He's So Fine
Page 68

“No. I—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Sharlyn.”
“Olivia,” she whispered. “I’m Olivia now.”
He just looked at her like she was a stranger.
Yeah, she was cold. Cold to the bone, and it had nothing to do with the mist. Staring into his closed-off face, she slowly shook her head. “I knew it’d come to this. I’ve been counting down.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we had a shelf life, and we’re expired. It was only a matter of time, and I knew it going in.”
His jaw tightened. “Fuck that, Olivia. You can’t hold me accountable for the way this has gone down.” He shoved his fingers through his hair. “You kept secrets. You can’t build a relationship on secrets.”
“I didn’t keep anything from you that mattered to the here and now.”
“Are you kidding?” he asked incredulously. “You kept everything from me, including the fact that you do have family, and your real name. Jesus.”
“It wasn’t like that—”
“What was real?” he asked. “Any of it?”
Her throat got so tight that she couldn’t talk, which was just as well, really. Because the one thing that had been unequivocally true had been her feelings for him.
Which she wasn’t about to admit now.
And besides, maybe after acting and faking emotions all her life, she couldn’t trust those feelings anyway. “You’re not listening,” she said.
He shook his head slowly. “Actually, I’m listening to every word, especially the ones you’re not saying.”
When she didn’t respond, didn’t know how to respond, Cole nudged her back, shut the driver’s door, and hit the gas.
She was still standing on the sidewalk trying to figure out how her life had just imploded when she heard someone come up behind her.
“Do I even want to know?” Jolyn asked.
Olivia drew in a deep breath, doing her best not to completely lose it.
“Let me guess,” her sister said, propping an elbow on Olivia’s shoulder as she gazed down the street after Cole. “You messed something up.”
“I messed everything up.”
“It’s a Peterson trait,” Jolyn said. “How did you land him anyway? ’Cause nothing personal, but that guy? Out of your league.”
Wasn’t that the bleak truth.
And worse, she realized she had an audience of more than just her sister. Lucille was standing under the bakery’s awning kitty-corner from her shop, eating some sort of pastry out of a white bag.
“Hi honey,” she called out, waving. “You want me to post to Twitter, ask him to come back?”
Olivia blinked and tried to change gears, but couldn’t.
I’m listening to every word, especially the ones you’re not saying…
“Because I can do that,” Lucille said. “People love it when I tweet.”
A few more elderly ladies came out of the bakery, each with her own small white bag.
“Honey, are you listening to me?” Lucille asked.
This wasn’t happening. This really wasn’t—
“What’s doing?” one of the bluehairs asked.
“She chased off Cole Donovan,” Lucille told her. “Right before my very eyes.”
“That charter captain hottie?” another one of them asked, and then tsked, like maybe Olivia wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. “How did she do that?”
“I’m not sure, I turned my hearing aid all the way up and still missed some of it. Something about her not being Olivia but Sharlyn,” Lucille said. “But I don’t know what that means.”
“It means she’s Sharlyn Peterson, that little girl TV star who put the crazy in crazy. Went off the deep end about a decade ago and vanished.”
“Get out,” Lucille said. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called out to Olivia again. “Honey, is that true?”
“Well, of course it’s true,” the other bluehair said. “I watch episodes of Not Again, Hailey! when my Xanax wears off. It reruns at two in the morning on Nick at Night. Cheaper than watching the shopping network. I had to cut up my credit cards after I realized I’d ordered twelve sets of paring knives. And I don’t even like to cook.”
Next to Olivia, Jolyn snorted. “This place isn’t so bad after all,” she murmured.
“So is that it?” Lucille asked. “You lied to us? Because if that’s what happened, well then shame on you, honey. Unless you had a really good reason. Did you? Why don’t you run it by us, and we’ll vote on it.”
Olivia turned on her heel and walked back into her shop.
Of course, Jolyn followed.
“I should’ve locked the door,” Olivia muttered.
Jolyn was grinning. “Shame on you,” she said, imitating Lucille’s ancient, smoked-three-packs-a-day voice.
Olivia ground her back teeth. “You enjoying the show?”
“Oh, yeah. This is better than anything you ever acted on.”
Olivia wanted to scream, she wanted to throw something. She wanted…
To figure out how to go back in time and strangle Jolyn before she’d come to Lucky Harbor.
God, she was tired. Tired of pretending to have it all together. Tired of the fiction. She just wanted to be herself.
Whoever that was.