What I Did for Love (Wynette, Texas #5)(2)

Eventually, the cavalcade hit the PCH heading north, and that’s when it struck him. Her likely destination. He rubbed his thumb over the top of the steering wheel.

And wasn’t life full of interesting coincidences…



Georgie wished she could peel off her skin and give it away. She didn’t want to be Georgie York anymore. She wanted to be a person with dignity and self-respect.

Behind the tinted windows of her Prius, she swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. Once she’d made the world laugh. Now, despite all her efforts, she’d become the poster girl for heartbreak and humiliation. The only comfort she’d been able to take through the whole debacle of her divorce was knowing that the paparazzi’s cameras had never, ever caught her without her head up. Even on the worst day of her life—the day her husband left her for Jade Gentry—Georgie had managed one of Scooter Brown’s trademark grins and a goofy pinup pose for the jackals that stalked her. But today that final remnant of pride had been stolen away. And Bram Shepard had witnessed it.

Her stomach churned. She’d last seen him at a party a couple of years ago. He’d been surrounded by women—no surprise. She’d left right away.

A horn blared. She couldn’t face her empty house or the public pity party that had become her life, and she found herself headed to her old friend Trevor Elliott’s beach house in Malibu. Even though she’d been on the road for nearly an hour, her heart rate wouldn’t slow. Little by little, she’d lost the two things that mattered the most—her husband and her pride. Three things, if she tossed in the gradual disintegration of her career. And now this. Jade Gentry was carrying the baby Georgie had yearned for.

Trevor answered the door. “Are you crazy?” He grabbed her wrist, jerked her into the cool foyer, then stuck his head back out, but his L-shaped entry offered enough privacy to shield her from the paps who’d be pulling over on the shoulder of the Pacific Coast Highway.

“It’s safe,” she said, an ironic statement, since nothing felt safe these days.

He rubbed his hand over his shaved head. “By tonight’s E! News, they’ll have us married and you pregnant.”

If only, she thought as she followed him into the house.

She’d met Trevor fourteen years ago on the set of Skip and Scooter when he’d played Skip’s dim-witted friend Harry, but he’d left his second-banana roles behind long ago to star in a series of successful gross-out comedies that were required viewing for eighteen-year-old males. Last Christmas she’d given him a T-shirt that read I BRAKE FOR FART JOKES.

Although he was barely five foot eight, he had a nicely proportioned body and pleasant, slightly cockeyed features that made him perfect to play the goofy loser who still managed to come out on top. “I shouldn’t have barged in,” she said without meaning it.

He silenced the baseball game playing on his plasma TV, then frowned at her appearance. She knew she’d lost more weight than her naturally slender dancer’s body could spare. It was heartache, not anorexia, that made her stomach rebel.

“Any reason you haven’t returned my last two phone calls?” he said.

She started to take off her sunglasses, then thought better of it. Nobody wanted to see the tears of a clown, not even the clown’s good friend. “Hey, I’m way too self-absorbed to care about anybody but myself.”

“That’s not true.” His voice warmed with sympathy. “You look like you could use a drink.”

“There’s not enough alcohol in the world…But, yes.”

“I don’t hear any helicopters. Go sit on the deck. I’ll make margaritas.”

As he disappeared into the kitchen, she finally slipped off her sunglasses and forced herself across the speckled terrazzo floor to the powder room so she could repair the damage from the paps’ attack.

With her weight loss, her round face had begun collapsing under her cheekbones, and her big eyes would have eaten up her face if her mouth weren’t so wide. She shoved a lock of her stick-straight, cherry-cola hair behind her ear. In an attempt to lift her spirits and soften the new hard edges of her face, she’d adopted a choppy update of a bowl cut, with long, feathery bangs and sides that curved around her cheeks. In her Skip and Scooter days, she’d been forced to keep her dark hair tightly permed and dyed a clownish carrot-orange because the producers wanted to capitalize on her megasuccessful run in the Broadway revival of Annie. That humiliating hairstyle had also emphasized the contrast between her funny-girl appearance and Skip Scofield’s dreamboat good looks.

She’d always had a conflicted relationship with her baby-doll cheeks, googly green eyes, and stretchy mouth. On the one hand, her unconventional features had brought her fame, but in a city like Hollywood, where even the supermarket checkout clerks were bombshells, it had been hard not being beautiful. Not that she cared anymore. But when she’d been the wife of Lance Marks, the town’s biggest action-adventure superstar, she’d definitely cared.

Exhaustion crept through her. She hadn’t taken a dance class in six months—she could barely get out of bed.

She repaired the damage to her eye makeup as best she could, then returned to the living room. Trevor had only recently moved into the house he’d decorated with amoeba-shaped midcentury furniture. He must have been taking a trip down memory lane because a book lay open on the coffee table, a history of the American television sitcom. The original Skip and Scooter cast photo stared back at her. She looked away.