Page 48 of Beneath the Fame

Instead…I took my ass to sleep.

ChapterThirteen

ALEC

I wasn’tsure ifproudwas quite the right word or not.

Maybe…impressed.

I wasimpressedas hell by the way Vee handled the latest scandal surrounding our relationship—this time, the bullshit didn’t quite hit like it used to.

Perhaps because there had been so much of it before we even decided to take things to this new place we’d arrived, but it was fairly easy this time to just…tune it out.

It helped that we’d been staying busy though.

Between legal stuff, finishingKinfolk, and finding more people to attach to my scripted reality show—even Vee had accepted a tiny writing role, the only thing she would let me convince her to commit to—we still weren’t out of the whirlwind.

Which worked in our favor.

Who had time to read ugly comments on the internet when there was so muchlifegoing on?

Movement in the doorway of the home office I was slowly turning into a writer’s room pulled my attention from my screen, and I looked up to find Vee lurking. Immediately, a grin spread across my face. She’d popped up at my place a few hours ago—we actually lived in the same gated neighborhood, so it was never that big of a surprise—and when I told her I was writing, she’d insisted on making herself scarce.

Not actually leaving, just not being in the same room, even though I’d insisted it was fine.

She didn’t want to be a “distraction.”

That was exactly whatIwanted though.

“How is it going?” she asked, and I raised an eyebrow at her, glancing back at where my cursor was in the same place it had been for the last hour.

“It’snot,” I chuckled. “Probably go a lot better if I could just…get another writer in the room with me.”

She rolled her eyes but obliged my outstretched hands to leave the doorway and take a seat on my leg before I turned us both toward the computer.

“Where do you think you might find one of those?” she asked, resting her head on top of mine. I closed my eyes as her hand went immediately to my beard for her favorite absent-minded task of running her fingers through it.

I was like a dog getting its damn belly rubbed.

“Uh-uh.” She laughed, stopping when she saw the expression—or lack thereof— on my face. “You can’t be going to sleep, or whatever you call yourself doing right now.”

“Huh?” I asked, making a show of peeling my eyelids openrealllslow, peering up at her.

When that faux-scolding look persisted, I moved my head to her breasts, settling in like her chest was a pillow—my favorite pillow—as she laughed.

“Stoppp,” she insisted, so after just another moment of teasing, I did, meeting her gaze again.

“Just look at it with me?” I asked, and she stared at me for a second like she was considering it, and then nodded.

“Fine. Show me where you’re stuck.”

“Oh, the very beginning.”

She raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

“It means I need…everything,” I explained. “Names, places, all that. I have a lot of scenes in my head, so I can build my outline, and I think I know how it ends. Everything else though?” I shrugged.

“You don’t really need all that though, right? Just…write. Everything will come as needed. Even the names.”

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