Method Acting: An opposites attract, found family romance (Center Stage Book 2) by Adele Buck (web based ebook reader txt) 📕

arms waving around to indicate the room. “I don’t know what it’s like to take having a home for granted. I don’t know what it’s like to have the sort of security you don’t even see because it’s so ingrained in you.”

“What does owning a home have to do with anything?”

“It’s just another thing you got to have a choice about.” Alicia’s teeth gritted.

“And you don’t have choices?” Colin said.

“In some ways, no. You get to do your job, what you are trained to do, for as long as you want. I don’t get that luxury. I have to take the opportunities I get when I get them before I get to my sell-by date. And that date is coming.”

“How do you know?”

Alicia gave him a withering look. “How many actresses can you think of who are over forty? A few? Really big names? But the ones who had good but not great careers…they suddenly see things drying up. I already have to figure out what I’ll do when I stop getting roles.”

“That seems absurdly fatalistic.”

“No, it’s realistic. I can’t afford to think I’ll somehow be special, be different. I have to live in the real world.”

“You think I don’t?”

“I think your version of real and my version of real are light years apart.”

Colin took a deep breath, eyes fixed on her face. She blinked, jaw set. She had been so exhausted, he felt like a cad for arguing with her. She was so vulnerable, standing there in nothing but his shirt. He extended his arms, and she regarded him warily.

“I’m sorry. I was surprised. I acted badly.” Fatigue rolled through him in a wave, but he kept his arms held out.

Alicia’s eyes slid to one side. “I guess I should have told you. If nothing else, you should have been warned that Mrs. Thurston Howell III would have something else to hold against me the next time you saw her.” She looked cautiously back at him, and he curled his fingers in a beckoning motion.

“I promise I won’t bite,” he said wearily. “Unless you want me to.”

“That’s a terrible joke,” she said, shoulders sagging as she moved back toward him. He inhaled carefully as he wrapped his arms around her. He was acutely conscious of her breasts pressing softly into him, an awareness that increased when she slid her arms around his waist and sighed. He rested his cheek on the top of her head, feeling tension he hadn’t even known he was carrying in his shoulders drain away.

“So,” he said, straightening up. “To return to the question at hand, what sort of takeout do you want?.”

“I don’t care.” She moved to sit on one of the high stools at the kitchen island. “I guess we’re okay with, well, everything?”

Colin turned away from her to grab his phone. “I hope so. I mean, it’s not like you’re working at a strip club, after all.” She didn’t answer. He lifted his head.

She was gone.

Chapter 18

Alicia’s head buzzed as she walked up the stairs and into the bedroom. She unbuttoned Colin’s shirt and dropped it in the hamper. Moving back to the chair where her clothes lay, she grabbed her bra and put it on, one of the hooks catching under her thumbnail. The small pain made her wince, but she continued to dress, shrugging her shirt on and buttoning it up.

Colin appeared in the doorway. “What did I do now?” he asked, resignation in his tired face.

“Nothing. It’s…we’re too different. I was right before.” Alicia avoided his eyes, looking resolutely at one of the paintings on his bedroom wall and pressing her lips together.

“I must have done something. We went from ‘we’re provisionally fine’ to you being gone in the space of half a minute.” His voice was soft, and Alicia gritted her teeth. She would rather he get angry and hard, give her something to push against.

Alicia pulled on her trousers and finally looked at him. His expression was gentle, concerned. Something inside her chest wrenched, and she found it hard to breathe.

“What do you think I did to put food on the table and a roof over my head when I left my family?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “I was eighteen years old, not even a high school diploma, and I didn’t exactly have a trust fund to live off of.”

Eyebrows drawing together in puzzlement, he just looked at her for a few moments.

Go ahead, put two and two together. Make four. Make twelve, make a million, for all I care. Just figure it out so I don’t have to say it.

His expression smoothed, and his head tilted back. “You were an…exotic dancer.”

Alicia nodded. “If you want to call it that.”

“At…eighteen?”

“What choice did I have? I didn’t have a lot of skills. Any, really. Just my body. And it paid better than serving fast food. It enabled me to get the hell out of Minnesota.”

His jaw worked, and Alicia braced herself for another argument. “Okay. I get that you did what you had to. But why are you leaving?”

Alicia closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her temples. “No, you don’t get it. It never occurred to you that you would ever actually know someone who had done that for a living. And yet. Here I am.”

“I still don’t understand why you want to leave.” The naked pain growing in his eyes became too much to look at. Alicia sat on the chair and pulled on her shoes.

“I don’t want to leave. I need to leave,” she said, her gaze tracing the grain of the wood floor. “We’re not just worlds apart. We’re universes apart.” A sob threatened, and she took a deep breath, forcing it down as she stood. “And you…I don’t have any defenses around you.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

“When you finally realize I’m right and we’re too different? Yeah. It’s going to be catastrophic.”

Colin focused on keeping still, even though every impulse in his body screamed to go