Dirty Sexy Alphas (Twenty Book Box Set) - Hannah Ford Page 0,260

Angeles.

A painful ache speared me and for a moment, everything around me seemed to grow dim, as if a shadow had been thrown over the world. I tried to blink it away, but now the heaviness of loss and regret was in full bloom within me.

“Look at it this way,” Delaney said. “If he’s making a movie about you, that means he’s thinking about you.”

“Horrible, terrible, evil thoughts of me, yeah,” I said.

“He can’t get over you,” she pressed—unhelpfully, I might add. “He’s like, pining over you. I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. I think it’s a good sign.”

“And I think you’re drunk,” I said.

All I knew was that waiting for this horrible film to come out was going to be worse than anything I could think of. If Leo Armstrong wanted to torture me, he’d certainly found the right way to do it.

Chapter 21

It was two months later almost to the day, that I opened my mail and found an invitation on thick card stock. At first I thought it was a wedding invitation.

The last thing I needed was to be around happy, joyous couples who’d found love and actually not screwed it up completely.

I’d actually been doing a good job of sticking to my promise to myself of staying in my lane, doing my job with Delaney, and not getting involved in any hometown drama.

When I opened the invitation, though, Leo came racing right back at me. It was an invitation to the screening of his new movie, All For You.

“Why would he invite me?” I asked Delaney. I raced to her office, invitation in hand, soon as I saw what it was. “He’s going to publicly humiliate me, isn’t he?”

“No, come on,” she said, examining the invitation as if it might hold the answer. “He’s a classy guy. He wouldn’t do that.”

“So why?” I pressed. “Why invite me to the premiere?”

Delaney dropped the thick invitation back on her desk. “I don’t know. But do you want my opinion?”

“Always.”

“Don’t go. The press knows who you are. You’ve been lucky no one wants to come way out here to the sticks to photograph you. But going to L.A., to this premiere, is stepping directly into the lion’s den. Haven’t you been through enough?”

She was right. I’d suffered enough heartache, not to mention public humiliation. Did I really want to go back there, but myself on display simply to be ridiculed? It would be stupid to go.

And yet.

I didn’t know what Leo Armstrong felt, about me or anything else. Maybe this movie would show me how he’d felt about everything between us, even though I would surely be a villain in the film.

But I also knew that part of my penance for the way I’d betrayed him—and myself—was to do the hard thing and show up for the premiere. I wasn’t going to cower away and hide from my past, I was going to face it and own the consequences of my bad behavior.

“I think I’ll go,” I said, realizing as I said it, that my decision was final.

Delaney shook her head. “You are insane. What did that guy do to your head?”

“He twisted it in ways I never thought possible,” I said, and I meant it in the best way. “Besides, I think I owe it to him. I was the one who was dishonest with him. I did a terrible thing. So the least I can do is go back and watch this film he’s made.”

Crazy or not, I would go. I would go and face whatever it was Leo Armstrong felt the need to say—on film, no less. Who knew—maybe it was the closure I hadn’t yet been able to find. I was willing to find out.

It felt strange being back L.A. When I first arrived all those months ago, I’d had such hope of starting my life, truly starting the excitement of a career I was sure would skyrocket. Being back and seeing the cars and people bustling about, I felt a sadness of being kicked out of the club, in a sense. I wished I could still be there, if only things hadn’t happened the way they had.

Ava Marie picked me up from the airport and let me crash at the apartment. It was odd seeing someone else’s things in what I still considered my room. Rosario, the girl who took my place, was at her catering job when I arrived late, and Ava Marie set me up on the couch.

“I think