Backstage Romance: An Austen-Inspired Romantic Comedy Box Set by Gigi Blume (ebook reader with highlighter txt) 📕

“But they’re still soaking wet,” I protested. “Are you going out like that?”

He shrugged. “This is L.A. I’m sure the Uber driver has seen weirder stuff than a guy in a Hello Kitty robe.”

“What if I don’t let you take the robe?”

He shrugged it off his shoulders and held it out to me in one fluid motion. “Like I said, this is L.A.”

He was a sight to behold—pure, chiseled man flesh, the defined features and golden brown of his skin more pronounced in the low light of my apartment. I swallowed hard and squeezed my eyelids tight. “Put that back on before I—”

I choked on my words, not entirely sure what I planned to say.

“Before you what?”

Gah! I lost all sense of sentence structure around this guy!

“Just put it on and stay.” I sighed. “You can’t go out like that. Just crash here.”

My eyes were still shut. I heard him chuckle under his breath as the swoosh of the cloth brushed against his body, and I rendered it safe to open my eyes again.

“You are something else, Beth short for Elizabeth and sometimes Lizzie.”

He drew near to me, invading my space. Even with a silly bathrobe barely covering his tall frame, he was still way too gorgeous. I began to regret this whole evening. The temperature in my apartment was always a slight chill in November, but the heat from his presence was downright tropical. He locked his eyes with mine as his arm wrapped behind me, barely grazing my side, and I heard a screech.

“Shall we sit and talk then?”

The screech was a chair he pulled out behind me at the breakfast nook. What a ridiculous tweenager I’d become. My innards crumpled into a heap of nerves whenever he was near. Get it together, Beth. I reminded myself he was a player. He had to be. The question was, did I care?

“Some people call me Eliza,” I blurted. “But I don’t like it. Too much like Eliza Doolittle.”

He smiled at my admission. “Okay, Beth short for Elizabeth sometimes Lizzie but never Eliza. Got it.”

An awkward silence fell over the room as if after a full day of easy banter, we’d finally run out of words to say to one another. I went over the inventory in my head. Yep. Tank was empty. But what I really wanted to talk about, what I was burning to know, was something I didn’t feel the confidence to ask. The showdown in the scene shop earlier in the day seemed like so long ago, but the feelings it stirred were still fresh on my mind. It turned out the same thoughts weighed on Jorge’s mind as well, and his countenance shifted to somber reflection.

“I want to apologize about this afternoon,” he began. I didn’t interrupt him. I let him speak without reservations lest he change his mind. “You probably noticed the… less than cordial greeting I exchanged with a certain person today.”

I nodded, understanding he was referring to Will, but waiting for an explanation I was anxious to learn. What could be the story between these men who were polar opposites of one another? How could their paths have crossed in life to have triggered such a response? The eager features on my face gave him the encouragement he needed to continue.

“Let’s just say he and I don’t exactly get along very well.”

That was it? No, no. He opened Pandora's box and now, he would show me all the ugly contents inside. I didn’t want to pry too hard. Best to keep the questions neutral. Respectful.

“How do you know each other?” I asked as innocently as possible.

Perhaps I didn’t do innocent very well because he ran his fingers through his hair and apologized, “I’m sorry. If you two are friends, I don’t mean to—”

“NO,” I blurted a little too loudly. “We’re certainly not friends. I had the unique displeasure of being locked in the costume shop with him all night. I could definitely understand your visceral reaction to him today.”

He relaxed into a relieved smile, and I could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. He was no doubt thinking what I was thinking. There was an agreement between us. Something unspoken but heady in the air. We were very much alike right down to the people we couldn’t stand together. It’s the little things.

Inspired by the confidence he sensed in me, he proceeded to tell me the story—the long story—of his childhood and how he came to be a close member of the Darcy household. To truncate his lengthy explanation, to which I was entirely enthralled but kept us up until almost four in the morning, Jorge lived the first eight years of his life without a clue about his real father. Why his mother kept it from him, I didn’t know. I got the impression she was nervous about getting deported back to Costa Rica and never revealed to her erstwhile lover he had a son. When she fell ill and could no longer care for Jorge, she confessed the truth to a very shocked and overwhelmed Greg Wickham, who was (you guessed it) Martin Darcy’s publicist. The relationship between Greg and Martin was so close to brotherly, Martin himself accepted Jorge as a nephew once the truth was made known. The passing of his mother brought Jorge into a new lifestyle, spending long hours at the Darcy house while his father worked or played golf with Martin. It was a culture shock and complete contrast to his humble beginnings.

Jorge then explained the distance of only a few years between himself and Will, and that they would often play together. But he described Will as a spoiled child and a poor playfellow most of the time and then went on to relate memories of some rather unpleasant pranks Will would play on him, all in the name of some ‘good ‘ol fun.’ He was quite the little