Know Your Heart: A New Zealand - Tracey Alvarez Page 0,85

padding, yay vegetables—and cupped her breasts, the nipples still tender and flushed pink from this morning’s early encounter with Glen’s jaw. She raised her chin, mussed hair spilling over her shoulder, and pictured Glen’s face after he’d kissed her goodbye.

Oh, crap.

The mirror doppelgänger’s mouth curved into a dreamy smile, her eyes gone glassy and soft. Either Sav was drugged by the green tea Glen made her before taking off with the guys, or…

Or she was a woman in love.

The dreamy smile faded to a knife-thin grimace. No. She couldn’t be. Not when there was so much at stake in L.A.

Unless… Savannah turned on the shower, barely waiting for the water to heat before stepping under the spray. She needed to think logically. Give up L.A.? She shampooed her hair. Only a few weeks ago, the idea of blowing this audition would’ve made her break out in hives. Now? Well, she still had High Rollers. While it may not have millions behind it like a new sitcom, she enjoyed working with her co-stars, and it meant living in Auckland.

With Glen.

Excitement bubbled through her as she rinsed and dried off. Another six months to a year with High Rollers and her agent could knock on her door with a better opportunity. Plenty of time for her and Glen to see if their feelings were real and to work out an agreeable compromise.

Sav slipped back into the master bedroom. She stole one of Glen’s freshly laundered tee shirts and slipped it on, loving the little shiver that rippled through her at the thought of him peeling it off with a teasing laugh once he got home. First, though, a phone call to her agent from the deck.

***

Savannah stared at the phone in her hand as if it had turned into a tarantula. She shoved it onto the small patio table and strode to the edge of the deck. In the distance was the long, blue curve of Bounty Bay’s beach, where Glen, Nate, and Todd were male-bonding over the surf. Sav closed her eyes, straining to hear the distant sigh of the sea. Instead, the only thing she heard was the echo of her agent’s voice telling her she’d been trying to get in touch with Sav for the last two days.

“There won’t be a second season of High Rollers, sorry,” the woman had said in her perfectly cultured but not apologetic So-Cal accent. The New Zealand production company had serious concerns about the ratings and blah-blah-blah. Sav tuned the agent out, barely listening to her litany of how High Rollers didn’t matter because once more, Hollywood stardom was within reach.

Sav’s throat squeezed shut, as though a small swarm of bees had stung her repeatedly, causing an allergic reaction. Breathe, she reminded her lungs. Keep the oxygenated blood circulating through her stone-cold heart.

An engine rumbled as it shifted gears along the driveway.

Oh, God, the guys are back. Perfect-freaking-timing.

She’d been fooling herself ever since Tom and Jamie left. She had to let Glen go. But she’d shoved everything aside and reveled in a few more days alone with him. Now that High Rollers was a bust, what choice did she have? It was kinder to make a clean break.

A door slammed, and then the truck drove back down the driveway. Deck planks vibrated as Glen walked toward the back of the house. Sav smoothed a hand over her hair and checked the width of her smile in the sliding door’s reflection, making sure her expression didn’t scream, woman drowning here!

Glen appeared, the wetsuit body peeled down and arms knotted around his lean hips, exposing an indecent amount of tanned skin. And his face, when he spotted her—blue eyes sparkling with warmth and a smile, as if she, in his shirt and hastily dragged on leggings, was the best thing he’d seen all day. As if she, instead of being a woman about to metaphorically kick him in the balls, was a gigantic chocolate-fudge-smothered sundae.

She couldn’t be his chocolate sundae…not any longer.

Sav took a deep breath that burned every inch of her windpipe. “Glen—”

He scooped her against his hard body, the neoprene of his wetsuit still a little damp. Salt and the faint hint of beer tickled her nose as Glen buried his face in her hair and growled in appreciation.

“Mmm, you smell amazing.” Hot kisses trailed up her throat and along her jaw, and he flicked the tip of his tongue against her earlobe.

Her nipples stiffened, becoming painfully hard as Glen deftly changed direction