arms so we could have a repeat of our first kiss—obviously the one we’d just had that night, because there was no way I was accepting the premiere kiss as my first from him—and shut them the hell up, but getting out of there as fast as possible seemed like a better idea.
Maybe I’d have a chance to maul him in public some other time?
Reaching the car and driving away from the small crowd didn’t help Jason loosen up at all. As much as Lucy did her best to lighten our moods, Jason didn’t utter more than a few words.
As soon as we dropped Lucy off, Jason reached for his phone and called his publicist without speaking a word to me.
“Megan. Yeah. Sorry for interrupting. I’m calling to give you a heads up. A few people from the crew took videos of Olive and me kissing on stage. Yeah, we were at the crew party. Fine.”
I quickly realized that I didn’t like them doing damage control about something that was so damn near magical to me. Rubbing my hands on my thighs, I turned my head and watched the cars passing by us.
I wondered where they were going, who they were going to reach at the end of their journey. Maybe they weren’t going anywhere, just sailing through life.
You’re not even making any sense, Olive. Shut up your babbling mind.
“Yeah, I know,” Jason clipped. “We didn’t promise exclusivity to the magazine with the marriage thing. Sure. Go ahead and make a comment on the videos then. No. That’s not all.”
He paused before letting out a big sigh. I felt like an intruder listening in on their conversation, but it wasn’t like I could get away to give them privacy either.
The best day of my life was slowly being ruined by damage control.
“Someone must have tipped off the paps because a small group of them was waiting for us when we left early. One of them got a little too close to Olive so I gave him a shove.”
I closed my eyes and rested my head on the window.
“No. He damn near tripped her,” Jason shouted suddenly. Despite being right next to him, I couldn’t hear what Megan was saying. I could hear her rising voice all right, but I couldn’t make out her words.
“I’m not apologizing,” Jason growled at her. “I won’t have anyone crowd her just because she is too polite to tell them to back off. I called to give you a heads up. Now you know. Do whatever you want with it.”
With those last words, he hung up on her.
For the rest of the ride, he didn’t speak to me, so I didn’t think it would be a good idea to force a conversation on him. Maybe he was already regretting kissing me? Or maybe he had been playing and I was too dense to notice we were acting? Could he be that cruel? Or maybe he was angry about the paps mentioning the photo from the premiere that made so many headlines…
If he was angry about that, I didn’t know how to fix it. I’d waited for him to say something about it the day the picture had gone online, but I was too chicken shit to mention it on my own. When he didn’t bring it up and chose to act like nothing was wrong…well, why poke the bear right? However, maybe if I apologized, he would soften at least enough to speak again.
Gaah… He was making both my heart and my head hurt with his loud silence.
We spotted the paparazzi lying in wait in front of his house the moment he turned the corner onto his street.
“Damn it!” Jason growled, speeding up toward the gate before they could get between the car and the gate and block our entrance.
I shielded my face with my hand as they started to light up their flashes to get a glimpse into the car. I had no idea if they could see through the black windows or not, but in any case I wasn’t in the mood to force a smile.
Jason managed to get us in without any problems.
“Either there is something new going on that we don’t know about, or they know we’re married,” Jason said as he drove the car up the driveway.
Soundlessly, I nodded in agreement.
After the short ride up, when we were safely tucked away from unwanted eyes, I jumped out as soon as the car was parked.
Jason had given me my own key to the house, but I still waited for him to let us in. No matter what he said, this little palace was his, not mine. I was more like a glorified roommate than a wife.