Page 3 of Breaking the Rules
How ironic, she thought. That neither of the men who had changed the course of her life was hers.
CHAPTER TWO
Marisol Cote was very displeased with the groceries Kate had stocked in the kitchen.
“You girls will not always be able to burn ten thousand calories,” she said, sternly shaking a box of doughnuts at Kate. Her dark hair was more silver now, but she was still a tiny and formidable woman. Now the house manager for Waverly’s parents, she had originally been brought on as the nanny. She had single-handedly raised Waverly during Robert and Sylvia’s volatile years.
The Sinners had settled down now, each with a healthier purpose, and Waverly was still adjusting to the new normal. And Mari, who knew Waverly’s secret had hopped on a plane immediately after Kate contacted her.
“Well, Mari, no one asked you to show up here and rummage through the cupboards,” Kate told her.
“No one needs to ask me to come check up on my girls. My reckless, irresponsible girls.”
Waverly plucked one of the doughnuts out of the box and took a bite before Marisol could slap it out of her hand. “Where did you tell Mom and Dad you were going? They don’t know I’m here do they?” She eased herself onto one of the barstools under the long kitchen counter. Almost a week into healing, and she was feeling stronger every day and more determined to figure out exactly how everything had gone so sideways.
Marisol gave her a long dark-eyed stare. “I told them I was visiting my aunt in the Dominican. They are hopeful that your ‘rehab’ will lead you down a healthy path.” She snorted.
“The cover was not my idea,” Waverly said defensively.
“This job should not have been your idea,” Mari said with equal fervor. “It is dangerous. You already have a job: you make movies. Why this too?”
It was an argument they’d had at least a dozen times in the last two years. “Mari,” Waverly sighed. “You know I wanted to prove that I could be more than just an actress.”
“So you proved it. You got shot. Now you can quit.”
Waverly shifted on the barstool and refused to wince at the twinge in her side. She’d been shot in movies, and her characters recovered much faster. Reality was turning out to be a bit of a disappointment.
The plastic surgeon the studio had sent in under the cover of night had had a steady hand and asked no questions. She’d sewn Waverly up on the couch in her bedroom with exquisite stitches and offered pain meds, which Waverly had declined. She needed her mind to be sharp and stay sharp so that when she was recalled to L.A., she could find Dante. Or find out what happened to him.
Until then she was to rest, heal, and stay invisible to the outside world, which thought Waverly Sinner was whiling away the hours in an undisclosed rehab facility for a DUI accident that never happened.
To gain a modicum of peace, or at least quiet, Waverly sent Marisol and Kate into town. Her go bag, while not typical of the average fast escape stash, wasn’t exactly stocked for a tropical vacation. She arrived in Belize with a cocktail dress, a pair of Zanotti Swarovski sling backs, a pair of distressed designer jeans, workout capris, a black tank, and a gray cardigan.
The clothes she’d arrived in had too many bloodstains to salvage. Kate and Marisol were on a mission to appropriately outfit Waverly’s closet here.
Waverly pulled on the black tank, a pair of bikini bottoms she’d left in a drawer on her last trip, and the silk robe from her bathroom.
She’d lay out by the pool and watch the ocean. And go through every single moment of last Saturday again until she could pinpoint where everything had gone wrong.
She chose a striped lounger in the sun and eased down onto the cushion to contemplate life.
Waverly had a good life. A solid life. One she’d chosen. She had a beautiful home, her pick of projects, and the occasional excitement that her side job offered. She and her parents had made great strides in repairing a relationship she’d once thought was a lost cause.
So her sex life was non-existent. She was very busy, and the few times she’d ventured down that road, sticking a toe into the relationship waters, it had been at worst a miserable failure and at best moderately disappointing.
No one had lived up tohim. Waverly cursed the memory of Xavier Saint, his memory a shroud that clung to her.
It had been five years, yet not a day passed that he didn’t cross her mind… repeatedly. She’d finally put an end to her hobby of cyber-stalking him, reading interviews with him covering Invictus, scouring the gossip sites for his rare pictures. Since their time together, entertainment bloggers and even the mainstream media had been endlessly fond of him. But when he and the painfully beautiful Calla were linked together, when marriage speculations were made, Waverly had finally stopped looking and stopped hoping that she’d find that one piece of information that she needed to move on.The why.
Their time together had sparked hot and bright and then burned out, extinguished by anguish.
She wished she could forget him, wished she could move on. But something always held her back. So she focused on the other areas of her life. She made movies, started producing, and decorated a house that finally felt like home. She held her small circle of friends close and she waited for the something that was missing.
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Five days earlier…
Behind the wheel of the rented Aston Martin, Dante Wrede was whistling the theme song to his last movie. For all of five seconds, he’d not-so-secretly dated the pop star who had recorded it.
